a little clean-up

I know this is late for Valentine's Day, but this is too good to be true!  We (Bob and I) have been working on some cleaning up, sorting out and re-organizing.  During the excavating, we have found many gems.  This is a good one--

Such a sweet reminder of our fun days with both Brita and Dan when they were young.

And a reminder of my own childhood--

These little cookbooks were mine, and I remember them well!  Even though I thought these little books were very special, everything I really learned about cooking was from my mom.  She could write a wonderful cookbook of her own!

This doesn't look like much, but it's a wonderful sight to me!  This is a little cubbyhole closet underneath the basement steps.  When this space was created, I fully intended that it would be outfitted with some sort of shelves.  That was about 20 years ago!  It was just never at the top of the "to-do list".  Random things were thrown in there, but I sort of knew what was in there.  Mostly it was a lot of boxes of old tax records, now largely shredded and disposed of, thanks to Bob's quality time spent with the shredder!  Remember, you really only need to keep 7 years of records!  So we installed a few little shelves and I even narrowed down my collection of boxes.  It's not a horde, it's a collection!  

In some spare time, I have learned a new variation of a design for my quilting, and practiced it on a little boy quilt.  This isn't a real good depiction of it, but with a little more practice it will be fun to use in the future.  

 I have seen this done before, but had never taken the time to really see how to best do it.  I found some great videos by Angela Walters, a name known to many in the quilting world.

  You can watch this video by clicking here.

And maybe take a minute or 2 to enjoy some of her other videos, too.  It's great to have that kind of learning opportunity.