Witch Hazel Has a New Home!

Find me now at www.witchhazelsplace.com! More arts, crafts, garden, etc. and you can watch me as I learn building my new site.

Weekend Wrap-up

So I turned what started as a bad weekend into a good one. My vending job did not go as well as...well, it was the worst. So Saturday I played hooky and spent the day exploring Kernersville, NC with Adam. We checked out the K-ville Indie Flea which was very cool. I knocked out a couple of Christmas presents there. I'm hoping to find a free Saturday in the next month or two to go out and set up my own table. Then we walked around the Honey Bee Festival. The weather was beautiful. Adam really enjoyed watching the iron works demonstration while I browsed the booths.
Tonight we wrapped it up by getting some end of summer chores done. We made pesto and cooked some eggplant to freeze for making baba ganoush when we need an appetizer for entertaining friends. I also tried my hand at making homemade crackers. This recipe comes from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. I think they are going to be tasty and they were very easy and economical. I think we'll have fun experimenting with different herbs and seasonings on these. Tonight I just did a basic sprinkling of sea salt, wheat berries, and flax seeds.
In crafting news, well, I hope there's no where but up from here. I got a lot of encouragement from friends and then found this in my in-box tonight. This local blogger put one of my pendants in her weekly etsy treasury. Click here to check out her blog, especially if you're in the Triad area - she's got lots of info on the local scene!

Labor Day at Grove Vineyards

Took me a whole week to get to posting this. It's very hard to fit five days into four and I've been exhausted. I'm spending this weekend recovering!
So last weekend I did a craft show at Grove Vineyards and Winery in Gibsonville, NC. Crafts and spending the weekend on a farm of sorts? That's my kind of business! It was a beautiful weekend!Here is some of the vines. We were invited to pick and eat what we wanted. All of us vendors decided that "Niagara" was our favorite grape. They make a wine by the same name that's as good as the fruit. It had sort of a pear and pineapple taste to it. Needless to say, a bottle came home with me and I'll be looking for a vine for my garden!

Of course, the activities including shopping the great selection of arts and crafts. And tasting wine. They also had grape stomping contests that were fun to watch!

Starting Over

I've been hibernating for sure. Even from the internet. However, I seem to be coming out of it. Tomorrow is the first day of September. Of course that means we have a few more weeks until the first day of fall, and here in the Carolina's it will be summer still for every bit of it. But tomorrow marks the beginning of the end.
Here's a run down of the season. The very ambitious garden did not do so well. It was so hot that even if I had spent more time out there, it probably wouldn't have helped much. I spent some time out there tonight pulling up squash vines that never produced and digging up the very few potatoes that grew. The craft shows have not been profitable at all the last couple months. My table is still full of half finished projects, projects never started, and some projects have just been forgotten completely. The house is still a mess, sometimes feeling like it's going to come down around me. It feels too full so I've slowly been trying to sort through our stuff. No major house projects got done this summer either. I spent this last evening of the month having my first meeting with a personal trainer who confirmed that I'm more out of shape than I even imagined (take note people - just because you're thinner at 30 than you were in high school doesn't mean you're in better shape! Apparently my non-office job doesn't help much either. Our health is more important than fitting into our "skinny" jeans!). And looming farther out on the horizon is Adam graduating this semester and looking for jobs. While we would like to stay put a couple more years, we don't know if that will be possible.
This all sounds kind of negative doesn't it? Very much like causes for stress. But tonight I'm not feeling the stress, I'm seeing the opportunities. This is the last day of the last fully summer month. Tomorrow starts a month that will see us into a new season. I'm seeing a new season for myself as well. I see a more restful period for the garden, maybe only growing a few potted vegetables this fall and focusing more on tidying up (I figure that if I plant a full fall garden, that will insure that we have to move). I see me getting through sorting out the rest of the house and getting a few things done. I see a better craft show season as people start preparing for the holidays. I see proving to myself and the personal trainer that I can get in better shape and enjoying all the benefits of better health. I see employment and location questions finally being answered, and see the celebration we'll have when Adam graduates (I'm so proud of him!).
We shouldn't wish time away for sure, but neither should we stop looking forward to what comes next. And I think (and wish and try) we should wake up every day and "start over". Put yesterday down and see what we can do today. So tomorrow when I wake up, I'll be ready to tackle the day!

Weatherspoon Art Museum

Last night we went to the Weatherspoon Art Museum on UNCG's campus. It's been a long while since we've stopped in. The Big Shots: Andy Warhol Polaroids exhibit is currently on display and was pretty interesting. One of the things I read was that Warhol liked to keep a camera with him in order to create a "visual diary" of his life. I wonder if he would have been a blogger?
My favorite exhibit on display right now is Arnold Mesches: The FBI Files. I'm in love with collages. These are particularly interesting because apparently Mesches was under surveillance for many, many years for his involvement in the communist party and other related activities. He finally received 760 pages of the FBI files under the Freedom of Information act, most of them with the information blacked out. He then made these into his collages. It was interesting to find that we wanted to try to read the works as much as we looked at them.

What To Do On A Sunday Night

We are wild and crazy. You never know what we'll do next. How about wrapping myself in duct tape? I've been wanting a dress form for awhile now. I had seen the articles on how to make your own with duct tape but that seemed like such a hassle. I was hoping to find a vintage one in good shape at a good price but was starting to get impatient after combing Ebay for months. I had moved my cursor several times over the "add to cart" button on Joann's Fabrics website. Ultimately I just couldn't bring myself to spend the money without trying the homemade method first. After all, it's about living simply right? Plus it seemed logical that this way would be even more true to my form than even the adjustable dress forms. So Adam picked up the duct tape yesterday and last night set to covering his wife in it. I have to say he did a great job and really put his artistic and technical mind to it! We used this Etsy tutorial and WikiHow article as guidelines. I still have to stuff the dress form now and I think I might "dress" it up a bit. I'll share when I get it finished.