Autumn Gift Set

Before we leave November, I wanted to show that I added these items to Miss Abigail's hope chest in honor of autumn time. As much as I love Christmas, I'm always a little sorry to see autumn forgotten in the rush to decorate for winter. I enjoy fall cooking and cleaning and I hope Abigail will like using these pretty things in her kitchen someday. I love the colors in the hot pad! I truly love all shades of green. I saw the oven mitt in a boutique when we were visiting in Idaho and couldn't resist it. The cloths were very inexpensive and could be used either for dishes or cleaning. I embellished them with a simple machine embroidery stitch around the edges. Very quick!

A Peek Inside - Autumn Plate Chargers

These pretty autumn plate chargers were a happy find for Miss Abigail's hope chest. I was in Walmart a couple of days before Thanksgiving and saw them for a terrific price. Abigail loves to set a pretty table and I knew she would like to have these in her stash. So I purchased a set of six.

I was quite amazed at the difference these chargers made on the table. The food looked like it was styled for a magazine and we felt very elegant this year! We'll continue to use them occasionally and make happy memories for her hope chest.

Pumpkin Pie

Can she bake a pumpkin pie, Billy boy, Billy Boy? She CAN bake a pumpkin pie, she's the apple of our eye, she's a young thing and cannot leave her mother!

This year Miss Abigail made the pies for our Thanksgiving dinner --her first attempt. The crust was the obvious challenge. She used a recipe titled "No-Fail Pie Crust" but it proved to be a real trial. The recipe called for oil instead of shortening and it was too flaky to bend --at all! So fluting the edges was impossible. At one point, we were tempted to throw it away and begin again. But, in the end, Abigail poked and pieced and made it work. Our traditional Chocolate Praline Pumpkin Pie was delicious!

If you would like the recipe, follow the link to our family food blog --Mower Cookin.

A Peek Inside - Sewing Angel Christmas Ornament

Every year we add to the collection of Christmas ornaments for Miss Abigail's hope chest. Handmade ornaments are especially prized, particularly when they are actually handmade by Miss Abigail. This very sweet "Sewing Angel" ornament was created by Abigail at our ladies club meeting last week. Isn't she darling?

Billie Lauder, a professional quilter and crafter extraordinaire helped us with this easy project. Billie joined our group some time ago and always has such great ideas for fun things to do. She brought the pieces in a little kit and all we had to do was stack the elements on a long metal pin and twist the end into a loop hanger. The silver metal bobbin is spun with silver thread and the rest of the beads are silver as well. Very clever I think.

Happy Thanksgiving!



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I have so many, many things to be thankful for!

I hope each of you do as well.  Miss Abigail and I

wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving!

A Peek Inside - Thanksgiving Recipe Book

Finished! I'm very pleased with how well this little book turned out. Perhaps I should have chosen an album style that could accept more pages, since I had too many recipes to include pages of holiday photos! It was always intended as a recipe book, however, so I will declare myself satisfied. Here are pictures of some of the inside pages:

I added a cooking timetable for Abigail since this will make it easier (someday) for her to get dinner on the table. When I was younger, I worked hard to find recipes that could be made way ahead of time and refrigerated - even the mashed potatoes! I typically do all of the cooking for Thanksgiving dinner, so cooking ahead of time allows me to enjoy the holiday and visit with family and guests. I have more recipes than I could possibly use in one year's feast! I often trade out side dishes from year to year. So, I guess I could exchange photo pages for some of these recipes and make a new dedication page with a photo as well. Or, I could just look for another 5x7 style photo album. Perhaps I'll get around to it someday, but for now this project is finished. I love it when I can cross something off a list!

A Peek Inside - Turkey Salt & Pepper Shakers

The hope chest is a wonderful place to gather and treasure heirlooms. I don’t have a lot of heirlooms from previous generations to pass on to my children. In spite of this, with some foresight and planning, I can create an heirloom. An heirloom is simply an object of special value, passed from one generation to another. These objects don’t necessarily need to be valuable in a monetary way, just made special somehow through loving memories and sentimental feelings.

Miss Abigail loves Thanksgiving. She loves to decorate the house and set the table with our fancy dishes. We often have company to dinner and she loves being with friends and family. I’m sure she will have many happy memories of Thanksgiving. So, I want to collect a few things to send into her future home, to strengthen these memories. I bought these simple, vintage-looking salt and pepper shakers. I’ll use them at Thanksgiving for the remaining years that Abigail is at home, and then put them in the hope chest. An almost instant heirloom.

Current Project - Thanksgiving Recipe Book

It seems like life is so busy right now that I can’t find much time to work on handmade hope chest projects. Certainly, the time issue is the biggest hurdle anyone has to overcome to create a handmade or heirloom project. I just keep plugging away at all the things I have going, but if you’ve been following me for very long, you know that it takes me quite a while to get something completely finished. I don’t suppose any of you are very different. Eventually I’ll get something finished and can post pictures. In the meantime, I am working on a Thanksgiving Recipes project in the cracks and corners of my free time.

I bought the supplies for this project a year ago. I was working on the Thanksgiving Kitchen Set and thought it would be nice to include a recipe book of all our traditional holiday recipes. I did finish the kitchen things, but ran out of time for the recipe project. So this year I want to finish it. I have all my holiday recipes collected in one notebook and I like having them together in one place. I thought this small photo album would work similarly well for Miss Abigail. I need to re-type the menu and recipes and print them on card stock. Then I plan to “scrapbook” the recipes, along with some past family photos of the holiday. I intend to leave a blank space on some pages for future photos of Abigail as she helps me cook and decorate for Thanksgiving.