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.

A Peek Inside - Cross-Stitch Pillowcases

Filling a hope chest is a wonderful thing, especially when it is filled with gifts from those who love you! These become treasures that fill your life with beauty and sweet memories. These pretty pillowcases were a gift to Miss Abigail from her grandmother. Grandma Mower has many pillowcases in her linen closet, including some that are now considered vintage and even antique. It is such a treat to stay in her home and find which treasures grace the pillows on the bed. Many are embroidered and some have delicate thread crocheted edgings created by her great aunts, now gone. Grandma loves to speak of these pioneer women - to tell their stories. I was the happy recipient of several sets of pillowcases, embroidered by my mother-in-law, when I married my husband all those years ago (this post). These are mostly worn out now, but I surely hate to retire them because I've enjoyed using them so much. I didn't save these pillowcases from use. Maybe I should have, but I used them. For more than thirty years I've washed and folded them, felt loved and thought about the skill and generosity that went into their creation. Grandma told me that she now no longer enjoys embroidery, but she still likes to cross-stitch.  I'm sure Abigail will enjoy using these in her future home too, just as Grandma has enjoyed those which were gifted to her years ago and as much as I've enjoyed mine. This is what my hope chest legacy is really about. 

A Peek Inside - Woven Wool Coasters

The weather is changing and I'm beginning to think about hot chocolate! These pretty coasters were a gift from some homeschooling friends for milking their dairy goats for a week. What a wonderful surprise and a perfect addition to Abigail's hopechest. All of the girls in the family spin and weave. These were made by the youngest, Nicole. Lovely, aren't they?

Stenciled Dish Towel

You see a lot of stenciling on the blog because it is so easy and quick to do and I think the results are so fun! I made a set of dishtowels recently to include in a wedding gift and I thought I would show you how I did it. Miss Abigail wrote a more basic tutorial on stenciling for beginners, if you need to see the actual technique.

Start by washing and drying the dishtowel. This removes any sizing or starch from the towel and allows the paint to penetrate into the fibers of the cloth. If you skip this step, the paint will likely fade much faster. Place a piece of cardboard or tin foil beneath the dishtowel, to prevent the paint from soaking through to the table. I use the Tulip soft fabric paint and whatever stencil strikes my fancy.

Use a just barely damp sea sponge and dab it lightly into green fabric paint. Lightly dab the sponge onto the towel to create a foliage background for the flowers that will come on top.

Add just a tiny bit of darker green to give the background some dimension. Use just a tiny bit!

Use the stencil to add flowers and leaves in a design across the foliage background. I blended two tints of the same shade while the paint was still wet to give the flowers a little dimension as well. I also added just a few dabs of a purple color between the flowers. Let this much dry. The directions for the fabric paint will give you the proper length of time.

After the flowers were dry, I stenciled smaller flower "centers" on top of the main flowers. I also used the end of the paintbrush, dipped in the paint and a very tiny brush to add further details and highlights to the flowers. Finally, I used another stencil with two colors to add the word.

Stenciling is really not hard to do and it makes me feel so artistic! So many projects for the hope chest can be stenciled. Dishtowels, of course, and pillowcases -you just need to be creative.