Victory Garden 2k17: Update #4

June 29, 2017August 2, 2017 / The Particular Overall Collection / Leave a comment

Welcome back to the victory garden!!

Here are my latest garden notes:
{Yes I was watching Grav3yardgirl while uploading blog pictures!}

Here’s how things looking on the deck lately!

6/18/2017

Excuse the 1990s comforter in the background in these pictures! One of the cats {ahem, ahem, I’m *pretty* sure it was Patti Smith–BAD KITTY} PEED on poor Chief’s bed! I had to wash his comforter and I put it out to dry in the sun and try to sun bleach more of the STANK out.

6/18/2017 (top) & 6/27/2017 (bottom)

You can a TINY bit of difference in the two pics above. The tomato plants are really starting to get tall and bush out. All of them have fruit on them at this point and 2 plants have fruit that is getting ripe enough to pick. I re-potted my purple basil and it is SO HAPPY now. I really like the pop of color it brings compared to regular sweet basil. I find the flavor pretty similar so I would definitely recommend growing some of the purple stuff too just for the different shade in your salads!

These are some kind of “chocolate” cherry tomatoes that Mom started from seeds she saved from her plants last year! I have two of the these plants.

Picked 6/26/2017

Here are the first tomatoes I’ve gotten to pick this year!! These came off a “yellow pear” cherry/grape tomato plant I bought from Walmart. The fruit matches the marigolds!

I planted two more drawers of radishes. For whatever reason one drawer is growing and the other is not Nature is so weird. Those pitiful pots in the middle have a few carrot seeds in them. They’re not doing much and I really ought to reuse the dang dirt for something else.

There is ONE pepper on the pepper plant you see at the middle of the picture. There were a few more blooms but no more fruit has appeared. I may need to fertilize. It’s supposed to be yellow so I’m going to leave it on the plant a bit longer to see if it turns color.

The raspberry plants are still kicking out a few berries every so often. I’m still trying to figure out where I want to plant them. They *seem* to be doing okay in the buckets so I’m leaving them alone for now.

In the bottom of this picture you see my big beautiful potato pots! Stay tuned for the next garden post in which I tell you a story of pests of pestilence and woe. Lordy Lordy.

Let’s end of happy note!

Look at these BERRIES!!! ❤

picked 8/26/2017

These are some of the wild blackberries I’ve been harvesting. I go out to the ditch along our property about every 2-3 days and can poke around and find about two cups to pick. I’ve been bringing them in and putting them in a gallon bag in the freezer. So far I’ve picked about 10 cups total. I hope to have enough to make some jelly and a few turns of dumplings!

YUM!

WHEW!

How are things going in YOUR garden?

What is working and what isn’t?

But for real, stay turned for my next garden update when you will get to LOL at my new irrational terror…it WILL be entertaining!! XD XD XD

TIE DYE, OH MY!

June 28, 2017June 28, 2017 / The Particular Overall Collection / Leave a comment

Oh hai!

Is it 1967 or 1997?

Those are the times I think of in terms of tie dye, hahaha!

I had this set of sunny yellow sheets that is pretty high thread count and felt really nice and was all around in great shape. EXCEPT for some rando mildew stains. I tried treating the stains and had absolutely NO LUCK getting them to budge. I felt bad about the idea of donating them somewhere since they were stained and they were WAY too nice to throw away. SOOOoooo I thought I’d try out my old tie dye skills!

Here is what the top sheet looked like all tied up.

I worked on the top sheet first. I used a few different rolls of what I think is cotton twine. I cut pieces that measured my “wingspan” or fingertip to finger tip. I was hoping to be able to reuse the string (that would also be kind of tie dyed) so I didn’t use any knots. As you can pretty well see in the picture above, I twisted a ‘horn’ in the sheet, then about an inch from the tip, started wrapping the string, then moved down another 1.5 inches or so and wrapped again, all the way until the string ran out. Then I tucked the sting in the last wrap to secure, using a crochet hook as needed.

I used Rit Dye in liquid form. The ratio was half a bottle to three gallons of HOT water. The instructions said to stir the bucket of fabric and dye CONSTANTLY for an hour. I stirred my bucket about every ten minutes. I would probably have stirred more frequently but I was dealing with the “Great Horn Worm Incident of 2017” (look for my Victory Garden Update #5 for more on THAT) so I was kinda busy.

After and hour I took the sheet out of the dye and it looked like this hilarious squid thing!

I then unwound all the little strings very carefully, which ended up being way easier than I thought. The dye took to the string and looks really nice. It will be great for incorporating in to doll sweaters! AND CHECK OUT THE PATTERNS! I am so pleased with how the top sheet turned out! I rinsed it until the water ran clear and then hung it out to dry.

After I got all that done, I went ahead and tied up the fitted sheet to dye. I wasn’t totally sure how well it would take the dye since it was the second batch AND the water wasn’t hot anymore. For the fitted sheet I actually left it in the dye bath for about 3 hours. When it came out of the dye it looked pretty much the exact same! Whew!

WHOA! Isn’t that freaking gorgeous!?!?!

I just love my funny porch/deck garden!
You may recognize this if you’ve kept up with the victory garden this season.

Here is the finished product all folded up! And YES I am one of those wizards who can perfectly fold a fitted sheet. It’s an ancient and dark art I learned from my grandmother. If you want to learn I can teach you…but it will cost you your soul!

(Kidding, I’ll totally teach you for free 🙂 )

The dye definitely dried to a lighter color but still looks nice AND the dye covered up the weird stains which was my goal! I haven’t decided if I’m going to keep them, sell them, or donate them. I’m going to put them on my guest bed and take some pictures and try to decide after that.

Yay for creative problem solving!

Yay for tie dye sheets!

🙂

TINY Tuesday #27! {ponytail miracle & more}

June 27, 2017August 2, 2017 / The Particular Overall Collection / Leave a comment

Hey!!! It’s TINY Tuesday…AGAIN!!

I hope you are having a great start to your week!

Things here in summer vacationland are pretty good. I’m getting lots accomplished and also nothing accomplished at all, lol! I’m having fun though and that’s all that really matters, right? I’ll keep telling myself that.

***Random note: In most all my previous posts you may have noticed that I put the text for clickable links in orange. For whatever SUPER annoying reason, I cannot make the text turn colors for the past few posts. In lieu of this delineation, I am now underlining and italics-ing the words. I like to add hyperlinks so you can learn more about what I’m talking about or even find & buy certain products–that’s something I like about blogs I follow so I do it here on my blog, too. SOoooooo look for these new clues instead of orange Hopefully I can eventually troubleshoot and fix the issue.

Without further a-do, here are some TINY fun things for you!

TINY PONYTAIL!!

OMG y’all! I have a TINY ponytail! Super weird/awkward angle for this picture, and it’s definitely not a “going-off-the-property” hairstyle, BUT I am so stoked to FINALLY have enough hair to get into a ponytail, especially for the summer. In other hair news, I think my hair has FINALLY recovered from a bad hair cut I got in March. I am so glad my hair has it’s normal body back and isn’t flat and sad. And look at those glorious grays! ❤

TINY!
BELATED!!
BIRTHDAY!
FUN!!

I told y’all last week that I had gotten some REALLY fun TINY stuff for my birthday. I’m not going to blow the whole shebang all at once though! 🙂 Here are some of the wonderful little trinkets and treats I’ve gotten lately! Stay tuned in the next week or two as I reveal ALL the new additions to my collection!

TINY TEA SET!!!

My #1 field agent and miniature resource collector, Cotton Candy, gifted me with MORE delights from her personal collection. I am SOOOO in love with this little cloisonne style tea set! I cannot WAIT to get my doll house set up again so that the dollies can have a tea party set up with this in their little living room! I couldn’t resist wearing the tea cups on my fingers–it reminds me of being a kid and putting black olives on my fingers and then eating them! I did NOT eat the tea cups.

And speaking of Cotton Candy being a great field agent, check out this new TV show that she told me about–it stars tiny KITTENS in a dollhouse, Keeping up with the Kattarshians. There is not much better than kittens playing in a dollhouse.

TINY!!
{dollsized}
CAT in a HAT!!

This is another TINY delight from Cotton Candy! This teeny cat is the purrrfect size to be a toy for a doll! Here she is posing in her sunhat trying to get some much needed shade in the Dark Purple Opal Basil. [That basil is SO GOOD, btw–you should get some seeds for your garden! It’s not too late!]

TINY!!
FLOCKED!!
UNICORN!!
{posing on a USB drive of no significance}

ModMom gifted me with this DARLING little unicorn charm at the last meeting of Doll Club. It reminded me that I REALLY need to get all my Kawaii charms (speaking of kawaii, check out this freaking store I just found when I googled the definition of kawaii!!!) together and back on a necklace before school starts back! I LOVE things that are flocked. I have a small collection of flocked rabbits…a flock of flocked rabbits? I digress. This charm is so TINY and totally perfect for my charm necklace.

TINY!!
FRUIT SALAD!!
IN MY HAND!!!

I would normally post this in a garden post, but I was just so dang excited when I picked these last night!!! I GREW THESE BERRIES!!! Well, nature grew them, but I took care of the plants! I ate them for breakfast and even let Duck have the shriveled up blueberry to play with. Anyway, it’s the little stuff, right? Stay tuned for more on my plants in a post later in the week.

Hope everyone has a SUPER HUGELY AWESOME rest of the week!

Stay cool and stay happy!

❤

Tiny Tuesday 26! [photo dump edition]

June 20, 2017August 2, 2017 / The Particular Overall Collection / 1 Comment

LOOK!

It’s TUESDAY! and it’s TIME 4 TINY!

{also for you educators and students out there: }

Happy Summer Vacation!!!

If you aren’t on summer vacation then I am terribly sorry and I will try not to rub it in too much. This is my first summer vacation since 2004 so it is a weird and foreign and fabulous thing to be certain. I have a list a mile long of things I want (and need) to get done and sorting my pictures on my computer is one of them. I’ve already come across a few things that have gotten missed for TINY Tuesday up until now. This will be remedied in TT26!

Miniature delights from AC Moore. How cute is that teeny Raggedy Anne doll? And those wine bottles?! I’m note sure why I didn’t buy both of these things immediately. If you are a n00b doll fan you may not have thought to look for unique doll sized items in the miniature section. There are often really cute things that are all TINY and perfectly sized–playing cards, enamel kitchen pots, gumball machines, soda/beer cans…all TINY and so FUN! Check it out at your favorite craft store.

So this isn’t exactly a TINY thing per se, but it’s one of the “little” things in life that makes me smile. I pulled in to a parking space at Aldi (this was a few months back when it wasn’t hot so don’t worry that the dog was in any discomfort) and looked over to see a dog looking at me from the drivers seat!! He was smiling so big and reminded me of a kid getting to pretend to drive on his parent’s lap. Sometimes it’s these silly TINY moments in life that get me through the day 🙂

This pineapple pic is from my trip to Louisiana last fall. Remember, the trip that got cut short because of all the crazy flooding? The cousins I was supposed to visit on that trip got evacuated, their house flooded, and they only just got to go home like a month ago. That’s not TINY it’s a HUGE deal! I’m so glad they’re back home and that I’m going to get to visit them in a few weeks when I’m back in LA. Anyway, I snapped this pineapple pic at Rouses — a grocery store chain that’s in Louisiana. This TINY pineapple is a “Zulu Queen” variety. I kinda fell down a rabbit hole just now trying to figure out where the name came from but couldn’t come up with anything based on historical or scientific facts. Pretty much everything just raved about how sweet and delicious they are. Next time I see one I just may have to get one!

And now for a TINY miracle tale:

{Forgive me if I’ve already told this story–I went through and looked to see if I saw it in a previous post and couldn’t find it. It’s too good of a story not to share, even if it’s for a second time!!}

One morning while I was getting ready for work I dropped one of my favorite earrings down the sink drain in my bathroom. It was a little wooden crawfish earring with a sparkley stone on its tail that mom had brought me back as a present from one of her trips to LA. I was mad as hell and had given it up for lost–I couldn’t even see it in the drain. SUPER SAD 😦 😦 😦 A week or so later I came home from work to find Duck digging her arm and paw down the drain. I had pretty much forgotten about the lost earring and Duck often played in the drain so I thought nothing of it. Later in the evening I went to go use the bathroom and what did I see laying next to the sink???? THE DANG CRAWFISH EARRING. It had some long hairs stuck to it and it was a little swollen looking from being damp, but it was FOUND!!! After months of swatting in that drain Duck FINALLY caught something–I bet she was shocked XD XD XD

Here is a pic of the sink drain and the cleaned up rescued earring:

Stay tuned for next week when I show of some of the TINY delights I got for my birthday–yep, the birthday I had last month. I’ve been slacking off so hard, y’all. Forgive me ❤

Have a week full of TONS of TINY fun 🙂