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Thursday, November 7, 2013

Mrowwww

About a month ago I got a request from my seester, Emily, to make my niece, Maddie, a knit kitty hat for Halloween.  She sent me a picture from the Etsy shop, pixiebell, of the hat that she was requesting I copy.

Here is pic and link.

pixiebell cat hat

After a few trial and errors I came up with one that was pretty close.  The shop uses a thicker yarn than one I could find at the local craft store, so I had to double mine and go with the flow.  When I finished, Emily received this photo to let her know.


So obviously, when she received the package in the mail, this is the photo I got back of my nephew, Andrew.


Awesomeness.  Clearly it runs in the family.

While Maddie did not wear her hat out for Halloween, I still got a good picture from Emily to showcase.


LOVE!

Monday, November 4, 2013

Finally the Fence

Due to reader demand (Linda, *cough*) I have decided to finally grace you all with fence photos.  Yippee!

It was quite a fun time, let me tell you.  And although Papa John did most of the hard manual labor, even he has to admit that I am a mighty fine post holder person.  Also post capper person.  Yes, I stole the most glorious job of capping all the fence posts as he finished.  Equivalent of stealing a puzzle piece and waiting for me to finish so he can put the last piece in, right pops?  Karma.

So as I think I told you guys, the first summer trip my parents took down here was supposed to be for the fence, but we ended up doing a number of other projects (just remembered I need to show the cat boxes...I am way behind!).  We did manage to get all the fence parts ordered and delivered though, so Chris and I were left with all this awesomeness in our garage for a month.



Xena in the back there had to sit out in the sweltering sun.  Poor little car.

I may or may not have been equally as excited to get my garage back as I was to get the fence up.

So, one unfortunate thing about where we live is that it's in the middle of an old lake bed.  Springville homes tend to not have basements because the dirt is hard packed clay.  SO AWFUL. You have to bring in truckloads of good dirt to get a lawn to stay green and be healthy around here.  We knew that ahead of time and opted to rent an auger to speed things up with the post hold drilling.  That is one power tool I will never use, FYI.  Scary!

Papa John was up at the crack of dawn and probably got about halfway down into ten of the holes before giving up and just returning the thing.  The dirt was seriously so tough that the auger just quit digging.  Which meant that all the rest of the holes got to be dug out with the post hold digger.  Oh what joys.  Chris came out one day and put a little elbow grease into them, but as he was working, it was mainly just Papa John and I.  And lets be honest, I lift ten pound weights when I work out, so yeah, mainly just him.

Chris' day of contribution = more work than my whole week.


Holes galore.


Farmer Joe with his hole digger.


Since we piled up the back berm with extra dirt...this is how deep those babies went.


Don't fall in!


Dwight also was helping...I can't believe I forgot to mention.


His specialty was finding lost birds in open posts.


He sat by that post all day until Chris finally figured out there was a bird trapped in there.  He spent an hour making a contraption to set him free.  Dwight was very disappointed.

Notice the nice post spacing in the previous photo as well, and the exact height of each one.  Anyone who knows my father, or has read my blog, knows that he has a slight perfection tendency.  And by slight, I mean really intense.  So I would say that about three quarters of our time spent building this fence was actually measuring and remeasuring and remeasuring.  If you think I'm complaining, I'm not.  This actually makes me very happy, because if we had not done this, our fence would be looking like the new neighbors who put theirs up in about two days.  It shows.


Notice the awkward one post higher than the others, the different post distances and, my personal favorite, the sloping gate next to the house.  REALLY?  And yes, that is snow on the mountain...I just took that picture two minutes ago.  It's begun.

After all the posts had set for a few days, we Papa John started adding the rails and slats.



And by the end of the day, voila, we had a finished fence!



With purdy gates.



Yes, he even did the neighbors with no extra labor charge.  What a guy!


We also filled in bricks facing the neighbors yard so we could dump our dirt higher without issues. 


Yay for being fenced in!  Sneak peek of another project in the lower left corner.  This backyard is getting so close to done...I keep telling myself anyway.