House Art Journal

My daughter on her adult-sized trike bringing the berries home. As another languid summer comes to an end, I am grateful for yet another year with my family. It is all gift. We are owed nothing.

Queen Anne, Queen Anne has washed her lace (She chose a summer's day) And hung it in a grassy place To whiten, if it may. Queen Anne, Queen Anne has left it there, And slept the dewy night; Then waked, to find the sunshine fair, And all the meadows white. Queen Anne, Queen Anne is dead and gone (She died a summer's day) But left her lace to whiten in Each weed-entangled way! by Mary Leslie Newton For more interesting facts about this lovely flower, click here.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills We trekked and picked until the cans were full Until the tinkling bottom had been covered With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's. We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre. But when the bath was filled we found a fur, A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache. The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like cr...

Fruit and flowers, free gifts of the summer days... alas, coming to an end too, too soon.... This August we kept a battered basket in our entryway and made nightly strolls to collect new home decorations and fresh desserts. Even now, my children are still finding the last of the black-hued berries, and the flowers continue their riotous color in the fields.

Forgive my lapse in posting... we have been picking blackberries. The season has now almost ended, but it was our pasttime for the past weeks of languid summer evenings....

As blog readers know, I delight in colored glass containers. This is one case in which my photography skills limp pitifully behind the image I wanted to share with you. Next to my desk is an old gun case we converted to a china cabinet/bookshelf. I normally use it for displaying my silver. This summer I thought I would mix in my collection of blue glass mason jars, pink depression glass, a set of green-glass goblets my mother bought me, and my assortment of glass jars and flower vases. I really wish I had glass shelves to set off the colored glass to full advantage, or at least a better flash on my camera. :( However, it looks wonderful in real life, particularly as a mental subsitute for the sumptuous Ventetian glass chandelier I will never own.

Queen Anne's lace makes a wonderful embellishment to a girl's hair. Even a weed has a moment of grace.

My daughter, the gourmet cook, continues to come up with creative ways to decorate cakes, and I had to show off this picture of her July creation for my son's birthday: using the new Skittles Chocolate Mix , she decorated this chocolate cake. I believe her method was this: she first did a row around the edge of the cake of Skittles ranging them from dark to light over and over again. Then she began a new row inside but shifted every color over one step. "It makes it look like a snail shell," she said. Allow me to gush: isn't she creative?

Not being a gourmet cook like my eleven-year-old, I tend to buy basic spices that come in large 99-cent jars from the dollar store. But of course I can't stand having the jars on my counter. So some time ago I started collecting empty Trader Joe's balsalmic vinegar jars. I love the shape and the cork stoppers. I find they're wonderful for spices: the narrow neck takes the place of a shaker top. I do have a set of shakers for smaller spices I picked up at a flea market. I have them arranged on an IKEA shelf that has been with us since the early days of our marriage. Someday, I will get custom made labels for my spices from one of those custom-made label places, but for now I'm happy with a permanent marker, even though it does wipe off.

I admit, I love silver and I love dishes on pedestals. I was first introduced to the beauty of pedestals at a homey hole-in-the-wall pizzeria, where the pizza was served on pedestals so that even six diners could gather around the restarant's diminuitive tables to eat. I actually own one restaurant pedestal, bought from a diner going-out-of business. I happened upon the other two in separate thrift stores: they cost about $8.00 each. Right now I don't use them very often, but they always stay on my counter. Alas, the glass cake stand I blogged about has met its demise, but its top remains with us, at least as of this blogging, as you can see from the photo above.

I'm glad I managed to finish the purse before the end of the summer! I have to say, I think it turned out pretty well. The bright colors are uplifting to me now, and I have hopes of carrying this purse into the fall. And because to the button-on cover, I can change it again for another look later on. :) Thanks for those of you who were following my little project: it's wonderful to be able to chalk it up as: done!

I have to say I'm becoming very fond of the book series that my friend Ben Hatke is doing with my other friend Neal Lozano . I just received their third book in the mail, and it's gorgeous, with a cover that reminds me of summertime. If you're not familiar with the books, visit the site to see their trilogy of books, Will You Bless Me? and Can God See Me in the Dark? Gently ecumenical in text but thoroughly Catholic in sensibility, these hardcover books with their handsome typesetting would be wonderful gifts for the children in your life. Enjoy!

I had the honor of attending the funeral of Thom and Marc Girard on July 5th, and when I went up, I presented the family with a spiritual bouquet of prayers from the teens on the Fairy Tale Novel Forum (Marc was a member). The night before, I was inspired to create a bouquet card out of paper to present the bouquet. It was fairly simple: I printed out the prayer promises from each of the members (for example, five rosaries and two Masses) in a decorative font in blocks of four to a 8.5x11" sheet of paper. On the reverse side, I printed out images from the comprehensive J.W. Waterhouse site of ladies and girls gathering flowers. I rolled each piece of paper into a cone, and put them into a larger cone I made out of card stock. It took a little bit of fixing to get them to all stay inside nicely (I recommend pushing them down as far as possible) but with some care they made a nice-looking, if fragile, bouquet. I attached a ribbon to the cone with floral wire to finish. Thanks to ...

I loved that boy so much.

Marc Girard, 18, looked like your ordinary Catholic teenager. But he was not. He had a Facebook page. He was a part of the Fairy Tale Novel Forum (even though, like most guys, he hadn't read the books :) ). He was careless about spelling. He hated having his picture taken. His avatar was a man making funny faces. To his four younger siblings and to most of his friends, I am sure he sometimes seemed very ordinary. Even though he took his Catholic faith seriously, and sometimes challenged his high school friends on different issues. His friend Paul Ethier was surprised when Marc told him that he was planning to join the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate , who had a friary near the Girard home in Griswold, CT. Marc was accepted as a postulant, and was going to join the Maine, NY friary in August. The Girard family had been through a lot. Last year they suffered two hardships in a row: first, their home burned down. The only thing in Marc's room that survived the fire was his pi...

If life was a bowl of cherries, it would be sweet indeed. We went cherry picking at Hartland Orchards on Sunday (we managed to hit the last day of cherry picking and the first day of blueberry picking at the same time: what a bonus!). I wish I had bought my camera: I don't think I ever appreciated before how red cherries are: almost too red to be believed. Red cherries filmed by pale green leaves glowing against perfect blue skies was a sight I would have loved to capture. So I am settling for this more prosaic shot of cherries in a bowl, whose subtle variations of red are still enchanting. Also this photo documents my latest conquest: spotting a good price on a set of vintage green Hull pottery! I am happily awash in green bowls these days.

For Father's Day, I usually clean the garage for my husband and organize his tools. This year I was finally able to put up some shelving in our new garage addition (which we are still insulating and drywalling: ah, construction is slow when you do it yourself...). The shelves are made of pieces of our old bed, and the lower shelf is held up with decorative brackets I bought from Lowes several months ago and never used. (I did buy 89-cent brackets for the other shelves, spray-painted black.) An old ladder that has been in our scrap pile for years became a table with the addition of old plywood on top and cinderblocks below, and I leaned a wrought-iron fireplace door against the wall to hold sunglasses. (Okay, I mainly did it because it looked pretty.) I was pleased when a strip of short coat pegs found a new job holding hammers and the cordless drill. Even if garages can't be particularly pretty, at least they can look slightly decorative. Happy (belated!) Father's Day to a...

What's more invigorating than a quick craft project on a summer day? Due to an oversight, I accidentally dropped one of my baby's white (actually dingy gray) Trumpette socks into a dyebath. So I had one blue and one white sock. I decided to dye the other one to match. For fun, I decided to dye an old silk scarf too. (I also thought it would absorb some of the dye and keep my baby's sock from getting too dark.) Fortunately this past Christmas my friend Andrea taught me how to dye in the microwave! So this was all I had to do: First I soaked the sock in some sodium bicarbonate (soda ash) from the hardware store. This enables the fabric to absorb the dye and "fixes" it. I put about a quarter teaspoon of Dharma Trading's turquoise blue dye in a heavy zip lock bag. Next I mixed the dye with about a quarter cup of warm water until it was well dissolved. I put both the sock and scarf in the bag, closed it, and squished the bag for a few minutes to coat the scar...

For those of you who've been wondering, I'm still trying to follow the diet that I started last summer. I have quite a bit of my accumulated "baby fat" (from several babies!) to lose, and sometimes the going is hard. When I succeed in following the plan (and manage to avoid the nightly family bowl of popcorn, the hardest hurdle of the day) I reward myself with a cup of herbal-and-berry tea and a quality chocolate . A good book and an early bedtime are further helps towards eating light. Wish me well!

While shopping with my guardian angel and praying for a good deal on a limited budget, I found some already-smocked fabric at WalMart on clearance and used it to make matching skirts for myself and the older girls. I had lots leftover, so I made dresses for the two younger girls. This one turned out particularly well. I just used two rectangles of cloth to make a bodice, and attached it to a gathered skirt, which I stretched out while attaching it so that the fabric gathered. Thus. After I attached the bodice, I gathered the neck and armholes with elastic and presto! A dress! The material was so gauzy that I put an underskirt of dark blue cloth trimmed with cotton lace eyelet at the bottom to weight the skirt a bit. I love when a little effort produces such a charming result!