Peggy's Jibber-Jabber: I Wish

I wish I had more time.

My head is so full of things I want to make and no time to make them. I only have five days a week to work on stuff, then Saturday and Sunday I devote my time to our visit — after church on Sunday. The Lord is first. Still and all, I can normally knock out something fairly decent in those two days.

Now, don’t forget that the other five days aren’t totally mine. I have critters that need attention, meals to prepare, dishes and laundry to wash, and let’s not forget that my handsome mountain man always seems to need a third hand when he undertakes any project. Even mowing!

“Peg,” he called me. “Can you pull me out?”

Sigh. I pushed back my desk chair, “Where are you?”

He’s not at all surprised when I show up with a camera and a Blue Heeler.

We made the trip to Lowe’s in Sayre to get the wood for the kitchen subfloor, wood for my shelves that Mike’s gonna build in the kitchen after the floor is put down, and a big ol’ honkin’ six-by-six.

“What’s that for?” you ask.

Mike put the bell up this week. His battery-operated screw gun couldn’t drive the lag bolts in so he had to break out the big boy, his impact driver.

Sometimes things get in the way of our weekly visit. Take for instance yesterday, Saturday. It was the around-town yard sales in Wyalusing. I worked on my pictures for this week’s letter blog on Friday so I'd be able to go yard sale’n with the Kipps in the morning. Mike wasn’t interested in going. I figured I’d get home from the sales and still have time to work on my letter blog.

It didn’t happen.

I had a great time though. I got a few good deals and met some fabulous people. There are some things I want to tell you about, and I might even take a few photos of my finds, but not now. Not this week. I already have a file full of photos and only a few hours to finish and post this.

I did work on the cats for my commission.

The cats...

SIGH!

I’m ready to throw my hands in the air and give up. I re-drew and re-made the cats. I added dimensional details this week and....

My cats are off balance and hang crooked. I tried to sand off enough to make them hang right but only the surface was dry. Inside was wet and it wouldn’t sand, it just pilled up.

I put the cats aside to dry and worked on the lizard house. I just love this little lizard house so much. If there’s time next week, I want to paint it. I think I figured out a way to make stained glass windows using glue and ink. We’ll see if it works.

I put the windows in the lizard house when I was making it. I had to cut the concrete clay out to make windows in the real-stone doorway house, then I framed them in. I still need to make a top for him.

The other one I’m going to send my sister for her fairy-house-grouping birthday present is mostly done. I may add a shuttered window to the back, but in any case, there haven’t been any changes to it since you saw it last time.

Something else I’ve been working on is trying to make liquid glass. I’ve searched all the stores for a PU solvent and haven’t found anything. Someone else said you can dissolve Styrofoam in acetone, take the gob of goo out and put it in xylene and it’ll do the same thing. I looked for xylene but only found huge cans of it for fifty bucks and I don’t want or need that much. I found a solvent that said it was a substitution for xylene and it’s in a smaller can so I bought that.

Guess what?

“It worked!” you say.

Nope. It didn’t work. I just ended up with another gob of the same goo.

I wonder if it’ll work for glue.

I don’t need to make glue because I already have several different kinds of glue. Hot glue, Elmer’s glue, super glue. But because I didn’t make glass I decided to experiment. I took three plastic milk jug lids. I smeared glue on one and sandwiched it with another. Then I smeared glue on cardboard and pressed the third lid into it. I looked around to see what else I could try it on and saw a few pieces of my concrete clay. I took two, smeared glue on one and stuck them together. The next day I tested them. The two plastic lids came apart with very little effort. The plastic lid came off the cardboard but the glue is stuck down fast to the cardboard. My two clay hearts? They are stuck together permanently and forever! They ain’t never coming apart!

I did finish Miss Rosie’s cats. On top of the branch are pinecone flowers. I cut a pinecone into pieces, highlighted with a little paint and hot glued them on.

Miss Rosie likes her cats, but she loves her chickens!

“Her cats don’t hang crooked,” you observe.

Nope. No, they don’t. The style cat on the right is fine. It’s the one on the left that’s giving me trouble. When I add clay to sculpt the tail it makes it too heavy.

After I gave it to Miss Rosie, she showed me a chicken she painted. Isn’t it fabulous!

“There were just outlines on the board and I thought it would look better painted,” she told me.

I think she’s right.

I was on my way through the pantry/utility room the other day, flipped on the light, and saw a mouse go running. I did a double-take. Upon closer inspection, I see it wasn’t a mouse at all but a Wolf spider. He got to the laundry basket and stopped. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t see him if he didn’t move. I thought about picking him up with my bare hands. I know that they’re not an aggressive spider and if I’m gentle, he probably won’t bite me. Probably. The sheer size of him was daunting! The pictures don’t do him justice. He was every bit of two inches and if you add the legs, he’d’ve taken up most of my hand. I took a glass off the shelf and encouraged him to go inside. Then I took him out away from the house and turned him loose. I’ve no interest in killing things if I don’t have to.

A Bluebird.

Two Kingfishers!

My pond is teeming with life. A skipper butterfly.

A Dot-tailed Whiteface dragonfly. Hmmm. I wonder how they came up with that name.

These are damselflies. There are somewhere around 2,600 kinds of damselflies worldwide. In the U.S. we have 135 species.

Milkweed is starting to bloom.

And so is the Heal-all.

The pokeweed is starting to set its flowers.

This is Dock.

I saw a whole field of English Plantain! I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many in one place before.

I’m going to wrap this one up with tons of pictures. I know some of you like looking at the big beautiful houses and Mike took a different road into Waverly, New York (just a stone’s throw from Sayre, PA.) where we went to get baseboard.

First, Waverly.