Summer is Here!

Well, it is definitely summer! Our neighborhood pool opened this weekend & went over this morning for a swim. It felt so wonderful! My hand surgeries & mystery pneumonia have kept me from hitting the gym like I normally do this spring, but now I can swim every morning before 10 when the kids get in there. I'm so excited about that! I've just started the Sookie Stackhouse novels, which will be a great poolside read. We're BBQing with the neighbors tonight & I just took a mixed berry cobbler out of the oven to take with me. Yum!

We've been harvesting our garden for about 6 weeks now. The experimental mixed greens I planted have gone wild & I can't pick or eat them fast enough. The spinach was kind of dwarfed beside it, but still producing. I've been picking some little carrots & onions recently, and the snow peas are wonderful. I ran out of room in our little beds & tried to plant some squash & cucumbers in the flower beds, but it did not work out so well. I think the flowers are sucking up all the water or something. Only one squash plant is blooming. :(

The flowers bed are going to town now as well. My hydrangea bush is huge & full of purple blooms. I put the ph balancing food on it this year & it more blue in some spots. There's a mix of purple, blue, and pink on it right now. I picked lovely bunch this morning.

 I have three colors of Asian lilies blooming now.

The Sock Buddies have made their retail debut at Dwelling Spaces in downtown Tulsa. I visited the store a couple weeks ago to take in a big basket full and found out that I had sold 5 out of 10. I also added some little robots to the mix.

I've been sewing up a storm to stock pile for my June show, which is going to be the 26th at the Tulsa Fairgrounds, The Alliday Everyday craft show. You can read my artist profile featured on the Alliday Blog. I'll be bringing my new linocuts in the form of stamped cards & 5x7 prints. They are looking great. Also just ordered some new postcards of some of the linocut designs.

I recently went to Dallas with my friend, Jenni, to do some serious shopping. We hit the Allen Outlet mall on Saturday, then stayed at the posh Nylo Hotel in Las Colinas. Sunday we went to the Container Store & IKEA. It was insane weekend. After four hours in IKEA we were about to kill someone or each other, not sure which. ;) I got this amazing shelf though. It's the Expedit, and seems to be a craft room favorite. I've seen many neat versions of it on blogs. It was surprising quick to assemble and I had it filled in no time. I was primarily going to use it as a bookshelf, but it fits my 12 x 12 scrapbooks perfectly, so I may outfit it with some paper shelves for my scrapbook paper. You can buy drawers & doors that fit on it, but I opted for the big plastic bins, which I filled with my fabric & socks for my sewing projects. I also bought those metal tins to store all my CD's in.