Kansas Grandkids Visit Colorado:

Now that quarterback Tyler is a junior, colleges are inviting him to come and visit their football programs.  Last week, the family traveled to Colorado and went to both the Air Force Academy and to Colorado State University.  They really enjoyed their trip, and Jen took some great photos of them.

Cameron, Tyler and Halie

Tyler

Halie

Cameron

Randy, Tyler and Cameron

Randy and Jen

Hi.

I am beginning to incorporate material from some of my other blogs onto this one.  Why?  For two reasons.  First, many of you probably won't notice them otherwise, and, second, I am considering paying the fee to have all of my blog posts printed off into a book.  Therefore, I am trying to put my favorite stuff into one place.  This is my diary, so just one hard copy for me will be fine.  I have so many photos, they might charge me a million dollars, but still I'm thinking about it.


One other thing, I just learned a new term today:  "Blend".  It means "Blogger Friends".  Thanks so much for being my blends, you guys!


Have a wonderful day.


Kathy

Folk Song #2: Cut the Cake Lyrics

Cut the Cake Song

Link to the 1983 John McCutchin AlbumHowjadoo Album Link

Click here to hear the song:

Tina Liza Jones singing this song link.

Cut the Cake

(Happy Birthday to You)

by Tina Liza Jones

We're going to let second grade out early today
Which made little Mikey kind of blue
You see he just turned seven years old that day
And he thought he'd get a party at school

He walked to his house and he's taken of his guard
There's tables and chairs all over they yard
And his friends jumped up and they hollered real hard
"Happy birthday to you!"

It makes me think of the good old days
Happy birthday to you
You sure grew out of your baby ways
Happy birthday to you

Seventh birthday, we wish you many more
Health and wealth and friends by the score
Cut the cake and lets eat some more
Happy birthday to you

Mike's twenty-two now and he's working for his pop
And his heads full of business through and through
They're puttin' in a whole new system at the shop
And forgot he had a birthday due

It makes me think of the good old days
Happy birthday to you
You sure grew out of your baby ways
Happy birthday to you

Twenty-third birthday, we wish you many more
Health and wealth and friends by the score
Cut the cake and lets eat some more
Happy birthday to you!


Now it's old man Michael in a rocking chair
Admiring the view
He's still got all his teeth and he's still got all his hair
And today he's ninety-two

He turns in his seat, and he's taken off guard
There's chairs and tables all over the yard
And his friends jumped up and they hollered real hard
Happy birthday to you

It makes me think of the good old days
Happy birthday to you
You sure grew out of your baby ways
Happy birthday to you

Ninety-second birthday, we wish you many more
Health and wealth and friends by the score
Cut the cake and lets eat some more
Happy birthday to you

It's your birthday, we wish you many more
Health and wealth and friends by the score
Tune up the fiddle and lets dance some more
Happy birthday to you

Easy Thrifty Pillows Tutorial:

Making Easy Pillows on the Cheap:
(This was previously posted on my Craft Blog.)

The other day I went to the local dollar store and purchased some tapestry wall hangings, place mats and table runners. I was lucky enough to only pay $1.50 for each of them. I did this project at Christmas, but decided to do it again and show you how.

This wall hanging that will soon become a pillow.

I first removed the wooden dowel (I kept the string attached on one end because I want to use it later for another project). Also remove the tassels.



Lay out your muslin. Don't worry about wrinkles, you'll iron those out later. I love my island for cutting things out ... it is the right height so my back doesn't hurt. The table works too, if you don't have an island. I buy semi thick muslin, usually at Walmart or the fabric store ... it is between .99 and 1.99 per yard and the color goes well for a lot of the projects that I work on.

I usually do pillows in bulk. These are some of the tapestry place mats that I bought and cut out at the same time as the pillow that I am featuring. Lay the tapestries face down on the muslin and cut around it. You don't even need to pin the two together if you don't want to.

This is what it looks like after I cut it out. It is better to have more muslin than tapestry so that you don't have to use pins (which saves you time and saves you hurting your fingers). If you are using thinner fabric you might have to use pins. You will be cutting off the excess muslin later on.

Just in case you were wondering what 

my sewing area used to look like when 
I first posted this on my crafts blog.

This is what it looks like now, when it is clean.

 It is a lot easier to sew when you have your station always set up, if you have the room to do that. I don't always have my portable sewing machine out, but everything else is always ready to go just in case I get the whim to sew. 

Sew the tapestry to the muslin.

After it is sewed, trim the excess muslin off.
 

Begin turning the pillow inside out.

Finish turning the pillow inside out.
Use your fingers or a sharper object in the corners.

Iron both sides, using high heat and steam. 
Press down hard on the seams.

Stuff it with good quality polyester fiberfill. I get a large box of it at Walmart. This time it cost me $19.95 (at Christmas it was $14.95). You can buy individual bags, but they are about $3.50 - $4.00 per bag. Make sure that you put stuffing in the corners of the pillow. I use a chopstick or wooden knitting needle for that. As you continue placing the stuffing inside the pillow, use your fingers to comb it and even it out. When you are all done, hand sew the opening.

The finished product!


I painted the dowels and made them into 
little fishing poles (or fairy wands): 

The End.

At Oregon Gifts of Comfort and Joy, if you miss a day, you miss a lot!  All material on this post is copyrighted and not for use without my permission ...Please click here to go to my home page and see what is happening in Mayberry today.
 

This Sunday's Drive: The McKenzie Valley

This morning we decided to drive two hours over to the Upper McKenzie Valley, just for something to do.  It was fun to get to the other side of the mountains for the afternoon, and enjoy the beauty of the lush valley.  I love it over there.  It is one of the prettiest places on earth, according to me.

  

The Rainbow Market

When I was in second grade, we moved to Springfield, a couple of blocks from Centennial Elementary School.  We lived in a modest and nice little neighborhood made up of ranch houses on a quiet street.  We were renting ours.  It backed up to a big field with power lines.  The field backed up to a drainage canal, that backed up to where 1-105 is now.  There was a lot to explore, and room to roam.

We had our dog Bambi, the fighter.  He was probably a pit-bull mix, but we didn't know anything about pit-bulls back in the day.  He loved to get loose and fight the big dogs.  We also had our cat Candy, who loved my sister Angie the most.  Candy had kittens in the bathroom, and I got to watch the birth because I was old enough.  It was an honor.  Then the kittens got big and started going poop inside my Dad's recliner.  He got really mad about that one day, and tossed the chair out the front door.  I thought it was pretty funny.

There were kids galore in that neighborhood.  My best friends were Shawn C., Teresa R., Wesley, and Kari M..  Teresa and I stayed friends for a long time, even after we all moved to other places.  Her mom and dad were so nice, Mary Lou and Neal, and they took us camping on the Rouge River and we went swimming in Lost Lake.  Once, during the winter they filled a swimming pool with warm water in the garage so that we could play in it.  That was a lot of effort to please two little girls.  Mary Lou loved the 1968 song "Honey" by Bobby Goldsboro  Now listen to that and see if that doesn't make you cry.

Kari M. didn't live in our immediate neighborhood; I had to ride my bike about a mile to get to her house.  It was safe enough in those days for kids to do things like that.  I didn't know it at the time, but I was riding by Nancy Kesey's house, where she had hidden her brother Ken's bus, "Further" in her barn.  The Kesey's owned The Springfield Cremery,  home of Nancy's Yogurt for years and years now.  Anyway, Kari had a very nice family too.  I remember that she had long, thick hair, and that I loved her name so much that I named my firstborn after her.  True story.  My Kari has thick hair too.

So, on to the picture of all the retro candy, which is my writing prompt for this post.  (Wow, a couple of months ago, I'd never even heard of a writing prompt!  Since I began my blog, I have searched Bing and other search engines for graphics and then they prompt me to write a story about them.  I just didn't know there was an official term for that practice.)  Anyway, we had a little store behind Centennial school called The Rainbow Market.  Mom would give us some money, about a dollar for the four of us was more than enough back then.  We moved from there when I was in 5th grade, so my siblings were pretty young.  I probably went with my friends and brought back candy for everybody else.

Candy was cheap in those days.  A Chico-Stix, my favorite, was only 5 cents.  Seriously. They had candy cigarettes, and candy necklaces ... all kinds of good stuff that looked similar to the candy above.  Sometimes we bought Cracker Jacks and ice cream bars there.  The Rainbow Market set the stage for my love of little stores.  So did my Grandma and Grandpa T.'s little store, The Riverview Market, on old River Road between Eugene and Junction City.  I'll do a story on that another time.

There was a boy from my school that lived right by The Rainbow Market.  His name was Cody. His hair was kind of long and shaggy. One time I parked my bike out front of the store, went in and bought my candy, and when I came out my bike was gone!  I walked around and found it at Cody's house.  Knowing me, I probably knocked on the door to ask for it back instead of just taking it.  At any rate, I went inside Cody's and could not believe my eyes.  There were velvet paintings of naked ladies, right there in the living room!  Boobies right there for those little boys to see all day long.  It was nasty!  That was the word we used back then for things like that, back when candy was only 5 cents.

One more little story about The Rainbow Market, before I let you go.  The winter before we moved from Springfield to Eugene was the winter of The Big Snow . We hardly ever got more than 1" of snow a winter, and that year we got 4' all at once.  The whole city closed down, it seemed, except for the hospital.  I know that, because my mom as a nurse and the National Guard had to come and get her in their army jeep.  Very impressive.  My Dad and all the other dads didn't have to go to work though.  They couldn't, because the roads were unsafe and everything was closed.  So, they loaded us all up (the smallest kids were on the sled), and we all went to The Rainbow Market for milk, bread and beer.  And probably for candy cigarettes.  Come to think of it, probably for real cigarettes.  On the way back the fathers carried their babies, pulled the groceries on the sled, and we tromped home through the snow.  That was so much fun, for little 10-year-old Kathy.  Me.

 My old school.  The Rainbow Market was behind it.

Source:  Ken Kesey Photos @ Bing.com

Ken Kesey and his bus Further.




You Tube Video of The Big Snow:
The Big Snow: Elmira, Oregon

Link to an Article on The Big Snow

Source:  Live Images

In honor of Cody.

At Oregon Gifts of Comfort and Joy, if you miss a day, you miss a lot!  All material on this post is copyrighted and not for use without my permission ...Please click here to go to my home page and see what is happening in Mayberry today.