Inspiration, Snowmen and Garlic!

Greetings from a perfect autumn day in Western Pennsylvania! The leaves are a blaze, the sun is shinning in a cloudless deep blue sky and a breeze is rustling the leaves. It's times like these that inspiration seems to sneak up on me and whollip me up-side the head! Such inspiration happened to me last week when I stumbled upon the most worderfully vintage style decorative papers. They have a 1950s-1960s feel about them. Naturally I knew I'd have to incorporate them into the "Fresh Vintage" Christmas tree ornament line. Here's what I came up with....

This is "Zoots". His passion is selling vintage Christmas ornaments and he has what some might say, is an unnatural love for tinsel. Zoots is compised of 1/4 inch baltic birch wood, painted light ivory with a hand painted face and then embellished with text, decorative papers, rubber stamps and cutouts. Everything is then sprinkled with ultra-fine glitter! (which is difficult to see in the photos!) He is 7 inches tall from the tip of his hat to the end of his body and 4 inches wide at the bottom.

Zoots is available on Ebay right now. So click on the word Ebay and check him out!

Now on to garlic planting........

I use to think I wanted a Christmas tree farm but now I'm thinking a garlic farm would be much easier to take care of and even more profitable!

Late September and October are the times to plant garlic here in Pennsylvania. Today was such a glorious fall day that my husband and I decided to put a bed of garlic in. It will grow all winter (slowly) and then when sprink hits it will really shoot up. July is the time to harvest it.

Here's a quick picture tutorial on how to plant it.....

First prepare the bed by turning over the soil and adding a sprinkling of 10-10-10 fertilizer.

Next split the garlic bulbs into individual cloves (leave the paper covering around each clove). Notice I have on blue rubber gloves so I don't smell like garlic! Oh! That's a scary picture of me!

Then plant each clove, pointy side up about 2 inches deep (that's my Gary doing that). Now sit back and wait until July to harvest it!

Happy Sunday! I hope you are doing something you love to do today!