Nature's Bounty

We forage as much food as we can. Fortunately, we live in an area that pretty much abounds with natural food from june through October. Blueberries grow well here, so we always load up at a local U-Pick that is super cheap. We fill up several freezer bags and keep them frozen all year, using them in smoothies, muffins, pancakes, etc. 

Over the summer, we kept our eyes on a wild pear tree growing on the edge of a cow pasture near our home. When the time was right, we planned to ask the farm owner if it would be alright for us to pick the pears. The time to pick came suddenly, and the asking was opportune because the farmer was right out there on his tractor. So, we tromped up to him and asked. He was the most agreeable man I've ever met. He had his two little dogs riding behind him on the tractor.

He seemed pleased as punch that we were interested in them and gave us quick permission to pick to our pleasure, warning us that his electric fence went right by that tree. Being shocked by an electric fence is certainly not a pleasant experience, but it's not bad (in fact, it's a little interesting feeling) so we weren't worried. It was a double-fence, so crossing it proved to be difficult, but we managed it.
There were lots of pears on the ground, but there were still plenty on the tree, so Brian got up there and shook several to the ground. We took them home and they fairly filled up our back porch.

They're not that ripe, so they were difficult to cut, but we immediately set out to can them. I love canned pears. They were highly sought-after growing up, and although we made tons of them, we always ran out quickly. In fact, if I remember my Mom's story right, my brother used to hide jars of pears so that when the main supply ran out, he'd still have his own supply to draw from. They're yummy. We can them in a very light syrup: 1 1/2 C sugar and 3 T lemon juice to a gallon of water. It ends up just perfect. I don't have a water bath canner, so I hot-pack my fruit.
I peel, core, and half my pears, and boil them in the above syrup for 25 minutes. While they're boiling, I prepare my jars by washing them thoroughly. When the 25 minutes is up, I put a good ratio of pears to syrup in the jar, clean the rims, put on the lids, and screw on the rings tightly. Then it's a waiting game, and by morning all of the jars are sealed. It's as easy as that! Seriously, the hardest part is peeling the things. Pears are gritty and hard in the center, so you have to make sure you get all of that out. Anyway, it's a satisfying feeling to know that you'll be eating from that pear tree all winter, and I like canned pears almost more than fresh ones too.

More Decoration Ideas

These may not work for you, but we use pottery and books to decorate.

 My mom is a potter, and her cast-offs are just as good as the real thing to me, so we always collect her throw-aways. Most of these are just that, and I can barely tell anything is wrong with them.
I realize that's convenient to have a mother as a potter, but you can get pottery elsewhere. Some of these pieces came from thrift stores. Places like the Salvation Army, GoodWill, Deseret Industries, Savers, Thrifty Shopper, etc, have all contributed to our pottery collection. They're beautiful and affordable, so why not? You can also get cheap pottery at some small potter shops. In my mom's home town, for example, there is a potter who sells his castoffs (which are all incredibly good and beautiful) for $5 a piece. All potters have throw-aways that they can't sell for the full price, so they may be willing to sell them. We actually use these pieces to eat on. Might as well have functional decorations, especially in a small apartment.

Books might seems like a weird way to decorate, but when you absolutely love books, it's not. They are a feast to the eyes, and whenever we have visitors, they always end up scanning our bookshelves. We get our books mostly from a sale in our area called "Friends of the Library". This sale lasts 3 weekends twice per year. The price diminishes with each weekend of the sale, ending up with 10 cent day, which is veritably treated as a holiday in our household. I even take time off to go to this. You can get everything there, and we always end up purchasing around 200 books at each sale. You can find cheap books though, at thrift stores and yard sales. We've landed some real finds at yard sales when a family is getting rid of an old collection. And again, it's functional decorating! We love books, so having so many right in our home is a pleasure.

Pretty Storage Idea

This picture was on my previous post, and I forgot to talk about it. Using old-fashioned wire-bail jars for dry storage in your home is an attractive way to decorate with spices, flour, popcorn, barley, etc. We got most of these jars from my grandmother, but we've found tons at yard sales for next to nothing. They're not as reliable as regular jars for canning, so I don't recommend that, but for dry storage, they are just beautiful. We use them as vases as well, which always looks great.

Red

I don't wear red...it's a little too loud for me, but I must admit that red really is a great statement in decoration. Brian says that whenever a photographer takes a picture of something with red in it, he has to make the red the center of the picture, because your eye is naturally drawn to it. We've incorporated some red into our home decoration, and I love it:

This is just two boards that Brian found at the local dollar store, put together by two small pieces of scrap lumber, painted red, and adorned with hooks from the dollar store.

This is just an old chip-board shelf that we've had forever that was an ugly shade of white. We painted it red, and now it's beautiful!

Picture Shelves

Brian came home with this idea one day. I was super skeptical at first (as usual). Shelves on the wall with pictures? But as usual, he was right. I just don't have the eye he has.

It works like this: Brian got some wood from ReUse (see "...Or make your own furniture" for what this is) to make these. They are just simple 2 x 4 boards cut lengthwise to a couple of inches. Then he put a small piece of board in the front section of the 2x4 to keep the pictures form sliding off. He drilled holes almost all of the way through the boards front to back, then screwed them into the wall through these holes. The holes were unsightly, so he covered them with another thin piece of wood. You can see all of the components in the picture to the right. I love these shelves. We had a huge wall that needed to be filled up with something, and every other previous attempt didn't turn out so well. Brian is a hobby-photographer as well, so it's an opportunity for us to display his pictures. He takes pictures of rural nature (barns, fields, fences, and some waterfalls), so his pictures blend into our home

Nix the electronics.

We don't have TV. I think that having dish or cable inevitably ends up creating a lot of wasted time, so we just don't have it. We do, however, have a TV and DVD player for movies. I like movies, and somehow the intentional decision to sit down and watch a movie prevents me from wasting time like I would with TV.
I hate to go to people's homes and find that their sitting room is designed around a monstrosity of an entertainment center and TV.  TV is just not the center of my life, so I don't want my living room designed around it. They have those fantastic close-able entertainment centers like my Mom has, but those are just slightly over our budget. We puzzled ourselves for a while over the trick of having a TV without making it the center of our home, and this is what we came up with:

  

It's all there: a TV, DVD Player, Speakers, and Subwoofer. Here they are unveiled:

The TV in this picture is actually a bit of an embarrassment to me. Brian found it on Craigslist for $150 complete with speakers and a nice carrying case. It's a good deal for a flat-screen, but I was super embarrassed to have such a huge TV. The fact that it's so hide-able though, is worth it, and this design would never have worked without it. The tapestry (just a piece of batiqued material from JoAnn Fabrics that I sewed loops on to hang. The pole holding the tapestry up is a stick that Brian whittled down to smoothness (same with the wood hooks for the pole). The Tapestry comes down to the top of the dresser, concealing the speakers and the cords. 

The DVD player is in the top drawer of the chest of drawers. We drilled a hole in the back of the dresser through which the cords go from DVD player to TV. The subwoofer is under the red material to the left of the dresser. We just draped a piece of gingham from JoAnn Fabrics and put that piece of pottery on top of it. It works out perfectly, giving us the benefit of watching movies while ensuring that TV is not the center of our world.

More on Barnwood

Brian is getting creative with Barn Wood, and is now making my new favorite thing: Barnwood Frames. I don't have tons of pics, but these hang in my kitchen:

We got those pictures sometime ago at Ikea. I just love the middle one. I haven't found a frame that works for them so well, or atleast that I could afford. Then I showed up at home one day and these were waiting for me! I just love them.

...Or just make your own furniture!

We moved things around in our living room, and ended up with a wall that needed some covering. Brian got the idea in his head to make a little coffee table-type-thing, and made this. I was a little skeptical at first, but I love it now.

There is a store in our town called ReUse. It is a thrift store of sorts, full of building materials. The people who own it go around and tear down old homes and barns and sell all of the usable materials. It's pretty cool. Brian got this barn wood for 25 cents a linear foot at ReUse. He sanded it down until it was nice a smooth, and put it together. The wood is super beat up (which we like), and the old nail holes add additional charm. There's a piece of plywood below these top boards, which are covered on the sides by additional barn wood (shown below). You can't even tell it's there, although it's what's holding the table together. It's a beautiful piece of furniture. We'll be moving from this area someday fairly soon, so I'm planning to go around and tear down those barns myself if it means that we'll be able to make beautiful pieces like this!

Refinish Old Furniture

I so wish that I had a before picture of this chest of drawers. My family had this thing growing up, and it eventually ended up in my Mom's barn gathering dust. It was just hideous. It was a horrible yellow, and you would never have guessed it could turn out so beautiful. Brian saw it one day and had a hankering to refinish it, so we took it. He had no idea what he was getting himself into. Underneath that unsightly mustardy-yellow were several layers of both paint and lacquer. He spent day after day putting toxic substances on layer after layer, and after several hours of hard work, he got the dresser down to the original wood. He then simply touched it up with some polyurethane, and voila! A beautiful, country dresser. It's quite old, turns out, and the nails used to put it together were square, which we love. It is now the most prominent piece of furniture in our house, and we just love it.

Prints & Mats

Unbeknownst to most people who know him, Brian has a secret love for art. Every time we go to a decent-sized city, he inevitably seeks out the free museums, and we spend more time there than I thought possible. Whenever we visit the Met, for example, my feet ache so much by the end that I am just dying to sit down. I don't dislike art, don't get me wrong, not at all. I love art, but just not with the fervor that Brian does. His favorite form of art: prints. They're pretty amazing. These fantastic artists carve pictures into wood, then put ink on the wood and 'print' them onto paper. They are incredibly detailed, and the most amazing part is that the artist has to carve a negative of the picture they want to turn out on the paper. It is fascinating, really.
Anyway, we especially like prints that depict farm life, but we can't afford to get a nice copy of the print. So, Brian gets an electronic copy of the print and just prints it out on beige paper. It looks pretty good... so much so that you can't really tell a difference between the purchased print and the homemade ones in the picture above.

Mats and frames are expensive. We buy our frames at dollar stores or thrift stores and polish them up with black spray paint. Seriously a hideous frame can become beautiful with a little paint!
To solve the mat problem, we just use poster board to mat our pictures. In the case of the prints, we make a nice, torn edge on the picture, and place it over some plain black poster board. It looks great! I don't notice that the picture is on top of the mat, and it gives it the same effect. You could do this with other colors of poster board, but we stick with black. Other examples of pictures matted in this way:

Collages

This is the collage we made for my office. I had my office painted green (far less "clinical" than other offices, as one of my students pointed out). The color did make a huge difference, but my office still wasn't the haven that I wanted it to be. I realized that some things were unavoidable...such as the desk, computer, and filing cabinet, but the rest I could mess with. I have a nice, comfy chair in there that I take a nap in during lunch almost daily, which helps a lot. I decided I wanted to decorate my office like my home. In the past, I've decorated it with cast-offs, but I spend a lot of time at my office (WAY more than I would ever choose to), so it should feel comfortable. I hung up some prints (more coming about these in a later post!), but I had a huge wall that needed something to cover up its blankness. So, we made this collage. It's covered with pictures, words, and ideas all associated with a 'quaint' lifestyle, embodying the joy of all 4 seasons. I just love it. It hangs proudly on my wall, and I find myself staring at it dreamily when I should probably be engaged in my work.

I don't have any pictures of additional collages readily available at the moment, but this is actually a pretty prominent form of decoration in our home. We got a whole bunch of old magazines (either free or for 10 cents a piece), including Country Living and Martha Stewart Living. We are slowly working our way through the plethora of magazines, building up a huge catalog of pictures for collages. We sometimes cut edges, or my favorite thing to do is to tear them (licking the edges first makes for a great edge). Put the pictures together on the board/paper, then finish it with little pictures (to cover up holes), and words or phrases, and you're all set! I love collages. They are a feast for the eyes every time you see them.

Great Find!

 

This is our living room, or half of it. We enjoy a country style in our home (no surprise there), and even though it's a basement apartment, we have made it into a nice, cozy home. We love it there. It's only half-basement, because only one corner of the apartment is under ground. The rest is exposed. This is awesome, because we enjoy the comfort of a basement in that it never goes below 50 in the winter and stays nice and cool in the summer, but we also have a full back door and plenty of light. It's great. Brian is the mastermind behind our apartment's decoration and design. I can tell what goes together, but I can't position things in a room like he can. We're cheap (or "Thrifty", since cheap apparently denotes something negative), so we do most of the work ourselves. 

Brian and I are "Freegans"... I don't really know exactly what that means, but our friends consistently label us that way. Apparently there's a movement going on where people won't pay for any of their food. They dumpster dive, eat un-eaten food at restaurants, forage, and get food in any way besides pay for it. Brian was curious about it, so he found a "freegan test" online and took it, and ... drum roll please ... yep! We are officially freegans. Now, although I think free food is of course a great idea, I'm not willing to go as far as some people do. But we do get as much free food as we can, and our "freeganness" extends past food. 

We are always on the lookout for free anything. I think the biggest secret to finding good stuff free is to be willing to wait for it. Take our couch, for example. We had a little loveseat that we found at a thrift store that suited our situation sufficiently, but I hated it. It wasn't comfortable (Brian would definitely NOT agree with that statement), and it was ugly (Brian would agree with that statement). It was a terrible blue corduroy with other colors dispersed all over it. I tried to improve it by sewing a brown sheet over it, but that almost made it worse. We stuck with the sheet, however, because the blue didn't match a thing in the room. I could have gone to a lot of work to make a decent cover for it, but I didn't have any intention of keeping the thing very long, so I saw no reason to go to so much work. 

So we had that thing for a long while, until one beautiful day when we found the couch in the picture. I had just gotten off the bus at home, and Brian and I ran back to something I had seen only a few houses down the road. I had seen a fake leather couch with a huge, cozy chair to match. There was a sign on it, which I supposed would list a price, but to my amazement, the sign said "FREE"... music to my ears.  The chair was in perfect condition. We loaded it on top of our Subaru and Brian drove it home while I sat on the couch to keep our claim on it.

While I was waiting, I inspected the couch. It was great from the front, but the back was all torn out and ripped up. I ended up patching that up easily by tearing off some pieces from the back, patching the parts visible from the front and sides, and then I sewed a brown sheet (Yep, the same one that was on the loveseat) over the back so that it wasn't exposed. I wish I had some before and after photos. It looks great! We have it up against the wall, so you really can't tell anything was ever wrong with it. We love it!

Summer Recap

Before I move on to our latest projects, I thought I would give a quick recap of our summer. It was a wonderful summer. The weather was perfect, with some cool nights, but lots of warm, swim-worthy days. We spent a lot of time outside, mostly working. Brian and I probably spend more time hiking and such in the winter, because in the Summer we spend most of our outside time working, and we like it. I am actually disappointed when the weekend arrives and I don't have a to-do list in the garden. I am most happy when I am working outside.

Anyway, the grow box worked beautifully. The plants flourished in there, and were quite sad when we removed them to our stony garden. We added a grow box on the right side of the covered grow box. We planted spices in (shown), which did pretty well even though it was a late year.

We made a garden in our yard. You see that weed patch in the right of the first picture? Our landlords let us tear out those weeds and plant a little garden. It's about 16'x 16'. The ground is super rocky, and we didn't put much money into it since we probably won't plant in it again, but considering, it has been a good garden.

Something attacked our tomatoes one night, so we made our little scarecrow. He's wearing a tattered pear of overalls that our last scarecrow wore, an old long-sleeved tshirt of Brian's, two left-handed work gloves, and a milk jug for a head. The baseball cap really gives it a life-like look, and our dog starts growling whenever she sees it. I was skeptical about hanging pie tins from its arms, but it actually helped, although the flashes of sunshine on the tins always catches my eye from the other side of the yard. We got a decent crop of zucchinis and cucumbers. Our tomatoes were super late, but they are coming on nicely now. There is just nothing like the taste of a garden tomato. Yum.

Change is Good

As you may have noticed, I've changed the name of this blog. I've been thinking about making changes to this blog for some time. I've never wanted a blog that is just a listing of my thoughts, or a journal...I want a blog about something that I do. I live a simple life, with not many exciting excursions or adventures to tell about, so I end up just expressing my thoughts. At first I was going to cancel this blog altogether because I wasn't happy with the result of my random ramblings, but I've decided that I might just have something to say. I keep life simple by doing projects. Brian and I are pretty good at scratching a few pennies together to make a living, doing things ourselves or learning to do without, so that is what this blog will be about from here out. I plan to post about tea-making, furniture making/remodeling, the projects that accompany farm life, putting away food, etc...and I'm planning to make a wool rag rug this summer, so I'll be posting about that! So hopefully someone besides myself will find this useful.

Now, the name...We've been struggling with that a little. Brian and I have decided that Quaint is probably the best word to describe us. Quaint has 2 definitions: strange, odd; and old-fashioned, nostalgic...well, we are just that! Synonyms to Quaint: original, peculiar, whimsical,  antique, charming, enchanting, picturesque...all words that would express my feelings about our lifestyle. I love living life the way we do, figuring out how to get by, or learning to do it yourself. It's something I've always loved. So here goes: a blog about living simple and quaint.