Fountain

I put a fountain in the backyard. My friend had an awesome solar pump for her fountain so I decided to get one for mine. It keeps the fountain running only when the sun hits it. It doesn't store energy which is great because then its not running all night long. Its actually a solar pond pump if your looking for one, I got mine off of eBay. My husband didn't care for the terra cotta colour of the fountain when we bought it but it ended up matching the colour of the planters perfectly so it works really well in the yard.

Get Away

  We needed a break from all the work around the house so we decided to head to the mountains for the weekend. We went to Canmore and Banff, Alberta. The weather was so beautiful for this time of year, especially for the mountains. We live in such a beautiful part of the world.

This is the view from our hotel room.

Main street Banff

Main street Banff

Banff Springs Hotel

Banff Hot Springs.

Gibbons Garage Sale

A couple of weeks ago one of our neighbours told us about a small town nearby where the whole town puts on a huge garage sale once a year. I checked it out online and found out it was this weekend so we went and checked it out.

Needless to say it was huge. The streets were packed with people. Lots of cool things to see.

We only found a few things we wanted to buy but it was fun to walk around the whole town and check out all the stuff. We bought two more bikes. That's it no more bikes after this. We just missed getting my Mom a sweet cruiser it sold just before we walked up. Oh well. Also got a brad nailer and an old brownie style camera.

Planters

I wanted to do a lot of container gardening in my backyard so we decided to build a whole bunch of planters  to grow the veggies in. We got a lot of reclaimed wood from my husbands workplace to make them out of. Mostly crates and a few pallets. Crates are much easier to work with and take apart than pallets are.

It was a lot of work to disassemble them all.

We decided to invest in a planer since we plan on using a lot of reclaimed wood for many projects around the house.

It just gets the wood all to the same thickness and a nice smooth surface to start a project with.

Once the wood was planed it was all cut to size for the vertical planks for the planters.

Then they were all stained.

They were then all lined up and screwed to a frame from the inside so all the screws wouldn't be visible from the outside

We made the mistake with the first planter of not really thinking about how we were going to join all the sides together. On the other planters we inset the frame 3/4 inch so the panels would join up overlapping the frame so you couldn't see it. The first planter we made the length from the stairs to the outer edge of the deck. Its huge.

We just used full length boards for the back sides of the planters since no one would ever see it. Much easier and faster than all the short planks.

Here's the first planter completed and filled with dirt. We have the slight problem than our whole backyard is on a slight incline. We didn't account for that with the first planter so there was a lot of digging down into the dirt to level it out.

On the second planter that went up against the garage we took that into account and made the back panel shorter than the front panel and put a slant on the bottom of the side panels.

So far we've got four built and one left to go off the left end of the deck. Grass is coming today so it'll finally start looking nearly complete.

For this project the wood was all free. The only cost was the screws and the stain.

Black Pencil Skirt

I made myself a black pencil skirt. I used Simplicity 2154. I've used it before and it fits really well and is easy to make. I used a black suiting fabric.

First off I cut out all the pattern pieces. There's only three its pretty basic.

Next I sewed the many darts.

Then the back seam.

Then I hemmed the slit on the back of the skirt.

I then sewed the sides of the skirt together and the waistband onto the skirt.

Next the invisible zipper.

I hand sewed the waistband shut. I also hand sewed the skirt hem.

I'm really happy with how it turned out. It fits well and is comfortable to wear.

Fall

It's been a pretty gloomy weekend here but the sun is out today at least. We got another planter built and hope to get a couple more started today. Grass is coming at the end of the week so theres lots to be done. Our trees leaves have started to turn yellow already. Summer is too short.