Tuesday morning - my first morning back from TN with the kids, found me outside with the boys. While they created more chalk masterpieces on the driveway, I decided that my geraniums needed some water. So I pull them down.

For those of you who have 'liked' Straight Stitches on facebook, then you know what is about to come. I apologize for the redundancy of this post, but figured that I should at least bring everyone up to speed. :)

As I am watering my geraniums, I notice that one of them as a lot of grass and crap in it. So I take a closer look.

Here's what I found.
Do you see it?

Let's take a closer look...

Yep, there are three little eggs in my hanging basket.

And crap! I've just watered them. See the water in the nest? Well I gently tip the basket this way and that to get all the water out without moving the eggs. And I did a durn good job of it too. :)

Then I can't remember which side of the porch the basket came from. Crap!

I go in the house and hollar up to Steve, who was still sleeping, and he grumpily tells me that it was down at the far side of the porch.

So I quickly put the basket back at the end of the porch and spend like the next day praying that the Momma bird comes back to take care of her babies, because I will feel like total crap if she doesn't.

So now Dev and I have a science project. Momma bird did come back. Dev startled her yesterday while coming back inside yesterday from playing, and he said she flew out of the basket. We had to go outside and take a look at her. I didn't think to bring the camera, but after doing some google searches.

We think our new neighbors are house finches, and when I played the bird song, yep, definitely what we have outside.

So now I have a new problem. How do I water my flowers now?

So over the next two weeks we're on baby bird watching duty. I know the nest and the eggs were not in the flowers last week, before I left on my trip, so it gives us a pretty good timeline and hopefully in about two weeks we'll have a trio of new baby birds. :)

See you guys later!
Heather

Did you know that Halloween is the 2nd most decorated holiday? Well it's really no surprise, at least not to me. Halloween is my sister's, Nicole, favorite holiday. When we all still lived at home we used to string up spider webs and gravestones. We had a lot of fun, but now that we all live on our own, well it's different.

My favorite part of Halloween has always been pumpkins, so its no wonder that when the artificial pumpkins came out I was all about that, because while I love jack-o-lanterns I do not really like the scooping out of the innards. For the last several years, I've been adding to our pumpkin collection. I usually buy them when they're on sale at Michael's or Jo-Ann's, and as of the beginning of this year I had 4 pumpkins, but one did not make it through the move. I thought I could fix it. It was a spiderweb pumpkin that had 'Happy Halloween' woven into the web. I loved it. Not scary, but definitely in the spirit of the season. Unfortunately Harrison found my pumpkin and accidentally fell into it. The web did not survive. :-(


Oh well, off to Michael's for another white pumpkin. They had the large ones for $10, which is pretty reasonable considering how expensive they can get, so I carved up a new Happy Halloween pumpkin, and proceeded to try and think up a better way of displaying my pumpkins than last year. Last year there were some very windy nights during October, and these pumpkins blew around everywhere. Annoying.

Ding! Enter my bright idea. So I've seen the pumpkin topiaries and what not around, but I didn't have an urn to place my pumpkins on. I also didn't want to spend more than $10 on this project, so on to the show!

What I used

{2} 8-inch clay pots
{1} 4-foot 7/8" dowel
{4} carved fake pumpkins
Gorilla Tape
Gorilla Glue
Spray paint
Halloween lights

What I did

First I had the hubs cut the dowels in half. Then I carved another hole into the top of the largest pumpkins. With the clay pot upside-down, put the dowel through the drain hole and make a mark right where the dowel extends from the hole. Stack the pumpkins on top.

 Look inside your top pumpkin and guesstimate how much space is between the top of the dowel and the pumpkin. Take off the pumpkins and using your guesstimate measure down from the first mark you made. Take your tape and wrap around the dowel at the 2nd mark you made. Make sure to wrap the tape around enough times so that the dowel is nice and snug within the drain hole.

I added the tape to this dowel after gluing it. Adding it beforehand is much easier.

Run a bead of gorilla glue around the dowel right below the ring of tape, and place the dowel inside the drain hole, let the glue dry. Repeat everything for the other clay pot. Paint both pots with spray paint. I was going to use black, but apparently I'm fresh out, so the ORB came out.

After the paint was dry, I brought the pots back inside, and stacked the pumpkins again on them. I applied a drop of Gorilla Glue to every spot that the pumpkins touched each other. I didn't glue the pumpkins to the pots because I wanted to be able to take them apart if need be, and  Gorilla Glue does not eat Styrofoam. Good to know for other projects! Wait for the glue to dry.


Take the pots, pumpkins and lights outside. I have my lights on a timer, but its just because I'm lazy. :) I have my lights blinking, so I found the spot on the string of lights where they start blinking differently, its about center. Then I wrapped the dowel in the lights making sure to keep the halves of the lights separate. I wrapped the bottom half of the dowel first and then moved to the top. I kept the top wrapped a little tighter than the bottom because the top pumpkins were not as tall as the bottom pumpkins. I also had to make sure that the lights didn't extend to far out, so I as I wrapped I tried to overlap the lights so they would hold themselves down. Gently guide the pumpkin down over the dowel and lights. Turn on and enjoy your stacked pumpkins!

I ended up replacing one of the strands of lights because the purple was just too dark. Here is Dev trying to figure out why they are not as bright as the other pumpkins. The lights were from Walmart and they did not blink or shine very well, but when I went back to Target they were completely out of purple lights, but had the multicolor Halloween lights, so that's what we got. They're so much brighter. :)  I also ended up hiding the cords with a galvanized watering can, but since I've got some more plans for it, I'm not showing that off quite yet.




Well I hope you guys enjoyed! Check out the banner up top to see who won the CSN Giveaway! Have a great day and enjoy it!!


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