Tag: Fall Fair

What I Did on Summer Vacation

new school scribbler

Here we are in the first week of school already. How did that happen? Where did summer go? When I decided to take a little holiday from blogging I did not expect the break to be so long. So, since school is in, it’s appropriate to write an assignment on what did on my summer vacation?

A trip “home” to see my brothers and their families shaped summer for me. I have not travelled since before COVID and I haven’t seen my family for at least five years. As my generation is ageing, I knew it was time for an in-person visit. The travelling part of our trip did not go well. Planes were late. Our rental car was a wreck. Medications were lost along the way. We arrived at an unknown house in the middle of the night and the house number was invisible. By that time we were so tired we opened the unlocked door and climbed into the empty bed we could see from the hall. We hoped we were in the right house, but if we weren’t we had a “Goldilocks” story to tell in the morning. 

After that, things got better. I saw all of my brothers and many of my nieces, nephews and “greats” — two of whom I had never met. Then there was the thirteen year old I’d last seen as a toddler. What a surprise. Intellectually, I know the children have been growing older. I send them notes on every birthday and have their years of birth recorded so I can keep track. But memory plays tricks. Even though the calendar says ten-year-old, my mental image is of a little one taking her first steps.

At the other end of the scale are my siblings. I’m taken aback when I see the aches and pains of old age in my younger siblings. Even though they have changed, I’m certain I’m the same as ever — until I look in the mirror that is.  Then I’m convinced it is one of those trick mirrors from the circus and the image I see is not really what I look like. Delusion, denial and disbelief!

 Despite the outward changes, our affection for each other remains undiminished. Our family jokes still resonate. I see my father in my brothers’ faces and they see Mom in mine. It is reassuring to know that our essential selves are still there. Since I’m working on a story with an older heroine, I’ve made notes of my family reunion and called it research.

The rest of my summer was spent gardening, harvesting, and preserving. I made stuff to take to the Fall Fair. I won some ribbons and got shut out in zinnias. I hear the phrase “next year . . .” echoing in my mind and wonder when I’ll get too old for all this. OTOH, so long as I keep gardening, I’ll always look forward with hope. That’s not a bad ambition. 

 

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My Summer Vacation

    In my part of the world, school starts this week. Even though I’m long past school age, at this time of year I still get the urge to purchase a clean note-book and a sharp pencil with a fresh eraser. Another back to school ritual is the “how I spent my summer vacation” essay. I think teachers used that topic in the first week to give themselves time to organize the classroom and memorize the students’ names. Anyway, here’s my essay.

       First, I took a break from writing this blog. I don’t cope well with hot weather and we had lots of hot days this summer. The weeds flourished, but the garden suffered from a cold, wet spring. Even plants that grew well failed to produce much fruit as the bees were missing at the vital time. For years we’ve been hearing about the loss of honey bees and how that effected the honey producers. This year, every gardener in my neighbourhood witnessed the effects of no bees first hand.  I’m preparing for next spring by hunting for bird feathers on the beach. If it is too cold for bees at blossom time, I’ll use the feather for a little human-assisted pollination. 

The lovely Jennie Crusie hosts a blog called Argh Ink One day a week she asks the question, “What made you happy this week?” I love reading the answers. Happiness, it seems, comes in many different forms. For me, happiness is good friends. So I’ve spent a good part of vacation time re-connecting with friends finally coming out of COVID protection. I know the virus is still out there and poised to whack the world again, but we’ve all been lonely these past few years so I’m hoping the endorphins released by laughter, along with all my vaccines and boosters, will help my immune system win the battle. Plus, I’m staying off cruise ships. I know a lot of healthy people who went on a cruise and came home with COVID.

    Over the Labour Day weekend, I had triple happiness as I was able to combine my garden, friendship, and nostalgia with a trip to our annual Fall Fair.  The photo at left shows my ribbon haul. I consider it a win if I get ribbons on at least 50% of my entries and enough prize money to cover my entry fees and my admission to the grounds. I declare success on all fronts this year.

   I reconnected with my farm roots as I walked among the horses and cows and chickens and sheep. (See photo at top.) Jeans and straw hats bring happy memories. Score one for nostalgia.

   Then,  I met my friend at the fair. We’ve been doing that for over twenty years. This  long friendship makes me happy. Our fair experience together is also a happy one. I give her produce from my garden, she makes jam and wins a prize. We’re in this together!

    Speaking of friends, my pen pal from the other side of the world is a “best seller” in Canada with the first book in her Guardians of the Crown series, By the Sword. So, I’m happy for her.

   So, the first day of school is over. I’ve written my essay. Tomorrow the real year begins.

  What did you do for your summer vacation? Did it make you happy? 

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Winner!

We interrupt this blog post to bring you the author’s annual brag fest. The fall fair was on the long weekend and I won some prizes. Not as many as some years, but still enough to encourage me to try again next year.

By the Friday before the fair, I’m worn out with fretting and primping and second guessing myself and I wonder why I bother. Then I win some ribbons and by Tuesday, I’m looking at the catalogue to see what else I might enter next year. 

I encouraged a friend to enter this year for the first time. She did and then spent two weeks telling herself not to get too worked up about it all. “It’s only a country fair.” “It doesn’t matter if the judges like my rose. I like it,” and other depressing sentiments of that sort. When she won a first prize she jumped up and down like a school girl, squealing, “I won, I won, I won.” 🙂  

I think writers are like that too. Give them a little encouragement and they jump into the next story convinced it will be the best ever, maybe even earn a movie contract.  So, hope, is a universal trait. That’s something writer’s can use in crafting their tales. Since I’m a naturally hopeful person, my stories are full of hope and it is usually fulfilled. Others take a more pessimistic view and they create characters without hope. This too can serve the story well. Someone with no hope of winning, of finding a better path, of being loved . . . sounds like a perfect villain.

Another universal trait is the desire to win. Whether it’s a blue ribbon at the fair, or a mega-lottery prize or a foot race or an election. We all want to win something. “How to” books on writing ask the author to define her character’s goals. If the word “goal” doesn’t spark your imagination, try asking what your character wants to win.  It means the same thing, but sometimes we respond to a different word more effectively. For myself, I wrestled with “conflict.” Then I heard someone use the word “struggle,” and I understood what story-conflict means.

And if you’re looking for a plot for your next romance, try the country fair. Lots of intrigue in the judging tent, conflict among the exhibitors, skullduggery in the garden. The possibilities are endless. And at the end, your heroine can come home with a fistful of blue ribbons.

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Twists and Knots in Yarn

On Valentine’s Day is seems appropriate to talk about expressions of love–handmade love. As witnessed by the response to last week’s blog, quilters love their craft .  This week, let’s hear from the knitters and crocheters.

I’m more adept with needles and yarn than I am with needle and thread.  As usual the impetus for my projects is a baby in the family.  This little blanket is not much to look at, although I tried to dress it up with a picot border, but it is made of a yarn that babies love.  It is very, very soft and the little ones always reach for it when they want to snuggle down.

This was a more ambitious project and one of my favourites. I loved the soft texture of the yarn and warm cream colour.  I did not love sewing it all together!  Each square is made up of four little squares. I had eighty short seams, then twenty long seams to do, then a border.  By the time I finished I was vowing never to tackle that project again.

 

For the next project I used a technique where each little square is attached to the next little square as you go along! There is a term for this but I can’t remember what it is.  I’ve tried Google, but they only help when you can tell them what you’re looking for. J  Anyone here remember the name of this technique?

And while I’m on the subject of baby projects, here are a couple of crocheted blankets I made to welcome newborns to the family. The pattern is all printed on a grid so I had to get a magnifying light to read it.  Very easy to lose count of the stitches.  The one with the pig I did twice as the first effort was lost in a house fire.  I thought, if I could replace at least one of the items destroyed it might help to ease the family’s pain.

                   

Not all my projects are for babies. Here is an afghan I started to use up the leftovers in my stash.  My friend persuaded me to put it in the fair, where it won a “special mention.”  The judges loved the colours but noticed that I’d run out of yarn on one stripe and had to substitute another.  Just like with quilting, I like to use up my left over bits.

Anyone else want to share? I’d love to see pictures of your favourite projects.

Do you like to read about household arts in your favourite books? I enjoy weaving a bit about my hobbies into my books.  In “The Man for Her,” the heroine is adept with needle and thread.

And please, if you know the name of that technique for knitting one square onto another, please tell me.

Happy Valentine’s to all my readers.

 

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My Vintage Fails

This is a photograph of a jar of water.  The only product I managed to seal in a vintage jar with a glass top, a rubber ring and a metal screw top.  I tried three times to put up a jar of preserves “like my grandmother did.”  That’s the language in the catalogue of our annual fall fair.   In honour of Canada’s 150th, the theme of the fair this year was “heritage seeds and breeds” with an emphasis on “vintage” everything.  When I saw the class for “vintage preserves” I thought it would be a snap.  I remembered the jars on the canning shelf at home, filled with strawberries and raspberries and peaches.  The fruit sucked tightly to the top while the bottom quarter of the jar showed only syrup.  That’s how you know the jar has sealed properly.  The vacuum pulls the fruit to the top.

I have a green gage plum tree — heritage breed, thought I.  The green plums in my vintage jar will look nice.  I’ll enter the category.  After a hunt through thrift stores for a vintage jar and a visit to the hardware store for new rubber rings, I set about to make my one jar of preserves.  Thirty minutes to sterilize the equipment, make the syrup and cold pack the jar. Then 20 minutes in the canner.  Don’t know why my mother made such a big deal out of such a simple operation.

Ahem!  The seal leaked.  My canner was full of plum syrup and the fruit, packed against the top of the jar when I took it out of the canner, slowly sank to the middle in a ragged mess.  So . . . not so easy after all.  Oh well, I’ve got more plums.  Try again.  This time I took extra care to be sure the top of the jar was free of any drops of syrup and wiped dry before I added the rubber ring, the glass top and the metal band.  Into the canner it went, but despite having the heat turned to high, it took forever to get the water back up to a rolling boil.  Result?  Leaked juice and floating fruit.  Funnily enough, when I tried to open the jar it was very well sealed and I had to pry a knife into the rubber ring to get it to open.  Sadly, the syrup no longer covered the fruit.  Not a prize winning effort.

Just to prove something to myself, I repeated the canning process with nothing but water in the jar.  It sealed, but I couldn’t put that in the fair.  I resorted to a different vintage jar, filled with marmalade and sealed with paraffin, another vintage method of finishing off preserves.  The judges thought it was “just lovely,” but didn’t warrant a ribbon.  Sigh!

Despite my multiple failures, the experiment was worth every minute.  As an author of Historical Romance, I’m always on the lookout for authentic information on life as it was lived in other times.  It’s one thing to go to a museum and look at an old-fashioned kitchen, to see jars of preserves on the shelf and to admire a hem-stitched pillowcase.  It’s quite another to participate in the creation or use of those items.  So, my failure was a great learning experience.   As Henry Ford said,  “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”

Well, I’ve learned quite a lot, including renewed admiration for my foremothers.  If I couldn’t get the water to boil and the seal to hold with all my modern conveniences, including an electric stove, imagine doing it on a wood-fired cook stove during an Ontario summer.  No wonder they got up at dawn, eager to get the work done before the hottest part of the day.  They used the sweltering afternoon hours to do “light” work like mending and knitting and singing to children.  I bow before their skill, toil, and indomitable spirits.  I also apologize for every time I took them and their work for granted.

Oh, one other thing.  I did win a “best in show” rosette for my bowl of roses.  It’s nice to have a few successes to temper the failures.

 

Remember to comment on this blog to have your name entered to win a copy of my e-book, “The Man Who Hated Christmas and other short stories.”  Winner announced Nov. 1, 2017.

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A Blue Ribbon

This past weekend was the annual Fall Fair where I live.  I entered some roses, even though the poor things had taken a beating from wind and rain the previous week.  I kept telling myself I was supporting the Fair by entering and not to expect any prizes.  Imagine my delight when I found this ribbon attached to one of my entries.

We all thrive on encouragement.  At the Fair, a blue ribbon encourages.  For writers a contract is the best encouragement of all,  but a kind word from an editor, a spike in sales for self-pubbed authors, a nice review — all give a writer a jolt of confidence and the courage to keep working, keep trying, keep getting better.   Even for those as yet unpublished, a comment from a fellow writer can make the difference between giving up and trying again.

On my desk I have a pretty jar filled with bits of pretty paper.  On those bits of paper I’ve written down kind words I’ve received over the years.  I read them when I feel discouraged.  Here’s a sample.  “I like your writing.  I like your descriptions.  It feels happy.”  That came from a chapter-mate in my local writers group.  Since I write romance and HEA is paramount, I’m thrilled that my writing “feels happy.”

“If you come to a path in your life and you look back and wonder whom did you touch, think of [name deleted].  I know that when [she} and I look back and think who touched us, we think of you.”  That came from the mother of a child I taught.

As well as exhibiting at the Fair, I volunteer.   The woman in charge of volunteers is a master at making us all feel useful and vital to the organization.  She sends a thank you card to each one and includes a personal note on the work we did.  With over a hundred volunteers, that’s no mean feat.

We could all do with more blue ribbons in our lives.  If you have the opportunity to hand one out, why not take it.  You just might make a difference in someone’s life.

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