making the weekend fun

I had fun being crafty this past weekend.  Folks brought some beautiful garden flowers to church on Sunday.  It was Karen's birthday, too, which gave me a lovely excuse to put them into a bouquet for her.

And, her birthday provided the push I needed to follow through with a long-planned craft adventure: reclaiming an old book by tearing its pages out and making it into a journal.
I'm still amused at the idea of a journal called "Think before you write."  ;)

I finally planted the front yard with summer crops, too, but I didn't take any pictures of that yet.  I'm growing baby corns, which has me pretty excited...

in print

Yesterday and today, I've been having a bit of fun with some little printmaking projects.

One was impromptu, cooked up to salvage a sheet that was oddly stained with navy blue residue in a bunch of places.  It's going to become a wrap-around skirt.

I'm feeling good about the double fortune of using a near-rotten yam to make some stained fabric useful.  I hope Marian doesn't mind about the state of the yam used on her skirt.

I also finally made the seat covers I planned last fall, for our backyard chairs.  (My procrastination was augmented by my need to wait for some nice, big, fresh fig leaves to use as stamps.)

Sometimes I wonder why I wait until Holy Week, when I have plenty of extra and special church projects to be working on, to finally get around to craft projects.  (It's nothing new, but I still wonder.)

open trails and hidden treasure

This past week, Matt has been on spring break, so we decided to take a bit of  adventure.  Having begun plans for an epic summer backpacking adventure on the John Muir Trail, we thought it would be good to get a little practice 'packing in.  Mostly for my benefit.

So, within the space of a week, I hiked a bit on both the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail.  Pretty wild.  (Some bits wilder than others.)  And, I got different blisters on each.

I also got to try something new that had been intriguing me: geocaching.  Using the GPS coordinates, we found 3 hidden caches on our  hike.  (We tried a fourth, but failed; geocaching near turkey hunters makes me nervous.)  Here are two pics of our happy finds.

Then, yesterday, when one of Matt's friends came to town, we decided to try a bit of geocaching adventure in La Jolla.  I'm thinking this is a really splendid way to spend time outdoors, explore new areas, and learn some stuff about them, too.  Plus, we learned that there's a cave in La Jolla accessible by a long tunnel dug through the rock, with an entrance in a little antique store.  Who knew?!?

I'm looking forward to trying some of the caches that come with riddles.  

How did I not realize there were magical treasure hunts all over the place?!?