Anyone who has followed this blog for a while knows I like to make things. The first decade or so, I seemed mostly making food and a garden and renovating the house in various ways, and this last year, since turning 50, I’ve been sewing. I wrote a few pieces on Tumblr about sewing this year. This one, about rethinking clothes in my 50s, and there’s a roundup of what I made this summer, and my foray into Japanese Pattern books in the spring. The dress in the photo above is Dress E from the Stylish Dress Book by Yoshiko Tsukiori. Google it or search for…

So here’s Hank — actually, this is Hank back in July when I first brought him home. Now he’s a great, big, galumphing, lovely dog. His mother was a nice little merle Australian Shepherd, and all I know about his dad is that he was “the border collie next door.” Hank has border collie markings, but we think there’s also something bigger in the mix — my guess is Great Pyrennes — he’s got feet like frying pans, a coat so thick he slept outside all summer as a puppy, and a big square head on him. He’s also the smartest…

  Well that was unexpectedly fast. My darling Owen went off to join Raymond yesterday — I wrote about it over here, on my Livingsmall Tumblr.

New year’s day was a sad one around here.  My sweet Raymond-dog, who has been ailing for a couple of months, shuffled off his mortal coil. Only inconsiderate thing he’s ever done, waiting for a holiday when I’d have to pay emergency vet fees, but there wasn’t any option. Poor bunny. He had a great life, and my only regret is that I couldn’t  spare him that last three or four hours. But our local vet was wonderful, and we should all get such a peaceful end. He was a good dog, and now he’s stowed on a shelf in…

I have a new room on my house. Almost a year ago, Himself came home one night and told me, over dinner, that he thought, maybe, we could repurpose these door/window combinations he was replacing on a job and make the greenhouse I’ve always wanted. We noodled around with designs for a while, and came up with this one, where each unit (a door flanked by two windows, each with curtains) forms a side. It’s a 10 x 10 room off the back of the house, and so far, it looks like we got the roof angle right. We didn’t…

Well, as anyone can probably tell by the six months between posts, I think the LivingSmall blog project has come to an end. You can follow me at Twitter, or send me a friend request on Facebook, which is where I’m doing most of my daily micro-posting. You can also keep an eye on my personal site where I’ll be doing some occasional book blogging, and writing about whatever else strikes my fancy. Mostly though, I’m working on a couple of book projects. It’s been far too long since Place Last Seen and while I don’t have anything I feel I can…

Sunday was Christmas tree day, so after breakfast we hiked up to the spot above the cabin where we usually cut a tree and Himself chose this one. “Isn’t it kind of big?” I asked. “No,” he said. “It should be about an eight footer.” I’d been kind of looking at scrawnier trees, feeling a little overwhelmed by the whole tree thing, but he was right, it was a really pretty shape. It was heavy, and Himself was valiant dragging it downhill to the car (20 minutes or so? I’m bad at estimating distances). I wish the pine cones hadn’t…

My remarkable grandmother died last week. She was almost 102 years old, and she was ready. She’d told us that she did not want ever to return to the hospital and so she died in her own bed, at about 2 am, with my Aunt Molly by her side. It’s what she wanted, and while we’ll all miss her, it was time. It was actually more than time. She was a mythic figure, our “Mommy Jane” — a name my eldest cousin Brad gave her. She raised Brad from infancy to about four. When he was learning to speak, he…

 This was last Saturday — nearly two feet of snow, followed by a couple of days of very cold weather — temps down into the single digits overnight. This weekend, it’s all melted off, and it’s a lovely day, sunny and nearly 50 degrees. Although I tucked the garden up for winter a few weeks ago, there were some greens and leeks still out, and I’d tucked up a few kale, komatsuna, and chard plants in a hoop house, hoping to eat my own greens as long as possible this year.  Here’s what I found under the plastic, and a…