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The French Ticking Stripe Crochet Throw
I love watching Joanna Gaines and Erin Napier transform homes on HGTV, and I so wish that I had their talent. I am way more hit or miss in my decorating abilities, and I’ve had some major misses. I once picked out what I thought was a nice gray paint color for the exterior of…
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Free Rainbow Bobble Crochet Blanket Pattern
“Now I know we had no moneyBut I was rich as I could beIn my coat of many colorsMy momma made for me.”Dolly Parton A lot has been written about grit and how important it is for success. The psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth has given a TED Talk about how when working as math teacher…
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How to Crochet a Rope Basket
I’ll never forget my reaction after the winner was announced on the first season of the Great British Bake Off. I went bananas. Flaming bananas. Bananas Foster bananas. After watching the contestants labor over 30 different baking challenges for 10 episodes under intense time pressure and with exacting judges, what did the winner get? A…
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Homegrown National Park, A Hopeful Perspective
Be the change that you want to see in the world.-Arleen Lorrance I saw that quote on a bumper sticker about 34 years ago, and it has stuck with me ever since. I like it because its message implies that we have more power than we think on this planet with 8 billion people. Clearly…
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Free Rugby Striped Toddler Blanket Crochet Pattern
When my son was little, he was a Linus. He went everywhere with his favorite “Yucky Blankie.” Yucky started out as a nice white cotton blanket, but with love, ended up as a dingy, knotted ball of string. Once, I washed him (yes, him) and accidentally forgot to remove something red from the washer beforehand.…
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The Best Way to Eat Strawberries
Did I make you look with that clickbaity title? My apologies, but I think that I have a hack that will make the click worth it. Obviously, the best way to eat strawberries is when they are ripe and freshly picked from the garden, so the title of this article really should have been “The…
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The Arrow Stitch Crochet Blanket
The Footprints in the Sand poem always makes me cry. Someone left a copy in my hospital room after I gave birth to my first child, and with all of the happiness and hormones flowing, I sobbed at the poem’s reminder of those who have carried us through tough times and whom we often take…
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Rabbit Resistant Plants in My Garden
When my mother read Peter Rabbit to me as a child, I remember being terrified by Mr. McGregor. I can still remember the suspense of not knowing if Peter would evade Mr. McGregor’s menacing rake and escape from the garden. The thought of Mrs. McGregor putting little Peter, like his father, in a pie had…
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Making Crochet Pleats to Shape a Beach Tote
When I first learned about The Marshmallow Test, I wondered if I would have passed. If you aren’t familiar with it, the test involves giving a child the choice between eating a marshmallow now or having the self-control to wait for a short period of time thereby earning two marshmallows. My initial understanding was that…
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How to Pick an Avocado without Black Spots Inside
My blood work from my last doctor’s appointment showed that I had high triglycerides and higher than normal levels of the bad cholesterol, LDL, and my blood sugar levels put me in the pre-diabetic range. Not great, right? And since I still have a lot of gardening and crocheting that I want to do, I…
