Give me butterflies!

Part of my spring planning is to create a butterfly oasis in our backyard!  I hope to get the flowers planted this weekend (along with the tomatoes and peppers!) -- zinnias, coneflowers, cosmos and marigolds mixed in with parsley, dill and fennel.

Today I picked up this adorable little birdbath that will serve as their water source.  I just love it!  I'm going to put small stones in the bottom of the bowl to give them something to light on.

I got this idea from Miss Rosalynn Carter.  She has a Butterfly Trail in Plains and I was just beside myself with the butterflies when we went down to sit in on President Carter's Sunday School class in September.  They were everywhere and they were SO beautiful!!

I'm so excited to see if they come!  If you build it...

Dreamin' of sunflowers...

I picked up this strand of silk sunflowers at Goodwill the other night and I draped them around the window in our mudroom.  I love how they look there!

I'm hoping to get some real sunflowers planted next weekend but in the meantime, these will do.

My pink dahlia bowl

I found a vintage 1946 Multi Products faux wooden bowl at Goodwill a couple of weeks ago for $2 and even though it was speckled with paint, I got it, thinking I could get the paint off of it and fix it.  Well, that proved to be harder than I thought and it ended up worse off than it was when I bought it.  :(

So I decided I would paint it and give it a new life.  I've never been crafty in my entire life.  Ami got all that talent in our family.  But since I painted the tiny picnic table we have and most recently, the birdbath, I built up some confidence to try to paint this bowl, too.

I wish I'd taken a before picture but since I didn't, I found this one on Etsy instead.  This is what the bowl looked like before somebody speckled it with red, green and yellow paint and dropped it off at the Goodwill on 96.  It really was a beautiful bowl!  And for the Multi Products company to produce a faux wooden (plastic) bowl in 1946 is just amazing to me.  They had no idea the evil that plastic would become and I didn't even realize that plastic was being used back then.

During my research, I found out that the flower in the middle is a dahlia and I chose to paint it pink, since that's my favorite color.  I painted the bowl white to start with and let it dry several days and this morning, I filled in the rest.  I think it turned out really pretty!

Patio pretties

(I took these pictures and posted this blog with my new iPhone just to see if it would work.  Guess it did!)

Here are a couple of flower pots I found when Larry and I went yard saling last weekend.  I love the bunny one!  I put a peppermint verbena in one and a succulent in the other.  

We got a beautiful yellow tiger lily and a mater plant for the patio, too!  We're ready for summer!  Good thing, too, 'cause we've got a heat wave going!

There but for fortune

A couple of weeks ago, in one of my Fill In The Blank Friday posts, I said if I had an extra $50, I would buy a used record player and an old Joan Baez album.

I might not even need $50 'cause I found an old Joan Baez album on eBay for 99 cents.  :)  It doesn't matter that I have NO WAY to play it.  I just loved the cover so much.

I think it's beautiful.  Like a piece of art.  I put it on my mantel so I can enjoy it every day.  The first song is one called "There But For Fortune".  These are the lyrics.  Quite powerful.  Now if I can just find a used record player...

Show me a prison, show me a jail
Show me a prisoner whose face has grown pale

And I'll show you a young man
With many reasons why
There but for fortune, go you or I

Show me an alley, show me a train
Show me a hobo who sleeps out in the rain

And I'll show you a young man
With many reasons why
There but for fortune, go you or I

Show me the whiskey stains on the floor
Show me a drunk as he stumbles out the door

And I'll show you a young man
With many reasons why
There but for fortune, go you or I

Show me a country where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins of buildings so tall

And I'll show you a young land
With many reasons why
There but for fortune, go you or I
You or I