The Ladies

When you come across a painting such as this one do you stop and think of what her life might have been like? A simple painting yet she is dressed so elegantly with a flower pinned on her shoulder.

Carefree, walking barefoot

I believe I would call this one....The Look....it definitely seems to have some hidden meaning to it

Oooh, la, la ..I definitely like the one on the left

Somewhere In Time, yes, that is what I thought when I first saw this print.  I absolutely love this one, it calls to me, it is what I call My Lady print.  I could place myself in this picture sitting there, wondering, dreaming, sigh.

All of the ladies are beautiful, and they were seen in Asheville.  The bottom one I purchased at a Goodwill store here locally where she has been waiting for her new home in the garden house where she belongs.

Lights, Camera and.......

Lights.....I love this one

Camera.....Ha! I caught myself in the mirror taking a photo of something else

And more lights.  This one that is hidden behind the bird feeder is made out of burlap

One of the simple carriage light design

Definitely different, might be a good one for outside, almost wind chime looking

For some strange reason I sort of like this one. I'm not sure what the parts came from, but if I remember correctly it had flowers and leaves on it.  Probably why I like it!

There were many more lamps made out of different items along with the usual ones.  I took these at the Screen Door in Asheville.  One weekend I'll have to go back and really look as I was just too busy taking photos! 
Side note -- I'm still having problems with blogger so I had to upload these directly from my computer and they have a different system to it too.  I'll have to get my act together on this end to get a few more posts up from the Asheville weekend. 

Blogger trouble

I don't know how many of you might be having problems with blogger, but it won't let me upload from Picassa or sometimes even leave comments! I will work on loading photos up from my computer soon, but if any of you know if this is something that I can fix please let me know.
Thanks!!
Ulrike

Asheville, N.C. Blogger Day

This past Friday hubby and I headed up to the North Carolina mountains to the city of Asheville.  It was about a three hour drive for us, and I was so excited to be going.  Asheville is a beautiful city, very diverse, lots of artists, beautiful scenery, and a lot of good food.  However, even though all of that sounds good we were going to a blogger get together meeting at the home of Penny http://www.lavenderhillstudio.blogspot.com/ and http://www.thecomfortsofhome.blogspot.com/.

So Saturday morning we left our bed & breakfast to head out to her home.  When we were all gathered together, and there were quite a few husbands who gathered in their group, Penny took us on a tour of their home that they have been working on for quite a while.  If you look at her blog you will see how it all took shape.  What a beautiful home they have too.

Even though the whole house is beautiful, I think all of us could agree we would like to have this bathroom!

The dining area waiting for us to have brunch

Penny and Diane posing for a photo

In the back are Melinda, Jennifer, Angie then Diane and myself

Here we are in Penny's studio, you really need to check out that blog, oh my goodness, beautiful work. There is Mary with camera in hand as so many of us were

Now check this out! Why didn't I think of this when I had a bonus room?  Look at all of the dishes

I think I positively drooled over the dishes, there were so many of them

Isn't this gorgeous?  Love the color

This one is too cute!

Getting us ready for our brunch

Check out this rooster that Penny decoupaged.  As she said with the scarf it does look like a French rooster!

Oh, the food!

Ok, girls, we have to get the photo of all of us together.  That was the husbands responsibility.
In the back row - Ulrike, Angie, Kim, Mary, Sherri,  Jeanne, Melinda
In the front row - Sam, Penny, Rhondi, Diane, Penny (our lovely hostess),  Jennifer, Donnie

Getting excited for the day

Ok, lets go get some brunch!

After the  food all of us ladies took off to savor Asheville antique shops while the husbands went to lunch, and waited for us to come back.  I will show you some of the places that we went later where we bloggers were busy snapping pictures.
It was so nice to meet all of the bloggers especially the ones that I have known for a while.  It was a wonderful time, and so great to meet all of you.  Penny, my hubby and I thank you and your husband for such a truly lovely day!

Grape color

While in the beautiful rolling hills of Virginia we visited a winery, and the colors were just beginning to change on the grape vines. I bet they are beautiful now!
So, here's wishing you a beautiful, colorful, and fun filled weekend!!!

Happy Days!!

If any of you have read my blog for a while you know that last year my daughter almost died from blood clots.  Last month she was finally able to get off of blood thinners, and last week she had to go back to the hematologist to have a series of blood work done to make sure that it was not caused by any type of auto immune disease.
Well, the doctor called yesterday and all of her tests came back NORMAL!!!!!!!  Oh Happy Days!!! The one thing that she was told was to stay permanently off of birth control pills.  I don't think that will be a problem.  The sad thing though is that we are hearing of more and more young women having the same thing happen to them, and some are not as fortunate as my daughter.  Let's hope that whatever these people are doing with "modern" medicine (don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good things from it) they make sure to change it so that other young women won't die or have to go through a horrible experience.
I am a happy mom!!!!

Monticello Gardens & Life On Mulberry Row

I took a lot of pictures so with some of them I decided to put into collages.  I'm sure the Monticello Gardens are even more beautiful in the summer, but here is a look at them in the fall. I think that you could almost call them the backbone flowers as they survived the heat of the summer and are still blooming!

In this collage you will also see Jefferson's greenhouse that was right next to his library.  He test grew seeds from all over the world.

The pink spiked celosia in the bottom right hand corner are the ones I bought.

The photo on the left hand corner is what I believed called red cypress vine.  I already have those thanks to a neighbor who brought back seeds from Florida.  The hummingbirds love them!  Each flower has 4-5 seeds in the pod so I will have quite a few of those seeds!  The Josephs coat is the bottom right hand photo, and I loved those so I bought some of those too.

Here is hubby sitting where a huge gigantic tree used to be

You can tell it must have been a monster of a tree!

Now this was interesting. The sign told us how back in those days they used to go fishing and would bring back quite a few fish.  Now if any of you like to fish like I do, you know that there are good fishing days, and bad ones!  So when they did catch the fish they would bring them back and put them into this pond until they were ready to be on the menu!

I have this vine although mine did not do quite as well.  I bought it at the farmers market earlier this year. I should say that I only bought one so mine does not look as thick as the ones shown.  I believe they call it a Hyacinth bean vine, but I'm not sure.

 

Look at the view! 

 

Now I think this is what is called an Italian squash which I had so many of last year!

 

Using what nature provides

 

Love the pole idea for the tomatoes

Some red okra, yum, love okra!

The vineyards along with fruit trees lower down

Not sure what the pots were used for

Corkscrew something! Can't remember the name

Tons of lavender

One of the gift shop areas alongside the garden

What a view!

This little gazebo was built to look upon the beautiful view and gardens

As you can see there are rows and rows of veggies

If you click on this photo you can read about Life on Mulberry Row.  Jefferson was not fond of slavery, but he did have slaves.  He inherited them when he received the land.  Of course Jefferson also hired people to teach his slaves various trades.  Jefferson was very good to all of his people, and later on gave a lot of them their freedom.

This man was skilled in making nails

This man made baskets

They had just cut down a young sapling that morning.  When we spoke with him (he was so informative of everything too) he had peeled the bark off, sliced it into layers, and the next time we came around he had already made a couple of baskets!!

Another good view of how far the gardens go

This man made the buckets

This man said he would have been the special tradesman back in those days.  He would teach a special few how to make casings for windows, and all the other different decorative work that was done at the plantation.

Just a few of the seeds that I purchased along with a postcard

Oh, how I would have loved to have seen the leaves with these colors!

One thing that was pointed out to us is that  the vegetables and fruits grown at Monticello are shared with the workers of Monticello.  I thought that was pretty nice.
All in all this was a very interesting trip with a lot of history.  I hope that you enjoyed it!