After years of execution and planning, our back family room is finally a pleasant place to be. It's not 100% done, but we're getting there. Elie did almost all the work himself—he is no joke. He figures out the things I don't. And vice versa. Which brings me to the fluffy pile of muslin.

Every so often, my sewing is a contribution and not a distraction. I made simple muslin curtains for all the back room windows, and now it's not a fishbowl. I have made these for every window in this house. We used to wonder and argue and have grand ideas about curtains, but now we know what works. This time there wasn't even a discussion.

I'll show you the back room once it gets a little more, hmmm...furnished. We need some shelves. I love this number.

PS This weekend we made awesome grilled stuff-from-the-garden pizza. Thanks Melissa.

I think it will be a Summer of Abundance. At least, it's starting out that way. Last year we planted six little strawberry plants in the corner of the garden. They spent the summer looking somewhat sickly, and I think we got one berry from them. This year they came back in a ferocious kind of way. I couple weeks ago we got our first three berries, and I was so excited about the precious little berries that I took the photo above. Since then, the strawberry patch has produced about four quarts of berries. I am totally amazed.

The cherries are a similar story. Our house had a mature, fruit bearing cherry tree when we moved into it 6 years ago, but this is the first year we've had anything resembling a harvest. Either bugs, birds, or late frost have prevented us from enjoying these tasty fruits. Then this year—pow! There are hundreds of cherries and the birds don't seem to care. They are more interested on the service berries out front.

I've got a lot of picking and processing to do. :-) Not a bad thing for a totally beautiful holiday weekend. I'm planning on doing more documentation of the garden this summer. I've created a flickr photo set for it here, just in case you'd like to follow along.

My friend Sarah is the kind of person who throws herself a birthday tea party with all the requisite trimmings. Awesome. All she asked was that we bring a treat (that was not cake) on our prettiest dish and bring some flowers to adorn the table. It was an occasion so festive that I up and left my house on a Sunday afternoon—in fancy clothes even!

To Do: Think of more reasons to get fancy with the outfits and the table service. I don't want to do it for no reason at all—I'd rather have fake reasons!

This year's garden was prolific. It's had me up to my armpits in tomatoes, which is not a bad problem to have really. For the past couple weekends, my usual crafting hours have been taken up with processing tomatoes—either peeling and freezing them or turning them into sauce and then freezing them. They'll be good later just like they're good now. I'm pleased and truthfully a little surprised to say that most of our dinners from mid-August until now have featured something from the garden. It's really made the "what's for dinner?" question easier to handle. Because really, something from the garden plus bread/pasta/potatoes and cheese is pretty good eating.

We are just overflowing with sweetness over here. Today we celebrated Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, and ate many, many sweet things in hopes of a very sweet coming year. Also, they taste good. I made honey cake, and my mother-in-law's awesome kugel, and challah. These are the same things we've made every year since we moved here five years ago, so I guess it's officially a tradition. Poof—tradition! It's fun to be a tradition maker and a tradition embracer. I was thinking a lot about this today as I kneaded and stirred. I think that one of the reasons that Jewish holidays are so much fun for me to celebrate is that I'm not trying to reach back and recreate a glorious childhood memory. I find myself doing this with the Christian holidays that I celebrated growing up—I want my daughter's holiday experience to be as rich, and oddly, often to be just the same as mine was. I'm a lot more reasonable about the rest of her life being her own, so what is up with holidays? Maybe I'll try to make a point to cut this out. It's a lot of fun to celebrate a holiday without too may ideas about how it should be.

Real Fall is a good month and a half away, but yesterday the air was cool, so let's allow ourselves the Fall Preview.

Socks! I finished the pair. The toes are quite messed up, and I think they really would fit Eva better, but I love em.

Pickles! The pickles came out tasting like pickles. We made real canned pickles and refrigerator pickles. I like the refrigerator ones better, but I also added extra unnecessary salt the canned ones. You know, for good measure. It's a bit much

Pulling up carrots! Our garden carrots never really took off, possibly because we never thinned them and due to a gardening miscommunication, radishes were planted directly on top of the carrots. Elie pulled up what we had. It's not bad though—two quarts of baby carrots. Ridiculous.

"Harvesting" the corn! A squirrel planed squirrel corn in our yard and we let it grow. Isn't it creepy-looking?

Cat fest! Wearing a cat shirt and reading a cat book with a real cat on your lap.

We came home from vacation to an exploding garden. This year's garden being so much bigger than last's, it a little crazy, but we're tackling it with gusto. Now, I love a garden tomato—who doesn't? But aside from these juicy red beauties, my favorite things in the garden this year have been the beets and the potatoes. The potatoes were fun to dig and so creamy when boiled, and the beets are just so pretty in all their states, and they're delicious. We mostly eat our beets roasted with onions. Elie and I know that we've succeeded in making our child weird because before she left for a week with her grandparents, she begged us not to "eat all the beets and onions without her". Ha!

More than anything else, we have cucumbers. How many cucumbers can a plant produce? Sheesh! So tonight, right now even, and am taking my first stab at pickling. How exciting is that? Actually, I just heard a lid pop in, so I know I have at least one vacuum packed jar. I used The Government's Guide to Canning (actually just the very helpful website of the National Center for Home Food Preparation), because when you've never done something before and it could potentially give you botulism, you should check your facts. I will let you know how the pickles turn out.

Speaking of things taking place in the kitchen, can you catch a glimpse of what's under those beets? Elie is just about done with out new counter tops and sink. I can hardly wait.

Elie brought these both in at the same time the other morning. The pinky-tan egg is from our hen, and the other thing is a bizzaro heirloom radish from the garden. These radishes are peachy on the outside and green and white on the inside. They are tasty and have quite a bite!

I realize I've been absent here. We've been keeping busy with simmer visits from relatives and a little bit of travel. We've had elie's sister and her family visit all the way from Israel, and to show them that Illinois is a bit more than cornfields, we went hiking at starved rock. Fun, lots of fun, but not very crafty. I'll be back to that soon enough.

Today I have an oh-so-rare day at home by myself. Everyone else is off doing their thing, and I have the day off from work. I love these pre-holiday holidays because there is nothing in particular you are supposed to do. I plan on spending the day sewing and being totally irresponsible when it comes to anything else, such as upkeep of the house. So if you don't see some sewing pics up here in the next couple days, you will know that I suffered a terrible sewing FAIL.

Elie's hives are producing. We harvested three frames of honey last night. Yum, yum, but what a mess! It filled two pickle jars and three larger jam jars, so we are pretty such swimming in the stuff. Our honey extracting process is not very efficient, as we don't own a proper (expensive) extractor. Instead we squish it in a strainer, then strain it through panty hose (one of the best uses of panty hose IMO). Our kitchen floor is done and beautiful, and as we found out last night as our sticky harvest dripped all over, it is just the color of honey.

And good weather Sunday. Man, today we had the kind of weather you wish for every summer day—warm but not humid with a good cool breeze. Eva and I enjoyed the porch this morning, I with my coffee and knitting and she with her book. Then we did some good weeding of the vegetable garden, and it was such a pleasure in the clear air. Our first year with the big garden is going along pretty well. The rabbits are ravaging the peas, but everything else is putting up a good fight. Something interesting we noted: We planted several varieties of tomatoes—some heirloom and some newer hybrids. The bunnies took the new varieties to the ground, but they didn't touch the heirlooms. It seems the new ones had their natural defensive compounds (ahem, bad flavors) bred out of them. It's one thing to read about the benefits of heirlooms, but it's another, more interesting one to see them in action.

The farmers market was so much fun on Saturday. I don't go every week because it's not exactly in my neighborhood, but I do go at least once a month to pick up my meat order. I didn't buy any produce this week as we already had lots of greens from the CSA, but I did get some yummy sheep's milk cheese from Prairie Fruits (eaten up above with Finnish gooseberries from the CSA), and our favorite goat's milk soap from Queen Anne's Lace, and I got to try the highly recommended sausage and egg sandwich on a muffin. So good. But possibly best of all, I met another craft blogger. Belle Noelle was there selling her beautiful handmade clothing. I didn't know her before Saturday, but now I do. Her things are so prettily constructed with a sweet old-fashioned/modern mix. I have my eye on the Mia jacket in blue. How nice it was to meet someone, and to make that craft connection offline.