Creative

I got this skirt at a thrift store (during a bag sale: I wasn't allowed to leave until my bag was full, and there wasn't much there!), and it was a little too long. I knew I'd never be happy with it. So I trimmed the waistband off, and put in elastic (like they did here). Now I'm excited to wear it!

I just finished another skirt today. I'll post pictures once I've taken them. :)

Excited

I really enjoyed Hard Times. I am really excited that I read it during the busiest week and a half of the year, and only took a week and a half. Me, who took nearly a year to read another book by Dickens. I'm excited, because if it only took a week and a half for this, might it not take less time to read each of the others on my list?

Summer Reading

A couple of girls have posted a list of their intended summer reading on their blogs, and are encouraging others to do the same. Since I love books and lists, the idea highly appeals to me. I kind of doubt that I'll even get through half of them, and I know it's not as an aspiring list as some, but I think it's a list of all the books that I've been wanting to read for a long time, and haven't gotten up the nerve to read, or just have been putting off.

Fiction
*Emma, by Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
Crime and Punishment, by Feodor Dostoevsky
*Hard Times, by Charles Dickens
*David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Quo Vadis? by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan
Paradise Lost & Paradise Found, by John Milton
The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri
Prince of Foxes, by Samuel Shellabarger
The Master of Ballantrae, by Robert Louis Stevenson
The House of Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, by Victor Hugo
*The Giver, by Lois Lowry


Nonfiction
So Much More, Anna Sophia and Elizabeth Botkin
Surprised by Joy, by C.S. Lewis
Pagan Christianity, by Frank Viola and George Barna
Always Ready, by Greg Bahnsen

Life is Wonderful!

Wheeeeeeeeeeee!

I have found a song that I think is my favorite. Life is Wonderful by Jason Mraz. I don't think I ever really had a favorite song before, and I'm not sure if I do now. But I listened to it four times in a row as soon as my friend told me about it. Then I listened to it four times in a row yesterday. And I listened to it three times in a row today, and I want to go listen to it again.

I'm reading Oliver Twist. I've been reading Oliver Twist for about the past year. But now I really am. I'm into it. I'm loving it. Dickens is really fascinating if you remember you are reading Dickens. I love that the movie was different from the book. Usually I hate that, and usually I read the book first. But this time, I watched the movie before I got half way through, and I love that I don't know what is going to happen next, because they cut this part of the book out of Oliver!

We leave this weekend for a long trip to Tennessee to see relatives and South Carolina for the NCFCA National Tournament, which my brothers qualified for. I'm really excited. I'll also be gone for a while. When I come back, I'll be done reading Oliver Twist. When I come back, I'll have listened to "Life is Wonderful" 13, 487, 904 times.

I am newly in love with yellow.

Excepting the first two pictures, which were found on the internet and my windowsill, respectively, these pictures were taken from my Oliver Twist which I purchased at an antique shop a few years ago. Title pages aren't what they used to be. Is a four-leafed clover still lucky if you find it an hundred years after it was picked? Who is the Thorke Thimble Club? And what costs $3.00?

Life is wonderful! Wheeeeeeee!

Geography

Is a wonderful thing.

Dickens

Living Sunshine

Shabby Apple Giveaway!

Marseilles Dress SHABBY APPLE GUEST GIVEAWAY!!!!
At Grosgrain.

Amazing Giveaway at an Amazing Blog!

Here at ohhellofriend.

Climb Every Mountain

Something Old

The handkerchief of my Great-Great-Aunt Grace, who happens to have unwittingly lent me her name. She was a girl in the 1920s. I am delighted to have this little bit of her's for my hoped for "Something Old" when it comes to old, new, borrowed and blue.

Inspired