Aprons Gone Wild

I'm on a roll....
Got the front porch deck scraped, sanded and painted over the weekend.
Entertained old friends we hadn't seen in 12 years. Cut out two aprons. Sewed up one.
Sold another from my etsy online shop. Cooked a pot roast. Celebrated my birthday.
And, took a nap. Whew.
Finished the porch painting and it looks great. Putting the paint on isn't the problem. It's the gut wrenching, agonizing, grunt work of digging those little pesky rocks out that get wedged in between the boards. (Check out "before" picture.) You see...I insisted on a driveway surface that reflected the age of our old house...somewhat. Blacktop just didn't cut it. We settled on something called "chip seal." That's a technique where they hide the black top underneath layers of loose stone...so all you see is the stone. It's the closest thing to having a good old fashioned dirt driveway, which is what we found awaiting us when we bought this house twenty years ago. I loved the way it looked with it's lush green grass median going down the middle. But...it was dusty and got lots of puddles when it rained. So we opted for the chip seal. It looks good. But there was unknown danger lurking. Those little stones get lodged in the bottom of sneakers, work boots and any other type of shoe sole that has spaces. They get picked up, delivered and perfectly planted on the porch and ultimately get pressed into the spaces between the boards. It's a nightmare. Scraping the peeling paint was a cinch compared to digging out those stones. You'd have thought they were glued in there. Yet...with cooperative weather and fast drying paint, I finished the job on schedule.
It looks so nice and clean and crisp now. Too bad it's the end of the porch sitting season. We call ourselves, "the porch sitters," because we spend so much time out there during the nice weather months.
Not that I'm finished with all my outdoor painting, I'm back to the sewing machine. Dragged
out all my fabric and cut out two really pretty aprons. They'll be ready for my etsy
shop in a day or two. Have to package up and ship an apron to Alaska tomorrow. It always
amazes me how people come from out of the blue and buy my aprons. It seems like the majority of our online sales are to people who live in places like Wyoming, Utah, and Wisconsin. This is my first Alaska sale. What fun!
Check out my etsy shop at www.apronsgonewild.etsy.com