Oregon Is Officially A Northern State

 Oregon is officially a Northern State. In fact, we're practically as good as Alaska at this point. We have seen the Northern Lights!

Boasting and the fact that we are already a north(west)ern state aside, I feel so blessed to have been able to see this once in my life, especially living in an area of the US that doesn't often get to see this special treat.

It was spectacular, humbling, awesome, gorgeous, and a bit overwhelming when it first started. 

We knew there was a chance of viewing on Friday night from 10PM to 2 AM. Being an adventurous, night-owlish family, we hopped in the car at 10 and headed north of our mountain for our "unobstructed view to the north." It turns out that we could have stayed home and seen it just as well, but since we had a 5,000 ft. mountain behind us and no prophets in the family, we drove north to find a side road in the sagebrush flats to watch this great piece of space weather. We found our gravel road off of the highway (as did a number of other people) and we began to see the beginning of the Lights. The sky had a hazy, white "space-bow" arching over the sky. You know, if I hadn't been expecting the Northern Lights I might not have noticed it as anything out of the ordinary. It began to look a little green, as I assured myself over and over again trying to see it. Then, we discovered that if we looked away from the lights, we could see streaks in the sky out of the corners of our eyes. That was exciting.

 

The lights from the highway nearby, and the noise, were bothering our celestial experience, so we packed into the car and drove to a more remote road to see if we could see better. 

A few minutes later, it was getting very late, and the sky, while interesting, was hardly colorful at all and not your iconic Northern Lights experience. Oh well, it was what we should have expected - this was Oregon after all and we were south of the best area for viewing the Aurora Borealis. We headed home, thinking we had seen a cool thing. 

Part way home, I looked out the back window and broke out into exclamations. The sky was changing  -and turning green!!!

Fortunately we were coming up on another gravel road, which we turned onto pronto and bailed out of the car. There, right over that mountain supposedly blocking our view, was 

the most remarkable thing 

I have ever, 

ever seen

 in the night sky.

The striation was becoming more intense, and a gorgeous, blooming pink had formed above an amazing neon green. 
It was overwhelming - so vast and bright and nothing like anything that had ever took over our sky before. 

We hurried home and watched the show behind our own hill, where it showed up quite well.

We were some of the few people in this viewing who got to see colors with our naked eye  - and they were vivid! The ground was colored in pink light, and when we did finally head inside, pinkish aurora light was filtering in our windows and giving us light to walk by. 

The total eclipse has been eclipsed in our family by this amazing phenomenon!

to God be the glory,

Miss Humphrey

Free-Hand Nightgown

 Hello Readers,

I made a nightgown recently that I thought I'd share with you. It is a very simply, but comfy design that is easily made without a storebought pattern. 

We were gifted with some Lanz flannel years ago, and I finally got around to doing something with it.

This is the basic idea of the layout I did on my fabric. I didn't measure how many yards of fabric I used (!) but I'm guessing it was 2 yards. I had to really squeeze the neckline facing out of some scraps, and it is not a nice, finished facing by any means, so I would suggest using another piece of fabric for facings if you're dealing with only 2 yards of fabric. I held the fabric up to myself to get the neckline and shoulder in the right places for the yoke and cut it out. If you'd like more in-depth instructions on this, here's a blog post that has a yoke tutorial in it.

{unfolded skirt}

Then I loosely stitched two rows of gathering across the top of skirt. On the front skirt, I clustered gathers on each side as shown below:

On the back skirt, I did roughly even gathers all the way across. I attached the skirts to the yolk front and back. 

I sewed up the side seams of my skirts to the corners. I don't remember the exact order I sewed the rest of the nightgown in, but I can tell you the steps :) 

I hemmed the skirt and set the sleeves in, and hemmed them as well. If you'd like to see how to set-in a sleeve you can find a tutorial in this post. I made a pleat in the top of each sleeve because I had extra material.

I put the neckline facing in and tried the gown on, only to realize...

The back of the skirt looked rather ridiculous. It just had way too much yardage in it! The front of the skirt had managed pretty well, but not the other side. So I took in two vertical tucks on either side of the back skirt, just below the yoke. They were ~6-7" long and were effective in gathering up some yardage. However, the look was not professional and next time, I would probably just cut a narrower skirt for the back! 

Well, you learn something new every time. I really like this nightgown and it whipped together in one evening. If you try something of the sort let me know!

to God be the glory,

                                                                   Miss Humphrey

Prairie Tea pt 2: The Report

 Hello all,

Well, we did it. the 2nd annual Scripture Tea for the ladies at my congregation has happened!

The first time we did this tea, I was so overwhelmed/exhausted afterwards that I remember driving home afterwards and not being sure how it even went! But this time, I can positively say that it went well. The second time you do something it will always be better than the first, right?

Except that we were still 1/2 hour late getting the food out, even with help, just like '23. Oh well, no body cared, at least not enough to come into the kitchen and demand why we were taking so long :)

Two of my obliging brothers were kind enough to do some behind-the-scenes kitchen work for my mother and I, and we would have been sooo late if we hadn't had help!

The tea happened on Saturday, April 20th, but preparations happened weeks ahead of time. I chose a theme, collected recipes, and stashed one of our freezers with tea party food. What did it look like? Carbs from top to bottom. Eek!

My mom and I collected decor, which you can see here.

That Wednesday, we went to Bible class early and sorted out matching sets of forks and knives from the church's vault of donated silverware. Last time, we made the mistake of doing this the morning of the tea. Never again!

On Friday, we began the task of decorating. This took longer than it should have (always do this THURSDAY, Miss Humphrey. Don't kid yourself.) I also made the chicken salad up in the church kitchen and stowed it in the fridge overnight. I really like that we brought food to the church fridge/freezer throughout the week and didn't leave all the hauling for Saturday. 

The Party Favor Table

About Saturday...

Saturday began a bit late, and it was in the 10 o'clock hour when my mom and I pulled out of the driveway to purchase our fresh flowers for the tables. 

We got a few minutes down the road and realized that I forgot to load a mixer of any sort into our van. This was important because what are scones without whipped cream at a fancy tea party?

So we turned around and lumbered up the hill again. We got the hand mixer and something else we thought of, and then started once more for town, only to make it as far as a sharp turn at the bottom of the neighborhood this time. Our faithful, 18 year old van was making a very peculiar chafing sound when we took that curve. We live 25 miles from the town where the tea was being held, and, not knowing what sort of car trouble we were experiencing, two women like us were not going to risk landing ourselves in a cattle field in the middle of nowhere particular with a dysfunctional vehicle. Especially on the day of an all important tea party that we must get to!

So we turned around and went home, moved everything from the van to our other car, and started out for the LAST TIME, late but still optimistic.

We bought bedding plants at Bi-Mart and my mom trimmed the blooms she wanted for bouquets. Now the plants sit happily on our porch, furnishing us with a beautiful flower garden. If we had bought florist flowers, they would likely be on their way out with no hope of revival. Getting bedding plants served our purpose for the tea and will give us joy during the late spring as well!

From there everything went relatively smoothly. Picking out flowers on that warm morning soothed our yet-to-be-breakfasted minds and made me feel better. We then went to the church building and dived into panic mode, chomping on leftover pizza from the night before for our breakfast-turned brunch while we worked and making tea to keep us going until we could drink tea with everyone else. Are we tea addicts? Oh, not a chance! We can stop anytime.

The rest of the morning was not terribly interesting. We tried to keep the panic factor down to some extent while whipping cream, filling tarts, making sandwiches and slicing things. By the time we were heating things up and early birds were coming, there was no use in keeping the panic down. It was survival mode.

By 3, I think we had the first batch of food out. I say first batch because, while I made enough for 40 servings of at least most of my food selections, I figured that we just needed to get ~20 servings out in the tea party room, because there shouldn't be more than that many guests, and I could whip up the rest of the sandwiches, etc. while they ate their first servings. 

As it turns out, only 15 of the 20+ guests who signed up showed up, which was not a problem. To the contrary, I made, as usual, Way Too Much Food, and didn't have to spend the tea party making more sandwiches in the kitchen, which was nice. My mother did a wonderful job on tea service and the ladies enjoyed talking amongst themselves and eating, and consuming tea. I actually didn't drink tea, opting for lemonade instead. I have a funny tendency to skip the tea when I make one of these parties, which I am the first to admit is strange.

Some of the food that was lucky enough to get its picture taken. On the table to the left, a bit of the dessert is to be observed. 

Perhaps this menu will help your imagination with the food, since I am lacking a lot of photos. For the sweets course, we had small plates of roulade cake with berries and cream, a plate of thumbprint cookies, and cream cheese chocolate tarts with strawberry slices in their tops.

After our tea, we had a rich Scripture sharing time. We went around the room and shared passages we had picked out, and the edification was wonderful. 

We had some wonderful help cleaning up, and before 7 pm we were driving home. It was a blessed, stressful good day! 

We came home and ate leftovers until we were feeling unwell from all the rich, 80% cream-and-butter food. Now we still have some scones, cookies and lemon posset to finish, but all in all these are not such bad trials to face.

to God be the glory,

Miss Humphrey