Old Time

Learning how to do things 'the old way' has been a huge part of the past fifty years. My mom and dad fostered an interest in researching and preserving time-honored traditions in and around the home... and that interest is carried on today in a lot of the activities my sisters and I are involved in. Home gardening, canning, freezing and preserving foods... game hunting to put meat in the freezer for winter. Cutting, splitting and stacking firewood. Quilting, knitting, and sewing. Painting with oils and acrylics, sketching with charcoal. Fiddling, playing guitar, singing. Storytelling.
When we were growing up we raised sheep for the wool and spun it into yarn... my grandparents demonstrated this at the Norlands. We got fresh milk from a local farm and churned the cream into butter. We learned to sew by hand and made most of our doll clothes (old shower curtains make fabulous rain coats) and furniture (open tuna fish cans carefully to leave about an inch of lid still attached, bend lid up, stuff the can with fabric or stuffing and then 'upholster' as desired). We made up games like "pick"and "other girls". We drew, we sketched, we wrote poems and stories. We took part in 4-H and hung out in the exhibition halls at the fair. We dried beans and apples in the top of the garage.
Our world these days is pretty fast paced, and we make choices and compromises in the name of being practical with our time and resources... but the lifestyle of the old days is never far away.
Thanks mom and dad for encouraging us to experience the old-fashioned ways of life!