Stick Figure Family Tree Ornaments

Yesterday, my little girl told me that she wanted to make some ornaments for the Christmas tree. We didn't have a lot on hand to work with, but I knew I had a nice little stash of glitter she could have fun with, and I knew I could make salt dough. Considering what other crafting supplies I had squirreled away, these are what came to my mind. Consider them a medium difficulty level, as my six year old daughter made them with (a lot of) help from me.

Supplies:
Salt dough:
       1 cup flour
       1/2 cup salt

       Water to consistancy
Food Coloring
Size 2 jewelry wire
White craft paint
Pink Paint (I used pink glitter nail polish)
Fine point Sharpie or gel pen
White glue
Paint brushes
Assorted glitter
Clear Acrylic Spray

Step 1: 
Mix the dough and separate out enough egg-yolk sized balls to make the bodies. We have six family members, so we made six bodies. Make sure you have a good consistency. You may need to add more flour or more water, to keep the dough from being too sticky or too grainy.

Fold in food coloring and knead until the color is uniform. I didn't use gloves, as you can see, and my fingers are now pink.

Step 2:

Form the bodies into pear shapes. These do not need to be completely perfect, but try to get them symmetrical. They will puff out a little during baking.

Take plain white dough, the size of a hominy kernel, and form the head.







Step 3:
Take a one inch piece of jewelry wire, form a coil on one end and push it up into the head, to form a neck. Then push the other end into the body.

A small round tube, the size of a lolly pop stem is the perfect diameter to wrap the jewelry wire for all purposes of this project.

For the ladies, since we have curly hair, I wrapped two inch pieces of wire to form ringlets. I then pressed four of them into the top of the head.

On all ornaments, make a coil on one end of a one inch piece of jewelry wire, and press it down into the top of the head. This is for the hanger.

Step 4:
Cut two 4 inch pieces of jewelry wire to make the legs and arms.

Press these all the way through the body, near the head and at the bottom.

Step 5:
With each ornament complete with legs, arms, hair for those who have it, and hanger hooks, they are ready to bake.

Put them into the oven at 250F for four hours.

Step 6:
Although the heads of the ornaments were white before and after baking, I felt that giving them a couple of coats of white acrylic craft paint gave them a more even surface. However, it is not completely necessary.

Curl the ends of the arms and legs into circles for the hands and feet.  I used a gel pen to draw on the eyes, noses and mouths, in a Charlie Brown inspired style.

Paint a small dot of pink glitter nail polish on each cheek, to give it an antiquated blush. Plain pink paint will also work.

Step 7:
When making the bodies, I made sure that I created colors that corresponded to the glitter I had put away. Because it was likely that there would be holes in the glitter, I wanted to mask it as much as possible.

Water down the white glue to make it easier to paint onto the bodies, and be sure to use a glue that will dry clearly. You want to be careful not to saturate the salt dough, get a good coverage.

Quickly sprinkle on the glitter and try to get it as even as possible.

Use a dry paint brush to dust away any glitter from the face. Gently spray it with a couple of light coats of the clear enamel, to set the glitter and keep it from flaking off.

Place a cord through the hanger hooks, clean away any stray glitter from the faces, arms and legs, and your little stick figure ornaments are ready to hang on your tree!

A New Year, A New Project!

I decided that 2014 is going to be a relaxing year. I'm going to make that happen. Because I'm in complete control of my universe and when I say I'm taking it easy this year, it's set in stone. SO. I'm lining up a soothing, easy project that may well carry me all the way to December... are you laughing? If you know me, probably! 'Cause you know, the taking it easy thing really isn't me.

Ok, no more fooling, let me tell you what I'm really up to! In 1999, I made a set of four stockings and a count-down-to-Christmas calendar for my family. Each stocking is navy blue cotton with faux applique scenes depicted out of scraps of fabric that I used some sort of iron on adhesive to affix, and then I used silver glitter fabric paint to go around the edges. When the subsequent children were born in '06 and '07, I made them new ones to match.

 

To be perfectly honest, I hated these stockings almost immediately after I made them. They're garish and ugly and at this point, I can do WAY better! I'm almost embarrassed year after year to pull these out of storage and hang them up. Of course, my husband who has a very strange idea of sentiment and gets attached to all of the wrong things fights each year to keep them. Right now, a week after Christmas, he could give two shits about them or the calendar or anything related to holidays. I'm starting new stockings and a calendar now, so when the Thanksgiving turkey is slowly churning in our bellies in November, I will a have a stronger argument than his for retiring these atrocious things to the attic forever. I mean, babe, I've worked ALL year on these new stockings! We'll see how well that goes...

Here's my plan for the new calendar. I'm really big into celebrating the origins of Christmas (aka Yule), particularly focusing on the pagan aspect, in December. Odin was only one of the forbearers to modern Santa. There's also St. Nick (he was a real saint), Sinter Klaus... Ok Google that shit because I don't really feel up to explaining it all.

Odin, who in MY portrayal is modeled after Gandalf (because Gandalf is f'ing awesome and needs to be hung in every home for Christmas!), is set among a moon lit sky on a tree lined mountain slope. The moonlit sky is very important as it is indicative of the winter hunt. It's all relevant in pagan/Yule lore.

So I photoshopped Gandalf from a scene in the movie "Lord of the Rings" into two separate images I found that had the sky and ground backgrounds I wanted. When I had everything jiving just the right way, I opened the image in Window's paint and saved it as 256 bitmap. That degrades the colors to give me an easy to follow map.

 

 



 

 

 

At this point, it was pretty simple to trace this out onto paper and then onto a piece of white cotton muslin. I put the fabric into an embroidery hoop, took the image to the sewing shop to buy the appropriate colors of embroidery floss, and am filling in the entire image with tiny stitches as if I'm doing a paint by number. This technique works extremely well for making heirloom products (such as family portraits onto pillows), or making custom patches or badges, as I show you HERE.

 

 

I have been wanting to do a large tapestry in this medium for a very long time, and now I have a great reason! So, here is the start:

 

 

 

The finished tapestry will be 11" x 14" and will be sewn as a panel onto a new count-down-to-Christmas calendar. If you're wondering what I mean by that, picture a piece of fabric with pockets numbered 1 to 25 and an object that is moved from one pocket to the next, each day in December. The numbered pockets will also be embroidered and I'm planning to use high-end fabrics for this project as I'm expecting these to last my family for another 15 years, if not longer. They may last until I'm an old lady. My family may fight over my dead body for them... or maybe not! It's going to be a fun project though and it will give me a reason to sit on my ass and watch trashy television, which I'm expecting to do a whole lot of this year.

Oh! And I'll keep you posted on progress. If you have any questions, shoot 'em in the comments. 



DIY Christmas Tree Bows From Re-purposed Materials

 These tree ribbons came out even cuter than I expected, and much better than my husband guessed when he saw the denim strips. He asked me skeptically if I really thought they would turn out to look good. Do you not know me? Silly!

I made two dozen of them and they give my tree the country-cozy feeling that I like in the fall. There is just something about denim on a Christmas tree that feels right to me. Add in the contrast of textures with the burlap and cotton muslin, the splash of red and natural grape vine and I just adore my little bows! Also, like many of my crafts, these were done for free using  materials I had on hand or found outside. You can come up with some creative combinations if you look around your own home to see what's available!

Materials:

Old Jeans (adult sized)

Burlap

Cotton Muslin

Scrap Yarn

Polished Hemp Cord

Salt Dough

Red Paint

Woody Tendrils (from a grape vine)

Glue gun and glue sticks

To start with, cut the pant legs off of your old jeans. It's best to use jeans that have good denim. Trim off the inside and outside seams as well as the cuffs, so that you have four wide strips of denim to use. Lengthwise, rip the jeans into two or three strips. Don't use scissors for this, the ripping helps with the fray.
Take a needle or your fingernail and pull out ten or so outside strands of thread, to make a 1/4 inch fray.

Finding the center of your strip, fold the sides in and under. Then fold the ends down, as shown in the photos. This can be tricky and takes a bit of practice.

 Slide a piece of scrap yarn into the center of the bow and tie it in place. Trim the ends of the yarn.

 Tear the cotton muslin into strips, 12" long and 1 1/2" wide. It's good if it looks a little rough, but trim the excess strings. You want it to look tattered but tidy.

Cut a swatch of burlap, 4 inches long and two inches wide, then cut a slit up the center of it.

 Shape the muslin into a bow as you did with the denim and tuck the burlap behind it. Use a foot long piece of hemp cord and wrap tightly around the two bows and the burlap. Leave four to five inches of cord at the top of the bow to become the hanger.

 Salt dough beads are super easy to make, and I found a recipe that I was able to make and then paint within minutes! Really! I was skeptical too, but I tried it and it worked.

That recipe is here:  Quickest Ever Salt Dough Recipe at Rainy Day Mum

I rolled the salt dough into tiny balls, about the size of blueberries. I did poke holes into them with a needle, thinking I would sew them to the bows which would have worked. But I realized I had new glue sticks so I didn't go that way.

I used enamel paint (and some gloves) to paint the "berries" bright red and dried them on craft paper.

 I know that not everyone has a boat-load of grape vine growing in their backyard, you can probably find these dried woody tendrils at your local craft store (look in the silk or dry flower section). Otherwise, you might be able to buy them online. If you can't find them anywhere, a good substitute would be dark metal wire, twisted and wrapped into curly-Q's.

 I pushed the ends of the grape vine tendrils underneath the cord and used a daub of hot glue to simultaneously secure the tendrils into place and glue the red berries to the front of the bow.

Had I not had glue sticks, I would have used a carpet needle and upholstery thread to sew the beads on and secure the tendrils.

 I strongly resisted the urge to add a glittery element, a touch of gold would have made these even better. But I wanted to keep them as organic and natural as possible.

Custom Badges and Patches

As my regular readers know, I'm not one for throwing something away if I can mend it. When Little Miss got a dime sized hole in her otherwise new and unblemished coat, it didn't occur to me to toss it. I wanted to make a nice patch for it to cover it up!
You can buy patches and badges at most craft stores and even big box stores like Target and Walmart, but they can be pricey. They can be generic. They can be... mundane. And perhaps you want something unique, or something you can't find at a store? Badges, decals, patches, whatever you want to call them, are extremely simple to make, actually!
Please consider my heartfelt apology for these awful photos. My camera is missing and I'm not sure if a child made off with it or if I'm just too scatter-brained these days to remember where I left it... so my phone camera made due.

• First things first, get some supplies and make your design. A plain cotton muslin makes a fine base. You want something that won't be too thick to trace an image through or too rigid to easily sew into.
• A 4” embroidery hoop.
• Small sharps (needles) with small eyes, better to use those specific for needlepoint.
• Cotton embroidery floss in all of the colors you'll likely use.

If you can't freehand your image, you're perfectly fine to trace it. You can look for an image to use on any search engine or even a childs coloring book. My girl wanted Cinderella for her patch and it was easy enough to find a suitable image to draw from.
Next, you simply fill in the lines with your thread. Separate the floss and use two strands of it at a time. Beginning at the top of the section you're filling in, begin making vertical stitches, about half a centimeter apart. You'll want to stagger the length and do one short and one long. Keep all of your stitches parallel to each other. You will get an evenly filled section by keeping your stitches going in the same direction. Once you have finished the top row, leaving small gaps between stitches, go back and fill those ones in. Again, be sure to stagger the length of your stitches.

This technique is called long and short stitch and Satin Stitch embroidery and it has so many uses!















Here is an excellent tutorial to show you how to do the Long and Short stitch.



Once you've completed one row, you go into that row ever so slightly to begin your next row. You'll not only be staggering the length of your stitches now, you'll be going into that upper row at varying heights so as to keep the entire section free from ridges.

A few tips:

• You want to keep your stitches taught, but don't pull them so tightly that they pull and pucker the fabric. Don't use too much force.
• Pack your stitches in to fill in any holes, but be careful not to bulk them up too much that they are laying on top of one another.
• Try not to rub the stitches to fray them. 
• Don't use damp or wet thread. If your thread gets wet, replace it.
• Don't use bulky knots. When starting a new thread, pull the thread most of the way through the fabric and sew a couple of little sideways stitches, one on top of the other to secure it and then cut off the tail. These two little stitches will be covered over by your fill-in stitches.

After the badge was complete, I cut around the edges and tucked them under. I then loosely hand sewed the badge to the front of the coat. Using the color I selected for my edging (pink) I used a button hole stitch going from inside to outside, to cover the entire edge of the patch and secure it to the coat.

Here are some other badges and embroidered items I have made recently. They're good not only for covering up a blemish on an otherwise fine article of clothing, but you can make them in any genre or theme. You see I like the Kansas City Chiefs! And I've also made one for the New Orleans Saints, though I haven't finished the sweatband I'm knitting to put it on. I am also making some Christmas Tree Ornaments for some friends which use a satin stitch design on the front.

Here are some older examples of what I've done with satin stitch embroidery. I sewed my daughter a dress and embroidered a beautiful butterfly motif on it.

I've even embroidered my grandparents portraits into a pillow as a gift for my father.

There you have it! It looks time consuming, but it goes more quickly than you'd think. It's not difficult, but it takes a bit of practice getting those stitches to look uniform. You can do some beautiful work though! I've had it in my head for a while to do a large long and short and satin stitch design for a wall hanging, but I just don't seem to have the time these days. I'll set that on the idea shelf and one of these days I hope I get to it!

My Fall Favorites! My Best Fall Posts

It's Fall! It's finally here!

I first noticed Fall one day last week when I saw a small yellow leaf on the floor of the dining room. Since then, I've been checking for more signs every day. Sure enough, the very next day, there was a sprinkling of leaves when the wind kicked up while we were playing in the backyard with our friends. Three days ago I saw the first spots of red on the slope of trees opposite my house. And today - officially, is Fall!

To celebrate, I have compiled all of my favorite Fall Posts from the last two years. My favorite Fall recipes, crafts and activities.




Fall Recipes:
Whole Wheat Cheese Raviolis with Apricot Squash Sauce
Apricot Squash Soup with Grilled Provolone Sandwiches
Vegetarian Chili With Meat Alternative
Nonfat Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies
Nonfat Crab and Squash Chowder


Fall Festivities:
A Yard For Harvest
Seed Saving How and Why

Fall Crafts:
Harvest Wreath
Sweater Legs
Cable and Ribbed Glove Pattern
Table Centerpieces From Found Natural Materials
Embroidered Heirloom Pillows

Harvest Wreath

Fall is absolutely my favorite time of year. The outdoor temperatures become more comfortable, the insects diminish, and the colors of the landscape here in Missouri are exquisite as the fog rolling in on a cool autumn morning.

I feel peaceful and relaxed at the idea of hunkering down for the winter. Harvest season is less than a month away!

As I shared in this post last year, one of my favorite fall activities is seed collecting. Visiting parks, the woods, even walking around my neighborhood usually culminates in a rather large collection of seeds to stash away.


As I wrote in this post, another of my of my favorite things to do in the fall is to harvest my yard. Not only the edible parts, but the grasses and twigs for my fireplace, weeds and wild flowers to make centerpieces and arrangements, and my unruly, out of control wild grape vines to make wreathes and other decorations.

This prolific vine gets cut back every fall and regrows in the spring. I think it's rather pretty, even though it's a messy thing. It's worth it to me to keep it because I can make pretty wreathes out of it.

This year, I have not been enjoying the outdoors quite so much. I decided to make a new wreath, but rather than collect my decorations before hand, I have decided to hang the wreath bare with only a simple cotton print and denim bow.

This autumn, as the landscape changes, we will look for our decorations for it and collect them on our walks while we are gathering our seeds. Anytime we see something pretty or interesting, we will collect it and bring it home. I am hoping this will motivate me to get out more and enjoy the lovely temperate weather. I'll update pictures of it on my facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/TheyAreAllOfMe, as it begins to fill up!

Growing A Yard For Harvest

I love to have a manicured yard. I want my yard to look good so that when I come home, I am arriving at a beautiful and uplifting place.

Growing native flowers is one way to achieve this with minimal fuss and no watering or chemicals. It's also important that I find my plants for free, and amassing my collection of native plants is something that I am always working towards. With many of my local parks growing native flowers, and no shortage of interesting flowers growing along the roadside, collecting seeds for my yard is both simple and exciting!

One thing that is just as important to me as having a nice looking yard is to have a yard that is useful. Again, growing native flowers is a useful way to garden because it benefits the local eco system and attracts beneficial insects and feeds the birds, squirrels and wild life. But native flowers are not only nice to look at and good for the environment, they make nice dried arrangements in the fall and can be used in many ways. Some wild flowers are edible like Queen Annes Lace (wild carrot) or have medicinal uses, like Echinacea.





I grow flowers with the ultimate goal of harvest. Even my ornamental rose bushes have a purpose aside from being pretty. I can make potpourri out of the blooms after they just reach their peak, and then I can blend them up to make rose beads for jewelry making.

Growing a yard for harvest naturally means growing a yard that is abundant in food. I would love some day to have a yard in which I can walk out into and pick a wide variety food to eat. I have my vegetable patch, my herb garden and my strawberry bed. I also have a hazelnut tree that I will find a mate for soon so that in a few years I will have loads of hazelnuts to snack on and cook with.

Nature offered me a blackberry bush earlier this year, that just sprouted in my yard and 75% of my vegetable garden volunteered itself, from the compost that I created from my kitchen scraps. I planted the cucumber and the bed of lettuce, but Nature decided to give me 3 squash plants, 2 pumpkin vines, 7 garlic plants and over twenty tomato plants. Yes, Nature is very, very good to me and I know how to use my bit of Earth.

One day I plan to have a small orchard, of four to six fruit trees, and I have a large currently unused area designated to grow others types of berries, apart from the blackberries I already have. But it's important to me to have a yard that is useful in many ways - not just pleasing to look at or delicious to eat, even more than a space for the children to play.

There are plants in my yard which are only grown for some sort of functional purpose.


I have an ash tree that was cut down to the stump a year ago because it was badly placed and would soon grow into the chain link fence. The sugars built up in the roots allowed it to sprout several upright branches, turning the tree into a bush. I noticed this when the shoots were small and could be snipped easily, but I quickly realized the potential in them. I allowed to shoots to grow tall, for they are straight and pliable. We have used them to roast marshmallows and hotdogs over the fire pit, and they are also useful for building natural trellises for vining plants. Cutting them down every fall will allow new shoots each spring to be used for many things throughout the next growing season. Because they are very bendy, they can be easily shaped and I am currently considering what types of things might be created from them.

I have a slope in my back yard that is a great place to allow the grass to grow in the late fall and get nice and tall. We purposely stop mowing it in early September. There are some weeds that grow in it, that once dried make nice floral arrangement along with the native wild flowers, but what I'm really after is the grass. In the late afternoon when there is no moisture on it, I will reap the grass and form it into little bundles. These are for my fire place during the winter. We also trim the trees back when the summer begins to get hot and the rapid growth of spring dies down. The limbs will then be cut into 8 inch long sections and dried out for fall, to become kindling. In the winter when I want to start my fireplace, which I tend to do daily, I grab a nifty little bundle of dried grass from the stack, and handful of the dried twigs. Getting the fireplace going is pretty easy with them, no need for fancy store-bought starter logs or supplies.

All along my chain link fence are many types of vines. But the vines I am especially interested in are the wild grapes. They are either too old to produce, or they are a naturally barren variety.
I don't grow them for the fruit, I don't even like grapes. I want the vines. These are invasive and unruly, however, I cut them down to their trunks in the fall, pull off all of the leaves and use the vines to make natural decorations, like wreathes to be decorated with fall leaves or Christmas baubles.

There is also my water garden, where I grow bulrushes and cattails. The long slender leaves of the cattail plants are great for decorating, lashing and I keep meaning to get around to weaving them into baskets or placemats. It's on my to-do list.

I do not consider myself an urban homesteader, and I have no desire to live on a farm at this point in my life. But utilizing my space in the most useful way possible just makes sense to me. Nature is very giving when you let it do it's thing.

So... You Wanna Build a Water Garden?

I'm something of an addict when it comes to water gardens. I think I enjoy building them as much as I enjoy looking at them. Before I move onto the building, let me tell you why I must always have one.

Water gardens are ridiculously easy to grow. You practically have to try to mess them up. Trimming the plants back in the fall and mucking it out in the spring (that's a really gross chore, actually) is all of the maintenance it requires. I used to think a water garden had to have hundreds of dollars of electrical gear to maintain it. And believe me, there is no shortage of that stuff on the market! Leaf skimmers, UV filters, regular filters... it's a little crazy. Not to mention all of the chemicals you're supposed to dump in it. But, to be honest, I've just let them be for the most part and they get along quite well without me.

Water gardens attract and nourish local wild life. We usually always have tadpoles in the spring, and a resident bullfrog. The birds can get a bath or a drink of water, the squirrels, ground hogs, raccoons, you name it. And if we're lucky, we can see this once in a while! There's always snails and sometimes even leeches, water striders, dragon flies and other fascinating visitors.

I've built a few water gardens and I've lost count which one I'm on. So I'll start at the beginning.

This is what I started with, eight or nine years ago. The rental house I was living in had this funny wood framed box sitting in the middle of the backyard for no apparent reason.

The landlord said I could remove it if I put something better in it's place. So I decided to make a little pond.

I dug the hole, and then I dug up rocks from the very back of the yard. Actually, where I got the rocks was between the backyard and a creek that was owned by the city. So the city probably owned the rocks. I didn't think they would be missed. They were well underground and needed to be dug out. I also got my first liner for much less than was expected. I hadn't realized until much later that the store had it mismarked and they charged me for weed barrier. What should have cost me $60 was only $11. Like I said, I didn't know this until a year later.

Some gravel from another part of the yard, and some free mulch from the city dump and we were off to a pretty nice start. I didn't have a bench, but a neighbor let me have a stump to sit on.

I put a small ten dollar pump in it to keep the water moving since it had no plants at first.

I collected wild plants from the creek area, including bulrush and cattails. Visiting my local lake yielded some nice finds too, with a bit of duckweed. I had  hoped to find water lilies in the wild, but no luck. I purchased one from Walmart for $4.89.

I transplanted a few other plants from the woods nearby and some roses from the front yard.

The photo on the right is my first pond, which cost me less than $30 dollars - just from being resourceful, working really really hard and getting very lucky.

But if you're a ponder, you'll understand why this wasn't quite enough. You see, ponders always want bigger, better and more elaborate.

I wanted a bigger pond!

I met a really sweet lady from a pond forum on Garden Web. She had a rather large liner just sitting in her shed and wanted to give it to me. I accepted, but I wanted to gift her something in return.
She agreed to accept a large painting of her pond. I'm glad she did, that liner cost her $80 to ship to me! She also included some starts of some plants. Some of them made it, like the pretty soft pink grapefruit lily and the purple irises, and others didn't really like the weather up here. She was from Florida. Her painting took me a year and it's really quite large. But it was such a labor of love, let me tell you!

Thanks to her I was able to double the size of the pond. I used my old liner to put in an upper tier.

My landlord brought me over some hostas, and I built a little wooden bench from some branches (for the legs) and some pallets my husband brought home from work.

I was building stuff from pallets before Pinterest made it cool! :D

The only cost for this was the cost of supplies for the painting and the shipping - all of which totaled less than $10.



I quite loved the pond after this and continued adding found plants around the perimeter and at one point, we bought a wooden and metal bench from a yard sale for $5. Here are some pictures!

I built this little arbor from branches I found in the woods behind the yard.

I still have these purple water lilies, and they are still very prolific bloomers.

Each year I have to pull them up and cut back the roots and stems and repot them. If left alone, the roots would matt up all over the bottom of the liner.

I originally wanted a water garden so that I could have it as subject matter in my painting. But I've actually never gotten around to painting it.

I am able to take some rather nice photos, though!

This waterfall worked out for a year, but the upper pool leaked too much so I took it out.

It was nice while it lasted!

One day my husband announced that the house across the street from his ill father was available for rent. I didn't want to move, but it was important for him to be closer to his dad. I wasn't going to leave my water garden, though!

I drained the pond and put the plants into a kiddie pool, and then I dismantled the whole thing.

I laid the liner out to dry before folding it up.

 Each of these rocks was loaded up onto the back of the moving van and brought with us. Damn right. There was NO way I could part with them, having excavated each one by hand and carried it up a thirty degree slope!

Our landlords had been really good to us. We also felt that we had been good tenants and deserved to get our deposit back. Therefore I made sure this hole was filled in before we left. I dug up dirt from the creek area and hauled bucketful by bucketful and painstakingly filled it back up, with enough on the top to allow for settling. But you know, they still stiffed us on the deposit.

 The new house had a nice slope in the back corner of the yard. This seemed a great place to put the pond. The slope would be perfect for a larger waterfall, and it wasn't beneath a tree, which I always regretted in the previous house - it always filled up with leaves quickly!

Digging a hole for a water garden, you always want a deep end for deep water plants like lilies, and a shallow end for marginal like cattails and rushes.

And boy, was I right about the waterfall! It was beautiful!

But there were some problems with this. The pump required to run the waterfall was a power hog, so we didn't run it very often and dirt would pool up in the filter, clogging it. The pump sucked... literally and metaphorically. It was always breaking down and needing to be fixed. It leaked a lot, too.

No one ever saw the pond except for me, on days when I chose to walk all the way to the back of the yard and sit by it. And without any shade, I never wanted to! After three years, I decided to move it again.

By this time, we had purchased our house and could do whatever we wanted to it. We have a two tiered porch, that when we first moved in, had a stair case coming from the top balcony. We didn't like this staircase, partly because it looked an eyesore and partly because our little ones would use it to carry out their escape plans. After their third time sneaking out, we took the stairs off and had a rather empty space that was perfect for the pond.

I dug the hole so that it looked like the pond went beneath the porch. Moving the pond has shrunk it considerably, but it's important a water garden fit the space that it's in appropriately and this felt like the best size to sit beside the porch.

One day, I hope to build a second one on the other side of the porch so that it looks like the porch is sitting on top of a singular pond.

 My kids had quite a lot of fun that day helping me move the pond, though I believe I did most of the work while they played in the pit.

This hole wasn't quite so difficult to fill in, since I could backfill the dirt that I had dug out of it in the first place.

Here is the pond as it sits presently! It's filled to the brim with plants and snails, frog spawn and probably leeches. In this spot, everyone can see it and we enjoy it every day, even in the winter. You may notice there is no longer a pump on it, because I've decided that they are much more hassle than they're worth. One day I may add a spitter, who knows. There are three varieties of water lilies, the irises my friend had sent me, and the cattails and bulrushes that I pulled out of the creek in the very beginning.

You can build a water garden out of so many things! They can be large, medium sized (like the ones I've shown here), or they can be as small as a pretty bowl with some gravel in the bottom and lily growing out of it.

You can visit Garden Web's Pond and Aquatic Plants forum to get a lot of advice and see some really amazing ponds!

There are many books that you can buy or check out from the library, as well.

 Do you have a water garden? I'd love to hear about it!