Visit Me On Aunt Mildred's Porch

 If you visit my etsy on a regular basis, you might have noticed that the name changed.

As with the name of my blog, I hadn't thought out the name for my etsy shop and I needed something when I signed up, so I chose sparkling74, which is what I used when I set up my blog.  It's always irritated me that it's so random and I've been wanting to change it for a while.

So, after all this time, my etsy shop is now called On Aunt Mildred's Porch.  Go see but you have to promise to come back and see where the name came from.

Aunt Mildred's porch was where I trained to be an old lady.

Aunt Mildred was my great-great aunt who came to stay in the campground every summer.  She came for all of my mother's childhood and she came until I was in high school.  In my mind, she was always really old because, well she was really old for the whole time I knew her!  She lived to 103 and I was in my 20s when she died, so that means she was in her 80s and 90s for all the time I knew her.

In my earliest memories, she drove a big, old car that was banana yellow.  It had little crank out triangular windows in the front door as well as the regular crank down windows.  I thought those little triangle windows were the coolest.  I remember her driving me somewhere.  Probably to the grocery store because she didn't go too far.

Later, she got a smaller, but still big, car that didn't have cool windows.

And eventually, she didn't have a car at all, so my mother would take her where she needed to go.

Her trailer served as the office during daytime hours during the summer months. We grew up on that porch.  We played, we read, we ate hot dogs and beans every Saturday, we got in trouble and coulnd't leave the porch and pretty much lived our summer time lives from that porch.  If my mother wasn't in the house, it was likely she was on Aunt Mildred's porch.

Conveniently, Aunt Mildred's trailer was right in the middle of the campground so people passed by a million times a day.  The dumpster was right nearby, so every time someone went to the trash, they'd stop and say hi.  Pretty much anything that went on was seen or heard from Aunt Mildred's porch and if we missed it, someone was sure to come right by and tattle on whoever was doing something suspicious.

In those days, there were lots of ladies who were always crafting.  Aunt Mildred was crafty until her
eyes got too bad and my mother was always knitting or crocheting something on that porch.  People stopped by to show the latest crafting fad they were making or to see what my mother was working on. 

So, it was only natural that I should learn how to knit, crochet, cross stitch, latch hook and who knows what else on Aunt Mildred's porch.  I had a small laundry basket where I kept my craft of the moment and I'd stop and work on it for about 3.5 minutes and then hop on my bike to do whatever I did before returning a little while later to sit for about 3.5 minutes and do it all again.

I made a lot of stuff back then!  Mostly cross stitch  but I gave crocheting and knitting a whirl.  My problem with knitting was that I couldn't start a project without someone's help, so I quickly abandoned all hope of knitting.  Plus,  my mother was always making baby booties or little sweaters (who was having all those babies back then?) but I wasn't really interested in that. 

We didn't have the internet back then, so my family was the lucky recipient of all of my crafting.  I had nowhere to sell them and didn't know what else to do with all of those treasures!

Luckily, I have a way to promote my creative skills online and refrain from filling my friends' and relatives' closets with all of my handmade goods.  Go visit On Aunt Mildred's Porch while I'm throwing a sale during this week of turkey eating and black Friday nonsense.



Linking here:
http://www.lovebakesgoodcakes.com/2014/11/freedom-fridays-with-all-my-bloggy_27.html#more
http://www.gingersnapcrafts.com/2014/11/wow-me-wednesday-182.html 
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