Sweet River Studios

Well another year is gone. We've lost great musicians like Prince and David Bowie and actor Alan Rickman and of course John Glen and many, many more. We went through a horrible election year. The bitterness, name calling, lies, lies and more lies makes it hard to appreciate the right to vote. On a personal note, I entered two quilts in the Ohio State Fair and one quilt got People's Choice. My parents celebrated 50 years of marriage, my husband and I celebrated our 20 year anniversary and took a vacation to Key West, Florida. River earned a total of 46 ribbons in C-WAGS scent games and earned her Level 2 Title, Level 4 Title, Level 1 ACE Title, and Level 3 ACE Title. She also earned 2 ribbons, both first place, in barn hunting and her Open Title. This year was a little slow on blogging but that's okay. I'm not competing with anyone. I had around 35 posts and the summer was really slow. Sorry, but I'm outside most of that time and not sitting at a compu...

In part 2, I posted a picture of the quilt with a piece of clear vinyl laid on top. I tested out various quilting designs by drawing on it with dry erase markers. Trying to figure out the quilting designs for this quilt has been rather hard. I guess the colored pencil drawings are making it hard. Do I quilt them or not? I'm no longer debating about it. I've decided to quilt the portraits. It'll be a challenge but I think every quilt you do you should give you at least one challenge. So far I've not really had one for this particular quilt so there it is. I just hope I have enough thread colors. I've also added a German Shepard to the quilt. Grandma really, really loved her dog and never got another shepard. She's had other dogs since then but she never talks about them, just her shepard. It's not an exact portrait of her dog but she'll love it just the same. I've been gathering some additional quilting threads this last week and I'm goin...

Last night River and I went to Anything Goes for Dogs in Marysville for scent league. We did 2 searches at level 1 and 2 searches at level 3.  River did really well and Q'd in all 4 searches. She had a little trouble on the first search but apparently a lot of dogs did. There were only 4 dogs to Q in the Level 1 search, which was really surprising giving that all of the dogs have been doing this a while. The second Level 1, went much better since all of the dogs qualified. The next 2 searches were at Level 3, which is 3 scent hides. Most of the dogs did really well at Level 3 as well, and River completed her Level 3 ACE title. The second night of the December scent league will be on the 21st. Below is a picture of River's Qualifying ribbons, her Title ribbon and her ACE medal. After a busy night like last night, River will sleep until about 3 pm today. A busy dog is a tired dog!

River and I participated in a barn hunt trial at Dogwood Agility in Ostrander, Ohio over the weekend. This was our first trial at the Senior level. River has to find 4 rats and complete the tunnel and climb requirements within 3 minute 30 seconds. We had a great time but only qualified in one run with a time of 2:09 which also got us first place. Another dog had a time of 2:03 and got High in Class but we were the only 2 dogs to qualify. Most of the time teams run out of time. Some dogs, like mine, alert very subtly and its pretty hard to figure out if they've found a rat or not. Even though we didn't qualify on most of the runs, we still enjoyed our weekend and it was great practice. It's a lot of work holding a barn hunt trial and we greatly appreciate all the people who volunteer to make each hunt run smoothly.

River and I are participating in a fall CWAGS scent league held at Anything Goes for Dogs in Marysville held in September and October. Our September trial went fairly well. The first evening, she was way too excited to search during our Level 1. She mostly just ran around and alerted to 2 boxes no where near the scent. During a level 3 search she did a perfect alert but it wasn't there and when I told her "no" she bounded 3 times across the room and tackled a small object and looked at me like, "I was just teasing it's right here!", which it was. So she was quite playful that evening. We wound up with 1 Q at Level 1 and 2 at Level 3, which she really made me work for. The second evening of scent league, we were doing Levels 1 and 3 again. River qualified in each round earning her Level 1 ACE Title! It's a small dog paw medal on a lanyard of black with hearts and stars. She was pretty calm. So calm in fact that she seemed pretty bored with the whole t...

I haven't posted about any recipes at all this year or if I have they've been few and far between. I guess over the hot summer I'm just not cooking all that much or at least not making anything post worthy. But today is different my friends. Today is about apple cobbler. My parents, especially my dad, likes pie and don't get me wrong I love pie too but I don't like making crust. My parents have that mastered but I don't make it often enough and I struggle. Besides, I don't like rolling out the dough either. So, I tend to gravitate more towards the cobbler dough. I use my Cuisinart, pulse, pulse, pulse and sprinkle it over fruit. Now, that's easy. You can use whatever apples you have on hand. You can use all Jonathan, all Winesap or mix them. Just don't use a soft apple like a Golden Delicious. You'll wind up with mostly mush but feel free to add them into another apple. Today, I had Jonagolds and Golden Delicious. I also had about 12 cups of ...

My husband and I have been married for 20 years now. We got married in 1996 on October the 5th and believe me it really doesn't seem like it's been 20 years. We don't travel much. We've gone on a cruise to the Caribbean, Las Vegas, DC, Hawaii and now Key West, FL. Seems pretty sad that we've gone to 5 places in 20 years but there you have it. I decided that our 20th should be spent somewhere else besides home. We wrestled around with a few places and decided to go to Key West. I've heard that Key West is pretty much like any other tropical island in the Caribbean but close to get to and you don't need a passport or have to live on a plane for 12 hours. Hawaii, I love you but that flight sucks. I'm glad we honeymooned there but I probably won't be going back. I can find sand elsewhere. So we booked our anniversary week, October 1 - 7, at the Tropical Inn off of Duval in the heart of Key West. We arrived in Key West, FL about 6 hours late due to ...

I went and picked up the two quilts I entered at the Ohio State Fair on Monday, August 8. I stood in line with about 20 other people, who were also picking up their entries. I got to the head of the line and a lady asked for my last name and I told her "Oliver." She said, "Lisa Oliver?" My immediately thought was, Oh God, she has to tell me a small child had somehow got a slushy through the building and was running and tripped and her bright blue no bright red slushy had landed on my quilt and its ruined! Ruined!  I dreaded confirming my name to her. "Yes," I said hesitantly. Here it comes the big, giant shoe that was about to step out of my nightmares into reality. Remember, wait until you're in the car to cry, I told myself. "Congratulations, your conservation quilt won People's Choice." What? Really? No giant shoe? Awesome! She took my claim tickets and we walked back to the table where my quilts were already bagged. I c...

I bit the bullet and decided to enter these two quilts in the Ohio State Fair. I've never entered a quilt show before so I pretty much know next to nothing about entering. All I do know is that some are juried and some are not. The Ohio State Fair is not juried. I believe all entries are accepted until they fill their space for each class but I don't really know. I figured, why not? I think my two quilts are fairly unique. I know my sewing isn't the greatest. Not every seam is a perfect 1/4" no matter how hard I try but considering I didn't know what a 1/4" seam was until 6 years ago, I think I'm doing pretty good. I'm not too concerned about winning a ribbon for either of these. This is me just dipping my toe into these waters and basically saying, "See? I entered quilts to the fair and I can scratch that off my bucket list." And I didn't hyperventilate once while they were out of my possession and my control! So if you get a...

River and I attended a barn hunt trial at Dogwood training center in Ostrander, Ohio the weekend of July 30. I believe it was their first barn hunt trial and they did a wonderful job. I know it's labor intensive with all the messy straw, building the course, making sure the rats are safe and well cared for and making sure everything runs smoothly for the competitors and they did a great job. The first day, River and I didn't do so well. She finds the rats fairly quickly but her alert is very subtle and very quick and she wants to move on and unfortunately, I don't always know if she's found a rat so we didn't qualify either trial. On Sunday, I was determined to get our final Q for Open and move up to Senior. I watched very closely and when River sniffed a particular area for 3 seconds I called it and found a rat. The second rat was a bit more difficult. I saw River barely scent one area and she ignored the rest and then she was standing along the gate. She was d...

River and I participated in a C-WAGS Summer Scent League held at Anything Goes for Dogs in Marysville.  River has been participating in scent trials since March 2015 and has titles at levels 1-3. She needs one more leg for a Level 4 title and she's needs a few more qualifying rounds at levels 1 and 2 for her ACE titles. We attended the scent leagues in June and July which is held two Wednesday's per month in the evening. Here's a pic of a Q ribbon. River earned a total of 14. River has a great time searching for scent, although she usually likes to run around the room then she'll remember she's supposed to check out the objects on the floor. But in the end she usually alerts to the odor by sitting or laying down next to the right object.  But I think she really loves it when other people pet and pay attention to her and she gets to socialize with other dogs. It definitely makes for a late evening but the part I like the most is the result. You get ...

Well it's taken me forever to continue posting about this quilt. I wanted to add a wash of color to the quilt to soften the glaring white fabric but I lost my inks. I looked for several weeks and had to continue posting about my other applique quilt project in the mean time. That quilt has had a serious set back and I'm really not happy about it or with my self since it was totally my fault. Of course it was my fault! I'm the one making the darn thing. Anyway, I still can't find my inks, so I finally broke down at the end of June and purchased the ink that I know I have lurking in my house somewhere. I'm pleased to say that I got the ink wash on last week. It really helped to blend the colored portraits together. I also got the edges a little darker. When applying the inks, I was trying to only blend so far into the portraits. They have white areas that I did not want to color and if the ink gets to the white area it's not going to come out and it m...

Over the weekend, our family celebrated my parents 50th Anniversary. Although I practiced making chocolate lace (previous post), I didn't have any confidence in my abilities at this point so I didn't try it. Instead, I wrapped some ribbon along the bottom of each cake tier and sprinkled it with gold colored sugar and called it done. I also decided to try to make some flower arrangements with little puppy flowers. I bought a variety of flowers at the local grocery stone, floral foam and a little decorative box and made 2 arrangements. One for my parents and one for my grandmother because grandma's should always get their own flowers to take home. Here's a close up of the cake. The bottom tier is yellow cake with raspberry, the center is hummingbird cake with cream cheese icing and the third is yellow cake with orange curd. Of course we had way too much cake but that's what freezers are for. Mom got her wedding cake cutter out from June 1966, whic...

My parents 50th anniversary is June 18. Last year was my in-laws anniversary and we had a nice catered party with a 4 tiered cake that I worked my backside off preparing. My family on the other hand is small. Even with all the cousins we only number about 14 people and my parents don't get out and don't have any friends. I've asked my parents several times what they wanted to do for their 50th and they always say "nothing" so I haven't really planned anything. My grandmother on the other hand is a different matter. She knows my parents want nothing for their anniversary but she doesn't believe that includes having cake and ice cream. And it got me thinking... There's been a cake decorating technique I've wanted to try and it seems like a good opportunity to try it out and there's a cake recipe that I found that I think my parents will really like. So I thought I'd combine the two. First the decorating technique. I found this video of...