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Mother Nature's Toy-Shop by Lina Beard
Mother Nature's Toy-Shop by Lina Beard
What You Can Do with Them
Wild flowers, like children, are up early. They don't want to lie abed after their long winter's sleep; they want to be awake and see what is going on in the world. While you think it is still winter there is a stirring going on under the blankets of brown earth, and sometimes before the snow is off the ground you may find the little things working up through the stiff soil and opening their eyes to the gentle spring sunshine.
It is remarkable the way the soft, tender sprouts force their way through hard ground that we would have to take a knife or trowel to dig into. But they do it. Not all at once with a great, blustering rush, but gently, steadily, and quietly they push and keep on pushing until their heads are above ground; then they begin to grow in good earnest, and pretty soon they laugh right out into blossom.
The pleasure these earliest wild flowers give us is in going out to look for them and in gathering handfuls to carry home and put into little glass bowls to be "Oh'd" over and wondered at, to be admired and loved because they are lovely, and because they bring some of the sweet outdoors of spring into the furnace-heated house.
They are too delicate and fragile, these anemones, hepaticas, and bloodroots, to be handled and played with, but later come the stronger, sturdier flowers and with many of these you can do all sorts of entertaining things. You don't have to look very far for them either. They are in the fields, by the roadsides, and even along the edges of the streets of a village or small town. You won't find them in the city.
To begin with, there are the daisies. How white the fields are with them! If they are fine, large daisies on tall, strong stems they will reach up to your waist-that is, if you are a little girl. If you are bigger they will come well above your knees. There are a number of things that you can do with them. First, you can make a really beautiful
Daisy Crown
for a May queen, or to wear yourself just for the fun of it.
Fig.1 - Begin the wreath in this way.
Fig.2 - Turn the stem of B under the stem of A
Gather a whole lot of daisies with rather long stems. They will stay fresh longer if you put them into a pail of cool water and let them drink a little before using them; and if they have wilted while you carried them, the water will bring them up again as fresh as-why, as fresh as a daisy to be sure. This is the way to make the crown. It is a new way and a good way.
Fig.3 - Bring B around and in front of it's own upright.
Take one daisy in your left hand and hold it, not upright but in what is called a horizontal position like the one marked A in Fig. 1, then with your right hand hold another daisy upright and place its stem in front of and across the stem of the first, as you see it in Fig. 1.
Fig.4 - Let the stem of B rest on the stem of A
This second daisy we will call B. Now turn the stem of B under the stem of A and up at the back as it is in Fig. 2. Bring this same stem, B, around and in front of its own upright part like Fig. 3. Turn it all the way around the upright part and let the stem of B rest on top of the stem of A. Fig. 4 shows this, but in the drawing the stems are separated a little so that you may see each one plainly. It is something like weaving, you see. And it is weaving of a sort.
Fig.5 - Weave another daisy, C, on the first two stems.
Across the stems of the daisies A and B, two stems this time, place the stem of another daisy that we will call C, and weave it on the first two stems exactly as you wove B onto A (Fig. 5). The stem of the fourth daisy will have to cross three stems, A, B, and C. The fifth daisy-stem will cross four stems, but after that the end of the daisy-stem A will probably have been passed and you will be weaving on the others. It depends upon the length of the stems how many are woven over; sometimes there may be five. It is not well to have more than that number. You can cut a stem off when it seems to be going too far around the crown.
Fig.6 - A new way to make a Daisy Wreath.
Place the daisies close enough together to have their petals touch, or even crowd a trifle, because when the crown is curved and the ends brought together the flowers will separate and leave wider spaces. When you have woven enough daisies to make your crown the proper size to fit your head, cut the last stems off about two inches from the last flower and, with a strong blade of grass or piece of string, tie them to the stem of the daisy A, just back of the flower. Fig. 6 shows what the daisy crown looks like when finished.
* * *
Her sister is marrying her ex. So she brings her best friend as her fake fiancé. What could possibly go wrong? Savannah Hart thought she was over Dean Archer-until her sister, Chloe announces she's marrying him. The same man Savannah never stopped loving. The man who left her heartbroken... and now belongs to her sister. A weeklong wedding in New Hope. One mansion full of guests. And a very bitter maid of honor. To survive it, Savannah brings a date-her charming, clean-cut best friend, Roman Blackwood. The one man who's always had her back. He owes her a favor, and pretending to be her fiancé? Easy. Until fake kisses start to feel real. Now Savannah's torn between keeping up the act... or risking everything for the one man she was never supposed to fall for.
One night. That's all it was supposed to be. After a messy divorce, Hannah wakes up next to her cold, ruthless ex-husband, Paul Green - bound to him by a night of passion neither of them intended. Humiliated and heartbroken, she vanishes without a word... carrying a secret that changes everything. Triplets. For six years, Hannah raised her children in peace, far from the man who once shattered her. But fate has other plans. A twist of mistaken identity pulls one of her sons straight into Paul's world. He doesn't know the truth. But he's about to find out.
Belinda thought after divorce, they would part ways for good - he could live his life on his own terms, while she could indulge in the rest of hers. However, fate had other plans in store. "My darling, I was wrong. Would you please come back to me?" The man, whom she once loved deeply, lowered his once proud head humbly. "I beg you to return to me." Belinda coldly pushed away the bouquet of flowers he had offered her and coolly replied, "It's too late. The bridge has been burned, and the ashes have long since scattered to the wind!"
Hannah Rodriguez was fired from her place of work, and at the same time, she received a call from her lawyer that her husband had filed for a divorce. Heartbroken, she ran to her best friend's house to cry out her despair, but she unexpectedly saw her husband having sex with her best friend. Her mother-in-law had thrown her things out of the house. Having nowhere else to go, she was left on the street, where she was kidnapped and raped. Shamed and humiliated, she packed her stuff and left the country. Fast forward, five years later. Hannah is back with a set of Beautiful octuplets, ready to make the people who hurt her in the past pay for what they did to her, but what happened when a mysterious man came from nowhere, claiming he was the father of the octuplets? What happens when she finds out the man has a striking resemblance to her octuplets?
At her graduation ceremony, Claire White eagerly awaited Adrian to finally make their relationship public. But to her horror, she watched as he got down on one knee and proposed to Nicole, the esteemed daughter of a powerful Alpha. Heartbroken, Claire drowned her sorrows at a bar, where she met a dangerously alluring man, Theo. Sparks flew between them, but just before they crossed the line, fate intervened-a desperate phone call about her father's sudden illness pulled her back to reality. With her father's life on the line and medical bills piling up, Adrian offered financial help on the condition that she became his mistress. Furious, Claire refused, only to find herself blacklisted and unable to secure a job. Just when she was at her lowest, an unexpected opportunity arose-a high-paying position as the secretary to the CEO of a prestigious company. But upon stepping into her new workplace, she discovered a shocking truth-her new boss was Theo. And worse still, he was Adrian's father.
There was only one man in Raegan's heart, and it was Mitchel. In the second year of her marriage to him, she got pregnant. Raegan's joy knew no bounds. But before she could break the news to her husband, he served her divorce papers because he wanted to marry his first love. After an accident, Raegan lay in the pool of her own blood and called out to Mitchel for help. Unfortunately, he left with his first love in his arms. Raegan escaped death by the whiskers. Afterward, she decided to get her life back on track. Her name was everywhere years later. Mitchel became very uncomfortable. For some reason, he began to miss her. His heart ached when he saw her all smiles with another man. He crashed her wedding and fell to his knees while she was at the altar. With bloodshot eyes, he queried, "I thought you said your love for me is unbreakable? How come you are getting married to someone else? Come back to me!"
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