Month: July 2026

Switching Gears from Bracelets to Belly Bands for Greyhounds

Sorry for the blog silence for more than a week! Cleaning up from the festival was just one activity this week. Then the garden started producing and suddenly I needed to make decisions about the tomatoes, green beans and cucumbers! Then I found out Nittany Greyhounds needed belly bands and coats (more about that in a minute). In the middle of all that, we took a few hours to drive north to have lunch with my brother and his wife!

Cleaning up from the Festival

It seems like when I move from one major activity to another a whole lot of other stuff needs to be addressed. After putting away my bins of bracelets and beads, I needed to reassess and redesign my booth for future shows. I’ve decided I’ll stick with indoor craft shows of 1-2 days. I’m now signed up for a 1-day show at the Ferguson Township Lions Club on November 14. That means my table and display elements needed to be redesigned. Without a tent background my gridwall won’t work. My signs can’t be hung on the wall behind my tables. My bracelets needed a better display. I quickly did some research on how other vendors display similar items. I ended up getting several new pieces. I needed to find a way to display my bracelets and still keep most of them in their packaging. Here are the three different racks.

For my individual packets of specialty bracelets, I purchased two of these table top racks that rotate:

For my smaller packages, these simple racks can display bracelets by size and the tags that extend outside the package can be seen. They have the size, the stone names and a short phrase about the meaning of the stones. I bought three racks…one for each size:

Finally, this display rack will handle the key chains and aromatherapy bracelets that just have their tag but don’t need to be in a plastic bag.

I’ve now disassembled all the racks and will store them until November!

Garden Produce

In the last week we’ve continued to pick tomatoes, picked yellow beans twice and discovered the cucumbers are going nuts! Thank goodness I have a few friends that don’t mind taking some off my hands! This is how many we picked today!

Lunch with my brother

We also finally made time to drive up to Salladasburg to have lunch with my brother and his wife. We’ve been talking about that for weeks and finally found a day with no medical appointments for all of us!

Mark and Mary

Mary and Lita

Making Belly Bands for Greyhounds

One of the benefits of writing this blog is the wealth of information I’ve saved that I can refer to when I want to make something again. Most of my posts involve pictures of how I did something and often I’m reminded how the pattern needed to be changed. Nittany Greyhounds needed belly bands, so I located the post I did about making them…#137… https://marykisner.com/belly-bands-for-greyhounds/  You can check out the whole article, but I’ll quote the first two paragraphs that I wrote about them:

“What is a belly band? A new fashion statement for our beloved greyhounds? Haha…no! Picture this…you have just adopted a 2 yr. old male greyhound from your nearby adoption kennel. You are ready to make him comfortable in your home and take him off his leash. He wanders around the living room…the kitchen…your bedroom. You show him his kennel or cozy bed in the corner. You let him explore on his own while you take off your coat and put things away. Very quickly you realize that he is lifting his leg and marking the corners of the furniture and table legs. This is a natural response to a new environment, especially if you had other dogs in the house previously. AHHHH…now what?

Luckily, the adoption group predicted this might happen and had sent you home with a belly band, just in case. You had wondered what it was for. This simple denim band wraps around their abdominal region and gently keeps his private parts from being used until you can get him outside. Over the next few days as he gets more comfortable in your home you can train him that if he’s in the house he should not have to mark his territory. When you take him outside and remove the band THEN is the time to explore and mark his territory. The hope is that he won’t need the belly band for very long, but that depends on the dog.”

The belly band fits snug around the dog like this:

I use lots of Velcro so it can be adjusted for many different sizes of dogs. Of course, I had a memory that I should cut the denim to 27” long, so today I cut out enough to make 25 belly bands. THEN I checked my post from 2022 and saw that I had mentioned I should cut them 29”!! Yikes!

Note to self: read the instructions BEFORE cutting things out! I will make one first and try it on a dog before I go to the trouble to add 2” to each band!

So, that’s what I’ve been doing the last week and a half. I’ve now ordered enough fleece to make 16 coats, so you’ll know what I’m doing next! Have a good rest of your summer!

Please contact me directly if you have comments or questions: maryjkisner@gmail.com

Garden Update July 18, 2026

I should not be surprised by the growth in the garden in mid-July! We’ve had hot days and lots of rain. I’ve been distracted by the festival preparations and clean up from last week, so when I headed out to the back yard yesterday, I was amazed to see how things had popped! Join me in a quick tour.

The petunias still look pretty…in the planters and in the pot. The spearmint is growing like a weed!

The radishes are minding the heat but the rain keeps them going.

I’ll wait until fall to plant more radishes so instead I found some old seed for beets and spinach. Not sure if it will even sprout!

We had to pull the sugar snap peas two weeks ago. Bert took our extra carrot seeds and planted a long row in that planter. They came up quickly. We might have to use that planter for carrots in the future…they don’t seem to do well up in the garden.

The asparagus looks pretty waving in the wind!

The pumpkins are determined to grow outside the fence! In the second picture you can see a critter must have taken a taste!

Up in the garden on the hill, the tomatoes are doing well!

The first picking included some pretty big tomatoes! I like to pick them while they are still firm. In a day or two they’ll finish ripening on the kitchen table.

Next, the green and yellow beans are making beans! Finally!

Here is the second planting of beans:

The carrots just can’t catch a break but some are trying! Maybe the soil just isn’t right. They seem to be growing more quickly in the bed near the patio (see picture above).

The cucumbers have gone nuts! Bert is spraying them for fungus I think.

The echinacea are spectacular this year! We started with several colors of flowers five years ago, but each year the pink ones take over more.

The bees and butterflies like them!

Enjoy! Please email me directly if you have comments or questions: maryjkisner@gmail.com.

Festival Wrap up 2026

The Art in the Orchard Festival at Way Fruit Farm in Stormstown was a 3-day event last week. I’d like to share how it went for me and two friends.

On Wednesday evening before the Festival (July 8) we were allowed to set up our tent. Most folks set up the morning the Festival started…on Thursday, July 9. I was glad we could do ours ahead of time. The vendor tents made a circle around a huge grassy field.

We were in space #15.

Bert and I were able to set up the tent and get everything ‘nailed’ down so it wouldn’t blow away overnight. I was able to set up my tables and the gridwall so it would be ready for me in the morning.

We zipped up the back wall and put a 2×4 along the bottom edge to keep the wind from lifting the tent.

The tent looked pretty lonesome all by itself, but another tent was going up nearby so we knew things would fill in eventually.

Here’s the neighboring tent going up:

Day 1 involved 2-3 hours in the morning setting up our stuff in the booth. The festival was from Noon to 8 p.m. We knew it would be a hot day and shade was important. Bert had figured out how to rig up a tarp and fasten it between the car and the tent. It worked for a while, but by afternoon we had lost any shade as the sun moved overhead.

I thought this was an interesting picture, but you can see the angle of the sun kind of ruined any hope of shade.

My side was pretty easy to set up. The black grid wall was effective in enticing folks to check it out, but most people did not linger. I hardly had a chance to explain anything before they moved on.

Toni’s artwork did attract people, so she had a chance to explain how she made things with polymer clay.

Sue’s bags on two display racks attracted attention because we could move the racks outside our tent where people could touch them as they walked by. She sold a lot of bags.

We started Day 2 smiling!

Day 2 started out fine, but a pop-up thunderstorm hit after lunch. We discovered the tent was not waterproof! Water dripped on all our stuff…and into my bins. Some ink on tags was starting to smudge. By 4 p.m. it had stopped raining and we were supposed to be there until 8 p.m. At that point, I gave up…packed up my stuff and shut down our booth. Really stupid of me…my two friends could have stayed and finished the day, although Sue wanted to get her bags dried out too. I guess folks continued to wander around the field, but I was a mess. Turns out I was hatching a real tummy ache and made it home just in time…maybe it was something I ate…you know all that good smelling ‘food truck’ food!

When I got home that day, my daughter and granddaughter were visiting so I put them to work. They dumped out all my bracelets, one bin at a time, on to towels on the dining room table. They dried off all the plastic bags and the bins. An hour and a half later, everything was back in bins ready for Day 3. Whew!

Day 3 weather called for sunny and hot but no rain. Haha! We made it until about 2:30 and a gusty thunderstorm moved through again. Luckily, I managed to put the lids on my bins just in time. Only the bracelets hanging on the grid wall got wet. So, we sat around inside the tent to stay dry and by the time the rain stopped it was 4 p.m. The festival was over at 5 p.m. so we all started packing up. A few folks were still wandering around but really no buyers. Bert showed up to help us break down the tent and we put everything away wet. Yesterday, we got all the pieces of tent hung up to dry before we put them away.

What did I learn?

First of all, I’m just not cut out to stand around outside for three days! I’m basically allergic to the sun, so I had to wear my long-sleeved sun shirt so I wouldn’t burn. Made it even hotter!

Second, my bracelets…with most packaged in plastic bags…did not attract attention. The few that I did hang on a small rack attracted attention, but the tags that are essential to describe each bracelet got tangled with the wind (and rain). An indoor venue might have been easier to display things. My bracelets really needed an explanation and that was very difficult in the outdoor setting.

Third, success with selling anything at an outdoor even depends on traffic…people wandering by. Attendance seemed to be down this year because the People’s Choice festival moved back to Boalsburg. Apparently, they were very crowded this year.

Plan for the Future

I have decided I will find local craft shows that are indoors and 1 or 2 days long. I will need to redesign my display to suit the indoor setting. I may even consider offering a workshop where folks could choose their own beads (from my extensive pile) and make their own bracelets. The teacher in me would find that satisfying!

I did end up making about $250 at this festival, but I did not find it an enjoyable experience. Live and Learn! I admire all the folks I met who go to multiple festivals during the year. They are competent at setting up tents by themselves and seem to know how to go with the flow when the weather changes. I don’t seem to have those skills! If you attend outdoor festivals, please appreciate the work involved for the vendors!

If you have comments or questions, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.

Garden Update July 4, 2026

Happy 250th Birthday, America! We managed to get our red, white and blue petunias planted at just the right time to have them blooming today! Yay!

Of course, a week or so ago, the deer cruised by in the middle of the night and chomped off some of the red and white flowers so they aren’t all the same height. Luckily, they didn’t go out to the front lamp post so those flowers are all the same height!

We’ve had a week of VERY hot days, with occasional thunderstorms. The plants in the garden are minding the heat. Hopefully, things will moderate soon. Here’s what’s happening in the garden today!

The lettuce looks like it is trying to make heads, but it is turning out quite bitter. Luckily, the plants will compost just fine (smile). The radishes are in various stages, but they still taste good.

The petunias in the pot are hanging in there…I think a roving bunny has been tasting the flowers when we aren’t looking!

The Spearmint is going strong. I may decide to dehydrate some of the leaves, but I wanted it mostly to attract the bees. We’ll see.

The sugar snap peas are done. We’ll pull the plants when it cools off a little today. Behind the peas is the asparagus. We’re watering it, hoping next spring we have a meal or two.

The pumpkin plants are huge! Bert is trying to keep the runners inside the fence because they are starting to make pumpkins. We’re hoping they are very big and survive the groundhogs in the area.

Up in the garden, the tomatoes are going nuts! Not sure what I’ll do with them all, so be careful if you stop by to visit…I may sneak some into your back seat!

The green and yellow beans are thinking about making flowers. The green beans in the right row are a new variety to us. They almost look like a pole bean vine. Oops! A bush-type bean is what we wanted.

This section is the second planting of beans. We’ll see how they do in this heat.

And then, there’s our poor carrots! They need to be weeded, but they are in there somewhere.

The cucumbers are making blossoms so there’s some hope for cucumbers eventually!

And finally, the Echinacea is going crazy. The bees love them!

That’s what is happening in our backyard today! I hope you have a happy 4th of July!

If you have comments or questions, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.