Preserving
thE
Wisdom
of
the
lost
arts
for
life.

About Me

I am the wife of a fabulous man who not only puts up with my grandiose ideas, but is willing to help me bring them into reality. I not only love that man—I genuinely like him. There is nothing quite like being married to your best friend. It would be hard not to admire such an authentically good person. Many of the things I dream up would remain just ideas without his willingness to jump in beside me and help make them happen. Some of my favorite memories have been made working side by side with him, usually under our amazing blue sky, turning another crazy idea into something real.

I am also the mother of seven fabulous children—three daughters and four sons. I grew up with many siblings and always wanted that same experience for my children. There is something special about growing up with people who know where you came from, remember the same family stories, and understand you in a way that few others ever can. Even as an adult, I count my siblings among some of my favorite people.

Being a mother of many has also taught me a great deal about making the most of what we have. When you are raising a big family, saving a little time here and a little money there can make a tremendous difference. Over the years, I have collected and developed countless practical ideas that make life easier, stretch a budget, and help a busy household run a little more smoothly. Those are the kinds of things I love sharing with others.

Life on Our Little Farm

I grew up on a small farm, and I always wanted to give my children the opportunity to experience that kind of life. Today, we have our own little two-acre farm where we raise chickens, rabbits, pigs, a milk cow and alpacas. We have a large garden, a small orchard, and a berry patch, and I love finding ways to make the most of what the land provides.

Farm life has also awakened a love of building and working with my hands. As our property has grown and our needs have changed, I have learned to build, renovate, repurpose, and create the things that make our little farm work for us. There is something deeply satisfying about looking at a project and knowing that you dreamed it up, figured out how to make it work, and built it yourself.

But some of my favorite moments aren't really about the finished projects at all. Those ordinary days working together are the ones that often become the memories I treasure most.

Food, Health, and Strength

I am passionate about exercise and healthy eating. Running and weight training have been my primary forms of exercise for many years. After my second child was born, I decided I wanted to do something amazing, so I trained for and ran a marathon. It was an incredibly hard but amazing experience.

Having babies back to back definitely made staying in shape more challenging—mostly because my shape kept changing! But I learned that being strong was about much more than appearance. Strength made pregnancy easier, helped me keep up with my little ones, and gave me the physical ability to do the things I wanted to do.

I also grew up eating hearty, healthy food. When I moved out on my own, I went through a three-month experiment with junk food. I quickly discovered that I felt terrible, changed the way I ate, and have never looked back. Good food, physical strength, and self care have remained important philosophies of my life.

A Life of Caring for Others

Before retiring to focus on my family, I spent twelve years working as a cardiac nurse and also trained as a midwife. I will always be grateful for the years I spent caring for other people. They taught me lessons about compassion, responsibility, and the importance of understanding the human body.

I have always supported holistic approaches to health, but my education and experience in nursing have given me a deeper understanding of the importance of using those approaches thoughtfully and safely. Today, my focus is on raising and homeschooling my children while continuing to learn, create, and share the things I have discovered along the way.

Creating With My Hands

I love to crochet, knit, and spin. My journey into these crafts actually began with all the time that comes with being a mother. When my children were young, I found myself spending countless hours waiting—at soccer practices, doctor's appointments, and all the other places children seem to take us. I decided that if I was going to be sitting there anyway, I wanted to use that time productively, so I taught myself to knit.

Eventually, I found more and more patterns I wanted to make that were crocheted, so I decided I should learn that too. Spinning yarn came naturally from our life with alpacas, whose beautiful fiber gave me another opportunity to work with something our own farm provides.

A number of years ago, my teenage son came home with a picture of a sea dragon he had drawn. At the time, I had been crocheting a lot of stuffed animals and was feeling particularly ambitious. I told him I would crochet his drawing for him.

I was thrilled with how it turned out and decided to put it on Etsy. My first designs were all based on drawings my children had made. It was incredibly rewarding to watch their interest grow as they saw their drawings slowly come to life in yarn.

That little experiment eventually became something much bigger. Our local fair now looks forward to seeing the new creations I bring each year, and creating crochet patterns has become a beloved part of my life. My specialty is dragons, and I love researching new techniques and figuring out how to make an idea in my head become something I can hold in my hands.

I create crochet patterns as OvertonFancies on Etsy, and my children’s drawings remain a favorite inspiration behind my creations.

The Women Who Taught Me

My mother and my maternal grandmother have been my greatest inspirations.

My mother was raised on a farm and has always been my example of self-reliance, creativity, and hard work. She has an incredible love of reading and learning, something I am grateful to have inherited. She has never been afraid to try something new, figure out how something works, or find another way to solve a problem.

My grandmother was equally remarkable.

Her parents were second-generation American-born Germans who owned and operated a German delicatessen, so food and cooking were naturally a big part of her life. She was always in the kitchen, taking care of the people she loved—and that often involved food.

She also spent much of her childhood at her grandmother's farm in the country and later married a farmer. She was a natural when it came to animals and gardening. Her garden was enormous, and as a child I thought it was the greatest place in the world because I could wander through it and harvest things myself.

She owned an antique store and was the person who taught me how to refinish furniture. She taught ceramic painting in her community, loved learning, loved creating, and most importantly, loved life.

I miss that woman!

Having grown up during the Great Depression, she understood the value of making the most of what you had. I can still hear her saying, “Waste not, want not.”

That philosophy was carried forward by my mother, whose own familiar words were, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”

Those sayings weren't simply about saving money. They represented a way of looking at the world—a belief that what we already have has value, that we should learn to use our resources wisely, and that we should not be afraid to work with our own hands.

Why Wisdom Preserved?

When I look at the women who taught me, I realize how much of who I am was shaped by the things they considered ordinary.

They knew how to cook. They knew how to garden. They knew how to preserve food, care for animals, make things, repair things, reuse things, and find a way to make something work. They learned because they needed to, but somewhere along the way those skills became part of who they were.

Today, many of those everyday skills are slowly disappearing.

Recipes that once lived in a grandmother's kitchen, techniques learned by watching a mother work, and practical knowledge that was once passed naturally from one generation to the next can disappear when there is no one left to teach them.

That is why I created Wisdom Preserved.

I want to preserve the things my mother and grandmother taught me, but I also want to preserve the spirit behind those lessons—the creativity, resourcefulness, hard work, self-reliance, and joy that came from knowing how to make something yourself.

I want my children to know these things. I want their children to know them someday. And I want to share them with anyone else who believes that there is still value in learning the old ways.

Because these skills are about more than canning a jar of food, planting a garden, crocheting a blanket, raising an animal, building a shelf, or making something instead of buying it.

They are about knowing that you can.

They are about confidence. They are about creativity. They are about caring for the things we have and the people around us. They are about slowing down enough to learn, work, create, and teach.

My mother and grandmother gave me a tremendous gift when they took the time to teach me. Wisdom Preserved is my way of passing that gift forward.

It is my hope that the knowledge shared here will inspire you to learn something new, rediscover something old, make something with your own hands, and perhaps pass a little wisdom of your own on to the next generation.

Because a good way of life is worth preserving.