I'm Deborah and I live on a cranberry farm! :)

I'm a Christian, a farmer's wife, a mom of grown-ups, a self-taught seamstress and a novice vegetable gardener. I'll be sharing snipets of my life here, from what I've been sewing to what's growing.

I hope you'll join me on the journey as I'm learning to set up and manage an online store. Also coming up, I'll be experimenting with different vegetable gardening techniques and maybe even work on building a fancy chicken coop for raising laying hens. And of course, helping my husband to get the cranberry bogs weeded and fed and ready to start growing.

I hope you find something that peaks your interest here. And that you come back to visit again soon.

Take care!

-Deborah

Our burlap bag story

Cranberries (when not floating in water like you see on TV) are harvested into burlap sacks. The sacks are filled with 40 to 50 pounds of berries and are then dragged across the ground, hefted up onto a cart and then hefted up again to be poured out into a very noisy machine that's meant to separate the berries from the leaves and sticks and little froggies that are inadvertently scooped up by the picker. As you can imagine, after many years of hard work, the bags get torn up and worn out.

One day, my husband, who's been a cranberry farmer all of his life, asked me what I thought could be done with the poor old burlap bags that were too exhausted to help with any more harvest seasons. I love sewing and creating so I was excited to consider the possibilities. It was only a minute or two later when I found myself laughing at my first thought. "We could make them into bags!"

The Old Burlap Collection

  • Old Burlap bags and pillows

    Here is one of the first tote bags ever made of the Old Burlap from my husband's cranberry farm. It was designed and created in the winter of 2021 and is owned by my mother in law, Gail! The front pocket is a hand painted replica of an old-style lable that would have been applied to a wooden crate of cranberries before being shipped off for processing. A variety of styles have sprung off of this original. Feel free to check out available options here. Old Burlap Tote Bags.

  • Gail's Old Burlap tote bag :)

  • Other styles of Old Burlap bags including some with the Mist-Kist label, which is a bit of family history.

  • Old Burlap Pillows

    I have to say that decorative throw pillows aren't really my thing. My sister in-law, Tisha, asked if I could make pillows out of burlap and I said that I could. I'm truly grateful to Tisha as I would have never thought of burlap pillows and they've definitely grown on me! Thanks Tisha!! :)