I'm in the garden.....

...the front garden that is. Time has been passing too quickly and I had a couple of blog entries to write which I never got around to. We spent two weekends working on our front garden of our new house. It was a big job as there seems to have not been much maintained in this garden in the 16 years since it was planted. It looks like the only thing done was trimming the beech hedge and even that was not done well resulting in a hedge that is far too high and too deep out onto the street. We worked on cutting out dead wood from the tree, trimmed some plants, weeded out the moss which was everywhere and turned the hard and compact soil. We also created a larger path so that we can enjoy the evening sun there when spring and summer arrives.

Gardening must be on my mind as I was persuaded by Hazel to start working on a crochet flower blanket. My first flower is sitting outside on our bench but it is too chilly to crochet out there just yet. I will be attaching the next flower to this first one today so I am excited to see how it comes out. I decided to work from what little yarn stash I have to try a flower out. Seeing how it work up and the yarn matching my couches well, I decided to go ahead and make the flower blanket from this yarn. I have 8 skeins of this yarn so I will see how large the blanket will become as I go along.

I will be planting up my crochet flowers along with real ones out in the front garden as the temperatures allow.

With all this gardening, you must be hungry? How about a cookie and a cup of tea? I love cooking and baking. I have been trying out many new recipes for the last two months.

When I do not have a needle in my hand, I have a book instead. I finished reading a young adult historical fiction series which I really enjoyed. It is The Quilt Trilogy by Ann Rinaldi.

The first book is A Stitch in Time introducing you to the Chelmsford family. Sisters Hannah, Abigail and Thankful are each stitching their part of the family quilt which goes with them as their lives take shape far apart from each other.

In Broken Days, Thankful's daughter returns to the family with her piece of the quilt. Thankful had been captured by indians in the Ohio territory so will her daughter be accepted by the family?

In the final book, The Blue Door, Abigail's granddaughter returns to the North to visit a family she has never met. These books combine quilting with American history especially the history of the mill houses of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Speaking of gardening, here is the stitching UFO that I finished recently. I had mentioned it but wanted to share it after I had sewn it into a finish. I have not had time to do it yet and thought I would go ahead and show you the piece. It is from a SAL I did last summer. I had been waiting for the last email when I realized that I had missed it. I got the email but it ended up truly getting set aside. There was so little left to do that it was a shame it got pushed aside. Now it is done and I want to have it totally finished well before the summer this year.

Jos and I have both been sick. We have bad coughs that keep us up at night. He has a terrible cold along with it and I have lost my voice. It was a whisper for the last four days but today it is starting to get stronger. You don't need a voice to garden, crochet, read, stitch...do you? *wink*