A Slow Day

Good morning, my friends. We were expecting a wet week, but the weather yesterday was pretty nice. It was cloudy at times, but there was no rain. It's looking like the same kind of a day today. We're doing our grocery shopping today...a long list (sigh)...and a dry day for that is always appreciated. I didn't accomplish as much in the sewing room yesterday as I'd hoped. The day was all slow sewing, and so I didn't make any more progress on the borders for The Story of My Day. They'll get some attention today.

The last few days have been busy with me trying to get some exercise in, and then several housekeeping chores. I spent the morning yesterday finishing off the stitching for April's "Sewing Room" block. This will still need borders, and then I'll make three more pieced blocks to finish off April's assignment. 

As you'll see in a minute, my sewing room is kind of a disaster right at the moment as I piece together the borders for The Story of My Day. I want to finish those before I try to do any other machine sewing.

Instead, I spent a little extra time on the binding for Jericho Walls. I've turned the third corner now. 

I'll spend some time on it today, but I don't expect I'll finish it until tomorrow. 

From there, I might have done some machine sewing. The sun was shining and so I decided to take a walk around the house to check on the landscape instead. I'm happy to see the Bleeding Heart is forming flowers now. I follow a Pacific Northwest Gardeners group on Facebook. Some folks who live at the lower elevations are posting pictures of flowers now. I expect to see some flowers on ours within the week.

This is another of our new daffodils. I believe this is the one called "Golden Echo" with light yellow outer petals and a dark yellow center.

The poppies in both whiskey barrels are sporting lush green foliage. I keep checking, but so far, I don't see any flower buds. I expect they'll make an appearance soon. These don't generally bloom until the end of May. We might miss them this year.

Since we're traveling a good part of this summer, I'm not planting any annuals this year. Nevertheless, the pansies are making an appearance.

The star magnolia is holding its own against the punishing rains of the day before.

The peonies are jumping out of the ground. That's a vibrating stake you see there in the upper right. It discourages the gophers and moles from tunneling into the bed.

And lookie there! The second one from the bottom has a bud. Yay!

Rounding the bend, I'm seeing more grape hyacinths. We only planted these a couple of years ago, and so they are small in number. I expect they'll start multiplying into a larger grouping in the next couple of years.

Some big fat buds are appearing on the rhododendrons. I expect we'll see some flowers from them fairly soon.

You might remember when our monster sage plant inundated the chives a few years back. I've done a pretty good job of taming the sage. With Mae's contribution of some chive plants a couple of years ago, the chives made a big comeback. 

I should have plenty of flowers for some chive blossom vinegar this year. I want to share some of it with friends when we go south next winter. The color of the vinegar fades over time, and so I'm thinking I'll freeze some of it to preserve the color. Then, I can bottle it to take along when we make that trip.

The Andromeda is forming flowers now. Ordinarily, we'd see more red leaves from this. The plant has gotten so large, it grows up and blocks a couple of our living room windows now. Mike vigorously pruned it last fall, and so the red leaves took a hit then.

After circling the house, I headed into the sewing room. Sadie was going to help out, but she looked disapurrovingly at this mess covering my workspace and decided she needed a lift from some catnip.

Then, while she was munching on the catnip, something caught her attention...or so she said.

Oh, would you look at the time! I must be on my way.

Yeah, she's not the most committed of helpers. And with no kitty help, how could I pawssibly purrceed?

Well, in truth, I couldn't. I decided to call it a day with no more progress in the sewing room. We'll fix that today. I might have to haul her short tail into the sewing room and hold her captive. A cat's gotta earn her kitty treats, doncha know.

Okay, so I probably have a little time for slow-stitching this morning before we need to make our trek to the grocery store. I'll be taking the first stitches on April's block for A Year in the Garden.

After that, we'll be on our way. It's an intimidating list, but someone has to do it. We also need to have a couple of house keys made to give to the neighbors who will be keeping watch over the house while we're traveling. (It's nice having good neighbors we can trust.) 

So, off I go. Have a good day, Everybody!