Whenever I’ve had a moment to spare, the knitting needles have been clicking away. And as a result, Wee Liesl was blocked on the weekend and I sewed her buttons on last night.
It’s a pattern I’ve knit twice before (both times for Wren). As usual, I omitted the garter row, because I prefer this smoother look. However, this is the first time I’ve knit it with full length sleeves, and in the smallest size.
I used a skein of Regia for it, and I really wish you could see it in person. It’s lovely shade of powder puff pink, but with subtle heathering of pale blue and mauve. It’s just gorgeous. I originally bought it to make socks for myself, but I think this is a much better use.
I finished it off with some pearl heart buttons, and now it’s ready to be packed up and sent off with the Sweet Pea quilt.
Happy Labour Day! We hope you are all having a wonderful day off, doing something you love. Depending on what the weather is doing, I’ll either be working in the yard, or in the studio, and trying to ignore the long list of housework I really should be tackling
And…
Because we apparently don’t have enough things to do around here… Dave brought home ANOTHER project.
Another antique radio. We got this from our favourite used shop. It’s another RCA and we think it’s a little newer than mine (which was born in 1937). It’s in much better shape than mine was – really just need some veneer work, and it’s guts hooked back up. He’s already started on it… though I have no idea where we are going to put it!
I can’t say much though… because I came home with a few things myself.
The bird and butterfly houses came from Dad on my last visit. All were made by my grandfather. The butterfly house will get some decorative painting, and the bird house on the end will just get a sand a refresh of varnish. The one in the middle was painted by Mom, with some cute little stencils, so it’s just going to get a clean up, and a fresh coat of clear.
The plant stand has already got a good cleaning (thanks to Dave) and will get some new paint. And that lovely lady on top…
She was once part of a fountain or pond. I’d like that to happen for her again, but that’s a project way down the road. For now she can just hang out in the garden. I just have to find the right spot!
Last week, I showed you a bunch of tiny creatures in the garden. But we’ve also got a rather special LARGE one that’s made herself quite at home.
Yup… a big beautiful Praying Mantis. She showed up in the white butterfly bush on the edge of the catio around mid August. I only noticed her because I was inspecting the bloom spikes for the dreaded Japanese beetles.
As you can see, while she stands out against the green leaves, she blends quite nicely with the fading bloom splikes.
I check for her every day now, and she’s almost always in about the same spot of the bush. I’ve never seen her actually eating something, but the hunting must be good if she’s stuck around for this long.
She can be tricky to get a picture of, because of course, she sees REALLY well and she doesn’t like it if I get to too close. If I try to move a branch or leaf out of the way to get a better picture, she’ll move deeper into the bush.
But otherwise, my prescence doesn’t seem to bother her much.
And for bonus content:
The grasshoppers seem to love the butterfly bush too!
September isn’t my favourite month (October is), but if I had to choose my second favourite… it would be September. As a child, I always loved the excitement of back to school… even if I didn’t love school. I loved getting new notebooks, binders and pencil crayons! And of course, I loved getting a new outfit and new shoes!!!
There’s no back to school for me any more, but I still enjoy September. The weather gets so much more comfortable, and a September garden is a wonderful place to wile away the time.
And there’s still so much in bloom. September, at least here, isn’t much different than August, other than the temperature is more tolerable, and the days get noticeably shorter.
All my favourites are still blooming, if not quite as strongly as the previous months.
Like many of you, my coneflowers suffered from the lack of rain. They start off ok in first bloom, but then the colours fade to a dull imitation of their best. Next year, I’m hoping to invest in a couple of rain barrels to help over the dry days. At the townhouse, I watered almost everyday, but water was included in our rent. Here, I pay for every drop, so I’m trying to be mindful. I watered at least once a week, and could probably do it more often, without breaking the bank, but I’d like to conserve where I can, so rain barrels should help with that.
The daylilies are very drought tolerant, and did amazing. Autumn Joy, which you see above, is a late blooming day lily so we still get to enjoy it after all the others are done.
September is also usually when the roses put on another show after resting for the hot, humid height of summer. So far, Chrysler Imperial is doing the best, but the others are looking pretty good. In October, they will get some extra protection against winter, to help baby them through.
All the sunflowers I got this year were volunteers, and a few are still blooming. I’m looking forward to trying again next year to get a better variety. I may invest in a small greenhouse to help my seedlings along next year. I had a very poor success rate this year.
Except where the Cosmos are concerned. I managed to get seven seedlings into the garden, and they are showing off now. I will probably sow them directly next year. I planted two types this year… the big, blowsy ones you see above.
And this smaller version. While the blooms are smaller, they have more petals, but the plant is absolutely HUGE. This one in the catio is taller than me and I’m 5′ 7″. As you can see, it’s a favourite of the butterflies too… (and you can get and idea of the size of the blooms)
And this time of year always gets me thinking about what worked this year, and what I need to change for next year.
For example, this is the catio garden… and as you can see, the Blanket Flower and the Sneeze Weed have grown so big they block the right hand path. They will both have to be moved to gardens outside of the fence next year to give them (and other plants in the catio) the room they deserve to shine.
Speaking of that Sneeze Weed….
It’s finally starting to bloom. The flowers are quite small, but there are going to be A LOT of them. The plant is just covered in buds. This is a great addition for a late-season garden (given you have the room!)
And last… Dave and I were at Home Depot the other day, and I picked up some small Mums for the porch boxes out front. The Impatiens and Calibrochoa I planted were looking a little ragged. It was time to switch them out for something more seasonal.
They haven’t quite bloomed yet, but each box has a yellow, a rusty orange, and a burgundy purple. They will provide a nice pop of colour out front for the next couple of months.
I just love everything about this … the flower blocks, the fun girly fabrics….
I had to Frankenstein a few pieces of this flannel together to make the back…
With the busy pattern, you can’t tell. And it was worth it, because it couldn’t be more perfect for this quilt. The recipient of this one is due next month. I’m just finishing up a little knit set (which you’ll see soon), and then I’ll get it in the mail to her Mom.
While I did all the quilting on the baby quilts at Mom’s, I brought them home to tack the binding down. I’ve said before, I love hand sewing the binding. I put on some good tv and just get to it. The first quilt whipped along nicely. Then I picked up the second one, and the skies got dark. The wind began to howl and a thunderstorm rolled through.
That wasn’t a problem… until it knocked the power out. Happily, we have the wifi on a back up battery, so I was easily able to look-up and see if the power company had an estimated time to get the lights back on. They did… but it was three hours away…
Nothing to do but kick-it-old school…
I lit some candles and my new-to-me hurricane lamp, and got to work. I’m lucky that it was light-coloured binding, because even with the candles, it was hard to see. How did our ancestors do it???
I got about half of it done before my eyes got to sore, and I decided it was time to give it up and go to bed. The power came on about five mintes after we got under the covers, of course!
I finished it up the next day in some nice, bright sunlight, and now I give you… Darling Duckies!!!
The pattern is Oh My Stars and it’s one I’ve done in various ways, several times previously. It’s a great way to use a charm pack.
I tend to stay away from pastels for babies, prefering much bolder colours, but these little ducks were just so sweet. the dark teal gives it some pop, which makes me content with the more subtle palette.
The back is a chunk of mottled teal flannel that is almost the exact shade as the solid on the front. It was leftover from a quilt Mom and Paisley made a few years ago.
Now I want to get a couple things knit before I send this one off. Maybe something simple I can knit in the dark… just in case!
As I mentioned yesterday, I spent a good chunk of the weekend quilting the baby quilts I had lined up.
The first to share is the fun, woodland-themed one.
I love this one because it’s a great example of not only what you can do with leftover fabric (these were almost all leftover from a fat quarter bundle that made this quilt), but also that simple is beautiful. These are all just four-patch within four patch blocks, surrounded by a couple simple borders.
It’s the type of quilt that really lets the fabric shine.
Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of the back of this one, but it’s the fun flannel I showed in a previous post.
This weekend was another busy one. Most of it was spent at Mom’s, quilting away on the trio of baby quilts (which I’ll share throughout the week). By Sunday, I woke up with a major headache, and I was soooo whomped that I wanted to do nothing but lay in bed and read all day.
And I did just that… until about 3 pm. For the past week, Dave has been bugging me to do something. You see, when we brought all that furniture home from his grandma’s, we had to start deciding what to do with it all. Some of it, we already had plans for, but a few things we took just because Dave didn’t want to see them thrown out.
One of those things was a large six drawer dresser. We’d already brought home two matching “fancy” dressers that I planned to use in the bedroom, replacing my old dressers (which I’ve had since I was a teen). And there was another smaller dresser he tucked in his closet for things like hats and stuff that tend to get lost in dark corners.
But that big one, we had no plans for. Until I was looking at Facebook and several people in a quilting group I belong to were showing off their cuttings spaces. Several different people had taken old dressers and cabinets and such, and turned them into cutting tables.
My current cutting space was serviceable…
Mess aside… It was a folding plastic banquet table. Big enough to hold my cutting mat, with extra space for my project boxes (which is what most of the mess is), and room for my rubbermaid bins of yardage and backing fabric underneath.
The biggest downside of it was the height. It was a little low to be comfortable for cutting. So, I took my idea of turning the dresser into the cutting table to Dave, and let him run with it. He worked away on the dresser for a few days, and had it all ready to go by mid-week last week, but needed my help to get it up into the sewing room.
But I had eleventy billion things to do… until I finally gave in Sunday afternoon. We hefted it up the stairs and…
I wish I’d taken a before picture of the dresser. It had been in Grandma’s garage for at least 30 years. It had been used to store car parts and tools and other random auto-related things. It was so filthy, you could barely tell it was white.
When I told Dave my idea, he gave it a good clean, and several new coats of paint. He cut a piece of plywood to make the top as deep as the old table was, painted it to match and secured it with screws. It’s not as long as the table was, but it’s a much better height. And the drawers give excellent storage space. The top drawers hold my project boxes for current WIPs. The rest of the drawers now contain most of the yardage that was in those Rubbermaid tubs. The only tub I couldn’t fit in was the one full of all my backing fabrics. But it fit nicely down the side.
Burton can’t wait until we have time to make use of it.
While I love showing off the big beautiful blooms of my garden, there’s a whole other world in there, beneath the petals and the leaves.
A vast city of tiny creatures making their way through nodding skyscrapers of flowers.
I’ve shown you all the butterflies that stop in and say hi, but if you look closer, you see some real magic…
Crab spiders are abundant in the garden .It’s not uncommon to find one hiding in the petals of a coneflower or tickseed (as seen here). What is unusual is to catch it eating a meal of stinkbug. Even more unsual is to see it eating a meal surrounded by a bunch of baby fly minions…
Seriously, I’ve never seen anything like it before! Lets also note that the spider is smaller than the nail on my smallest finger… so those flies are TEENY!!!!
Fascinating!
And just as fascinating…
These guys are so small that I wouldn’t have noticed them if there hadn’t been so darn many of them!!! They are Milkweed Aphids. Sadly, if I wanted to keep my milkweed, I had to give them a good dunking in some soapy water. If they get out of control, no more milkweed.
And here’s the reason I’m so keen on keeping that milkweed.
It’s only my first year with the plants, yet the Monarchs laid eggs, and at least one hatched into and became a nice fat caterpillar!!!! He’s since disappeared so I can only hope he wandered off to make his cocoon, and as I write is working on becoming a beautiful butterfly.
There’s a new one on another bit of Milkweed on the other side of the yard, so I’m keeping an on him as well.
But as I said, butterflies aren’t the only pollinators we cater to.
This plant is called Boneset. It’s one of the native plants I put in this spring. It’s not very showy, and it’s flowers are kind of odd looking. But it’s ALWAYS covered in bees, wasps, and hoverflies.
This plant is a pollinator powerhouse!!!
And check out this neat guy hanging off a Cosmos bud
He’s a Green Lacewing. It’s not a great picture, but he was hard enough to see, let alone get a good picture of.
And while honey bees are abundant, we see loads of native bees.
These shiny black-bummed Carpenter bees are easy to mistake for Bumblebees, though they are much bigger… and of course, have a shiny black bum!
I don’t know what kind of bee this is… I can’t tell what’s under all that pollen! It looks like he rolled in it!
But nothing is sweeter than these little bees I keep finding asleep in my sunflowers at the end of the day.
I’ve never seen it before, but it happens pretty regularly. Now I check the sunflowers every evening, and there’s almost always one bee who’s settled in for the night. But one evening…
Wandering Cat Studio 