The Turtle Moves

Happy Easter to you all!

Hello again! I'm sorry I haven't blogged for more than a month - but the sun has been shining!

Yes, after a December and January of wall-to-wall snow, ice and slush and a February of miserable wind and rain, Scotland has at last been allowed to thaw out. Half-way through March it began to look as if spring might actually arrive, with snowdrops and aconites hurrying to make up for lost time and daffodils rushing to catch up. We have had three weeks of warm dry weather now and the garden is looking cheerful, so we have been out in it, waging war on dandelions and constructing raised beds for vegetables.

 

My exceedingly handy husband is now in the process of constructing a greenhouse, so that hopefully I can add tomatoes and sweet peppers to the (keep your fingers crossed) bumper crops of veggies which are beginning to raise their heads in the new beds.

See those broad beans grow!

Even with all this garden-related activity, I would have posted a blog before now, but I've had a little technical difficulty to sort out. The other day I downloaded Internet Explorer 9. You know how those cheery little pop-up boxes appear when you log on, telling you about updates you should be using? Well, I tend to do as I'm told and install the updates, on the grounds that the IT buffs must know what's best for my computing pleasure. Let me tell you, dear peeps, that ain't necessarily so. These dratted IT fellas can be too smart for their own good, and advance one thing at the expense of several other things which have been working just fine, thanks. So it was with IE9 and the uploading of pictures into this blog - the new security settings (designed to protect you from pesky adverts) insisted on protecting me from uploading my pictures (from MY computer, to MY blog) - now I call that Nannyish in the extreme, so I've changed to Firefox as my web-browser. Yah, boo, sucks to you Internet Explorer, and just for good measure, here's another sunny picture of my spring-time garden.

Have a lovely easter weekend, everyone!

Little Easter Chickies

Hello!

I was getting totally carried away knitting ruffly scarves with the lovely CanCan tape yarn we got at the SECC "Creative Stitches" show, and messing about with the heat gun and friendly plastic we got at the same show, and trawling through various multi-media books and magazines getting all dizzy with lovely gorgeous pictures and possibilities - when I remembered! Eek! I've got a table at a Craft Fair this Sunday and Easter's just around the corner! So drop all that experimental fiddle faddle and create some characterful wee birds to decorate the Easter breakfast tables of the nation (oh, okay, Fife - I'm not really a megalomaniac).

It's seems like ages since I've done any needle-felting and it was great fun to get the wool tops out again. I made these five little fellas yesterday - it's hard to believe they all start out as a ball of wool approximately the same size and shape as each other and end up such different characters. But that's what I like about needle-felting, you never know exactly who is going to emerge! I was busy today, but I'll get a few more little chicks done tomorrow I'm sure.

Little Flower Boys and Girls

As a change from wrestling with yarn, I thought I'd get stitching and sticking with some felt. These little people are the first of this year's Easter Decorations. Well, the shops have got some Easter Eggs in already, so it can't be too soon to start amassing a stash for the Spring Craft Fair. These little chaps are very easy and quick to make. The body is a pipe cleaner, the hands, feet and head are different sizes of wooden beads and the felt coat is just folded over and blanket-stitched up the sides. The flower decorations on the coat and hat are "Fuzzy-Felt" shapes stitched on.

I like the sweetie colours, and I think they'll look quite good as decorations interspersed with felted Easter Bunnies and the like. Got to get that old needle and balls of unspun wool out and start stabbing again soon, although my sewing machine is also shooting dirty looks at me, so maybe I should get crafty with fabric and thread as well. Oh, choices, choices.