The Turtle Moves

Moorland Blanket

Well hello there, and Happy Easter! This week I finished the Moorland Blanket. Lucy from Attic 24 really does have great colour sense, doesn't she? This beautifully evokes moorland, heather and sunny sky. I can almost hear the skylark.

This week's been wonderfully warm and sunny and the broad bean and pea seedlings are sprouting merrily in the greenhouse. I hope it continues next week so I can get them into the ground before we toddle off to Knapdale for a week's holiday next Saturday. At the Farmer's Market this morning there was a stall selling tomato plants and suchlike - once again I marvel at how robust and mature the professionally grown plants are compared to the spindly little tomato seedlings I've got. I was quite pleased with their progress until I saw this lot! I suppose it's all down to polytunnels and lots of feeding. Ah, well. Don't give up the day job.

After I finished the blanket I got down to making a Niffler

As I said in a previous post, I tried using eyelash yarn, but simply couldn't see where my stitches were among the long strands, so I used ordinary Stylecraft special DK. There isn't an absolutely perfect pattern out there in web-land so I adapted one and then needle felted some merino onto his back and tail to make him a bit furry. He's okay, but could be better. I will try to make a bigger one at some point, and will use alpaca or merino wool, so it can be brushed a bit to make him furry.

Anyway, here he is - all I need to do now is find a 'gold' coin to put in his pocket.

A Perfect Weekend

It's been a lovely weekend. The weather has been WARM and springlike. Flowers are opening and the first grass mowing of the year took place.

A fund-raising event on Saturday evening went okay (we at least raised some money) and I vow it is the last one I will be involved with as organiser. I just don't need the stress. So that's all done. Phew.

I finished the 'mystery CAL' - the Jane Crowfoot Sunshine and Showers blanket - and very pretty it is too. The last section plopped through my letterbox last Tuesday in the April edition of Crochet Now.

I practised some new combinations of stitches to create the bobbles and lacey bits, so it was a learning experience as well.

Best of all, we had our fabulous grandchildren to stay on Sunday all day and overnight because their mum and dad (aka My Incredibly Talented Daughter and Amazing Son-in-Law) had a luxurious spa hotel stay booked for mother's day/ their 40th birthdays).

We had a lovely day playing Cosmic Encounters, talking nonsense, throwing the ball for Maisie and finally watching Dr Strange on telly and eating popcorn.

Also, they had the bonus of not having to endure the school bus this morning because our house is right beside their school. Result!

Next week my other wonderful grandaughter comes to stay for a few days because it's the Easter Holidays. Hurray!

We are truly blessed with a gorgeous family.

 

Where has the time gone?

Sooo sorry - it's been such a long time since I've blogged.

We went on holiday to Barra and Vatersay at the end of May and had a week of endless sunshine and beaches. Wonderful walks to look at ancient stones, a different beach every day to entertain Maisie and a lovely cottage to stay in.

When we were booking our cottage I could hear the sounds of an accordion playing in the background - 'Oh, that's only Donny practising', said Helen and it all just got nicer and nicer from there. Helen rang us up the week before we were due to arrive to ask if there was anything she could get in for us and to reiterate that there were plenty of old towels to dry off the dog after our walks. Relaxed and welcoming or what?

When we arrived she was waiting by the cottage and she'd put a bottle of wine in the fridge because we hadn't asked her to get anything in.  She brought us a pot of cooked crab claw meat the next day as well.

We walked every day from mid morning to mid afternoon and discovered old hill forts, the remains of Neolithic houses, beautiful beaches, lovely flowers on the machair and friendly people everywhere. Maisie was the happiest dog in the world and we collected pretty stripy stones (cobbles of gneiss), gnarly shapes of dried seaweed and great pictures where ever we looked.

Even the 5 hour ferry journey between the island and Oban was reasonably untraumatic. The weather was calm so no sea-sickness for m'dear husband. Maisie slept in the car during the journey and seemed perfectly happy when we returned to her - no little accidents! And we saw dolphins!

On returning home the weather was still happy and sunny thank goodness, because I was involved in a community event in the local park the next weekend. The sun shone, people had a good time, local groups did well with their fund-raising stalls and nobody complained. Result!

Then it started to rain. It has been cloudy and rainy interspersed with hammering it down ever since the 7th of June. The grass and weeds were shooting up in the garden and all I could do was look at them through a rain-smeared window and feel inadequate - up until this weekend! Hooray! I got out in the garden and at last planted the perennials which have been getting pot-bound in the greenhouse. I did some much needed weeding and m'dear husband mowed the grass.

Thank goodness - order and peace of mind has been restored. I was beginning to feel dangerously redundant/remiss/useless/old.

 

Splashes of colour

It may be cold and grey today, but Spring is definitely trying to appear. The birds are certainly in their finest 'wanna come and nest with me?' finery - as witness these two smart-as-paint siskin on the seed feeder today. You may also notice something slightly different about the background - that's right, no tatty greenhouse! We decided that the cheapo greenhouse with acrylic window panes was finally getting so rickety and had such cloudy windows that we would buy ourselves a proper one with real glass as a 40th Wedding Anniversary present to each other. Who needs rubies, right?

So it's been stashed in its hundreds of component parts in the garage, waiting for the weather to improve so m'dear husband doesn't get frostbite while working on it. At last, we had a decent weekend and the old one has been cleared away and taken to the tip. The paving slab base has been deemed to be level enough, so construction can begin! Watch This Space.

In other news, I finished the Lily Pond Blanket. It's small, but beautiful, and I now feel confident to take on much more complicated flower patterns than I did before.

 

 

 

I can now think about smaller projects for a bit, although I'm sure the blanket urge will steal upon me again soon - they're just so impressive when they're finished!

I thought I'd carry on with my forays into the Nintendo Game characters and created this little fellow in a couple of evenings. It's Mario, of course. Letsa Go!

I've ordered some grass-green Stylecraft DK and as soon as that arrives Luigi will also appear. He's cute, isn't he? I think they will prove quite popular on a craft stall.

Goldfinch

Hello there!

It is dreich and wet and windy here, so no gardening is getting done. Instead we are gazing out the window at the latest addition to our birdfeeders. This yellow-topped job is for niger seeds and is specifically for the small seed-eating birds like goldfinch and siskin.

It's designed to attract them with its yellow colour, because these birds both have yellow flashes on their wings and travel in flocks, so the yellow is something they respond to.

It certainly works - we've had at least 3 goldfinch on this feeder every day since hanging it up. There's also been the odd one or two siskin, so it looks promising for attracting more as winter progresses.

It's something to take my mind off of Christmas Lights (I'm organising the town's Lights Switch-On again this year) and needle-felting santas (my lovely grand-daughter is running a craft stall for me at the associated Christmas Market).

I'm not stressed - really. Only 2 weeks to go to the fateful day. Aaaaaargh.

Lurker in the shrubbery

What is that lurking in the undergrowth? A Berserker!

We decided a mirror would be nice to add a bit of light and interest in the garden, so we got a sheet of mirrored acrylic. M'Dear Husband stuck it to some plywood and made it a frame. Unfortunately, thin acrylic sheet warps very easily, so we decided to set the mirror at an angle so that you didn't walk up to it face on, otherwise it gave a sort of fairground 'hall of mirrors' effect to your appearance. Thus, it reflects bits of the shrubbery when you're on the patio, and bits of the patio when you're down on the path by the shrubbery. I thought it would be good if it also revealed glimpses of something mysterious in the undergrowth, and it just so happened that last week was Perthshire Open Studios - so off we went to see what we could find.

In Blairgowrie, there's a retired dentist who's taken up working with stone. Among the copies of Pictish carving and the sleeping hares there was this wee red sandstone bloke - a berserker (what the Lewis Chessmen have instead of a Rook). He has very ferocious teeth - perhaps his maker was channelling his former employment. You can see him more clearly in this picture of him face on rather than reflected.

We also visited a lovely lady in Alyth, who is possibly the best basket maker and willow weaver in the country.

She's done loads of fabulous decorative hurdles

for various projects around Scotland, and she makes coracles too. I urge you to visit if you're ever up this way.

We bought a 'bothy basket'. The different colours are different varieties of willow and the handle is a piece of hazel branch. It's about 15" tall and I've sat it in the hearth - perhaps it should hold kindling or something.

Maisie's still not sure about our new addition to the garden!

 

Crazy Weather

Phew! Today's been a scorcher. Just when you get back into 'wearing a vest' mode and the sandals are consigned regretfully to the cupboard - the sun comes out and gives you one of the warmest days of the year. It's just the latest in a long line of barking mad weather designed to confound the gardener.

We've still got lots of colour in the new flower beds, but this picture is reminding me I need to get out there and dead-head stuff.

The 'Sun Cherry' and 'Sun Gold' tomatoes took a long time to get going this year - that'll be your cold wet summer - but are coming up trumps now. The only thing is that there are loads of green tomatoes still on the vine, so we need this spell of sunshine to continue for a bit. That's the one drawback to cherry tomatoes - they are a wee bit fiddly to turn into chutney if you've got lots of green ones at the end of the season.

The runner beans took a long time to get going as well, so they still have flowers and only just-forming beans. I really, really need this warm spell to last!

Ah well, at least I'm just a dabbling amateur.

Farmers have every justification for extended ranting upon the vicissitudes of the weather, market forces and rapacious supermarkets.

Keep shopping local, support your farmers' market and remember - if the food is very cheap, someone or some animal is paying the price that you're not.

Pontification over. Enjoy the sunshine!

Oh, and our little apple tree has 7 red apples on it this year. That's a 110% improvement on last year. Grow, little tree, grow! Well done for effort.

Little red rooster

Now we have our new patio sorted out and the trellis up (to obscure the view of the passing schoolchildren) we have started finding interesting objects to add to the garden.

I got the pretty folk-art flowery hen on t'internet, but when we were browsing a splendid junk shop in St Andrews a wee while ago we spotted this red tin rooster. He looks just the type to be proprietorial of a flowery hen, doesn't he?

Buying it did mean that m'dear husband had to show devotion above and beyond the call of duty - striding through the tourist-thronged streets of St Andrews with a rooster under his arm. That's love.

Wormistoune

While I'm waiting in the queue to book tickets for the Edinburgh Book Festival (number 2247 on the list and counting) I thought I'd tell you about a garden we visited last week.

Wormistoune  House is just north of Crail in the East Neuk of Fife. It's a 17th century Scots tower house and its owners, the McCallums, have spent the last 20 years restoring it and its 1.5 acre walled garden. The picture above is looking across the 'pond' to the stable block with the roof of one of the garden pavilions peeking over it.

They have  excavated the pond (or what most of us would call a lake or lochan) in the woodland area around the house, which has inevitably also created a small hill - McCallum's Mount as the gardener called it. Yes, this is definitely how the other half live - a Head Gardener and two part-time under gardeners, plus the money to restore a 17th century house and doocot and build two ogee roofed pavilions in the corners of the walled garden that have been done so well that they look like they've always been there.

At the entrance to the garden are two big wooden Chinese Lion Dogs.

There are vegetable and flower beds, rock gardens and water gardens, roses and herbs and a formal knot garden all sheltering within these old stone walls.

And in the far corner, hidden in a cool shady woodland area, the best Green Man I've ever seen.

 

These people may have money, but they've also got taste.

Keep a look out for the 'Open Gardens' details next year and come and have a look for yourself.

The tower house is also a barony, so the McCallums can call themselves Baron and Lady Wormiston, and they do. Their one lapse of taste, I think - or am I just being ungracious?

Leaves are turning

Usually about this time of year we jaunt off to Perthshire to have a look at the autumn trees, but various hectic happenings in the garden have prevented that this year, so here's a picture taken in our local park instead.

We're getting a new shed! We went to a wonderful place in a village near us - it really was a shed wonderland! We had to restrain ourselves from being seduced by Dutch Barns and Wendy Houses and keep to the Matter In Hand.

The old shed was terminally leaky, so we've ordered a new, slightly bigger one. This means My Dear Husband has been toiling away demolishing the old shed and increasing the size of the paved area for the new shed to sit on. That sounds simple, but you know how one task can lead to another, don't you. He's been working really hard for days and days. (BTW, I don't think I can summon up much more interest in discussions about the pros and cons of various combinations of paving slabs, but he finished the job today. Hurrah!)

Shed is to be delivered and erected this Friday. Splendid! Should I celebrate by making curtains or something for it? Or a string of bunting?

Next weekend we will be with all the family in a log cabin in the forest near Loch Lomond, so hopefully the autumn leaves will still be putting on a display. Fingers crossed for no howling gales between now and then.