More Grievous Injury!

Background:  I am walking with a cane because I jumped when I stabbed my hand last week (point of knife came out my elbow....really!) and I pulled a muscle at the top of my left thigh.  [Thigh bone connected to the hand bone.....now hear the word of the Lord.]

New developments:  I woke up last night with leg cramps, a common occurrence with me, leaped out of bed, walking fixes the cramps, made my mad dash to the loo, I have a tiny bladder, and stubbed my toe on my cane.  I broke it....the toe that is!

I am hobbling around the office with pained look on my face.  When anyone asks what my trouble is I tell them.   But do I get any sympathy???  Nooooo I get giggles.....now is that nice?

I don't have a life I have a cartoon!

Whingingly,

Dianne
P.S.:  Silver lining:  I now have six cucumbers, five zucchini and one tomato in my planters.  You will have to take my word for it, Blogger won't let me upload pictures....See I told you, I live a cartoon.

One Third Done

I have completed the CQ side of the hand bag.  It has been slow going as I don't CQ!  All those seams, so many new treatments to think up!  Goodness how I admire the CQ ladies. I have one tiny seam at the bottom to do after the bag is put together.

 This has been cropped to what will show when the bag is constructed.  The other side will have a semi 3 dimensional dragon wallowing in his hoard.  I have not designed the handles yet, the bag has to hang flat.  Hmmm, a mechanics dilemma....

Another delicate beauty has unveiled herself.  This one bloomed last year for the first time.  Some kids were climbing around the air conditioner trying to get to the roof and broke off two stalks of blooms....so sad.  There are drawbacks to living right downtown!

Spent a boring Saturday evening with DH.   We were in the emergency room at the local hospital!  I did a dumb thing....as I was handling the knife I said to myself:  "This is how you cut yourself Dummy."  Well Dummy cut herself!  I have a deep stab wound in the web of my left hand, near the thumb.  (Truly odd to look under your skin and see meat!)  We went in to see if it needed stitching.  NOT!  They glued it shut!  The marvels of modern medical science!  I am now learning how dependant we are on working opposable thumbs!  Imagine that!  I have had to take two Tylenol 3 with codine so I can continue typing.  I have a short pointer finger on my left hand and the reach for the t is painful. 

I am such a wuss!  We bought a dozen consolation donuts on the way home from the hospital! We stayed up until 2:30 a.m. watching old Frazier episodes on You Tube.  I am well and truly consoled.  Haven't had a late date like that with DH since we were young!

Nap time....see y'all.....

A weekend in the garden.

Almost all done.  Planted the last of the perennials and some Wave Petunias that should fill large spaces of not-quite-prepared-yet beds.  We need to get soil on top of the grass clipping mulch.  This will have to come next year, as the budget is spent.  We are trying to convert awfull lawn into perennial beds.  It is working!
The bed below was all weeds and grass two years ago.  What looks brown in the picture is actually Viola that self-seeded.  I will thin them and isolate the beautiful 'sports' and hope that they will seed true next year.

I want to put in a sensuous curved line of beets and carrots with some lettuce accents into one of the long sidewalk beds.  I even garden like an artist, lol.  I did this last year and it was lovely.  The photo is taken from the edge of our second floor deck.

Upon which we have self watering planters:

These hold about nine gallons of water and it should last a week of sunny weather.  We fill them with the hose connected to the kitchen sink.  DH has always wanted a deck.....now we have the biggest and highest deck in town. 16 by 60 feet on the second floor.  No children or pets allowed out on it ever.

 

It is a delight to work in the garden beside such lovely ladies as these.

I am armed with a trowel and my seeds and I am off  before it rains again!

Fun in the Garden

We have harvested a night crawler for one of the upstairs garden planters....at this size I shall only need one per planter!  After all it is too big for bait, it would scare the fish.

One of DH's friends found it as he was coming in last night.  He hid it as he handed it to me, expecting me to shriek and drop it.  You should have seen his face when I said "How wonderful, let's put it in one of my planters on the deck."  I am no fun at all! 

 

This was the first sunny rain free day in over a week.  I spent all afternoon in the garden today weeding, planting a Coleus, weeding, planting a gorgeous blue Columbine, weeding, choosing spots for two pot Mums {not planting them, just choosing spots}, weeding......it must be time to get more mulch but the Viola have self seeded and I want to move some of them around yet.

 

Went to Canadian Tire for aphid spray for our apple tree...it is infested again this year. I wonder if we will ever get fruit.  I bought Roundup for the parking lot next door....that man never cuts his weeds so I just kill 'em.  I don't know what I will do when they ban the stuff.  Normally I don't like chemicals, but that seems to be the only solution here.  When we moved in it was a three to four foot swath of almost waist high weeds, all blowing seed into our side.  Sheesh.

We are in the second floor of a commercial building right in the middle of downtown.  There was a tiny patch, about 20 by 40 feet, of weeds and quack grass nestled between two parts of the single storey back of this building.  The landlord said if we would mow it we could garden in it.  We are making a little pocket park. 

This gorgeous Hollyhock froze out last winter....darn!  I have purchased a wonderful dark purple plant to replace it, and we are doubling the depth of this bed this year.  The small lawn is getting smaller.  It takes DH longer to set up the electric mower than it takes to actually mow the grass.  We have to scrounge for grass clippings.

 

 

This stuff is Round Leaf Mallow.  I think it is the Canadian version of Kudzu Vine.  I cut it back to the edge of the concrete and it grew half way across again in 18 days!  I let it grow last year just to see how it would look. It was lush and lovely till the middle of July, then went to seed and looked awful.  It is going to be all gone this year and other ground cover put in to replace it.  I would let it grow on the parking lot side, but it is just too invasive and would hop over the fence in a minute!

 

I have had to explain to DH that you cannot use Roundup in a sprayer to kill dandelions in the lawn.  It now looks like a dog park!

 

I bought some fertilizer for the garden planters, and I found Scarlet Runner Bean seeds.  I have been looking for those for two years.  While in CT I chatted with an elderly fellow about gardens and invited him to the parking lot to see ours.  He told me that that spot used to be his wife's back yard many many years ago when there were houses here!  Neat coincidence!

This was last year in early July.  We mulch with grass clippings from a local church.  Left over stone from the lot was pushed on to our side.  Too big a job to move it so we are just working with it.  It is not a problem, it is an opportunity, right?  Now if we can just stop the kids, who use our yard and the passage between the buildings as a short cut, from knocking the stone towers over as they go by......

I will post some 2011 pictures when we get it a little further along this year.

Now I will go sit down and work some more on my handbag.......I am too sore and tired to do anything else!

Well Along aka A Good Start

Spent the better part of Monday with my stitching group.  Good fellowship, good friends, and lots of hints and tricks and new techniques to explore.  I took along my second commissioned bag to work on as it is mostly paid for, and long overdue.  Our group disciplinarian has admonished me sternly about finishing this bag.

I am really getting ahead with it though.  It is to be more outrageous than the last one and to be two sided.
The first side is a crazy quilt block.....that is Crazy Quilt To The Tenth Power!

The background is all ties and the predominant colour is purple, ties again.  I am amazed that I can think up so many things to do with purple.

I love my stash of buttons, they can be tarted up quite nicely, especially when you have a stash of flower shaped sequins which stand up beautifully on little stalks of seed beads.

SIDEBAR:   We had a group of young college people

over on Saturday.  One of the young ladies who

  had never been here before looked around in    

total jaw dropped amazement and said "I've      

never met anyone who canned buttons before!" 

I am still laughing!                                             

And last but not least the ubiquitous spider.  He is made with beautiful big faceted Amethyst beads. I am using a lot of Amethyst and Ruby beads on this piece as well as Swarovsky crystal bicones and flower shapes, and will be using some Sterling silver as well.

The yellow centre was TOO YELLOW and fairly screamed.  I toned it down a bit with some free motion machine stitching.

I am trying to be a bit smaller and flatter as I get out to the edges of this block, I am thinking of wear and good mechanics here.  But it is so hard for me to be conservative.

I got home about six o'clock and watched 'our' Grackle steal two more worms which he ate, and then came back and very daintily removed the grass clipping mulch and picked out a morsel that had been previously buried (I watched him bury something else the other day.) There must be a pair, and they must be feeding babies, although it seems a bit early.  He must be the gobbler and she must be the stasher.  We stitcher women are good at that.

The pair of house sparrows were back again.  She lit on the fence and chirped at him, but he must not have been in the mood for love and just flew away.  They put on quite a show the other day, but he is a rude fellow and kept pecking her on the head.  I certainly would have told him where to get off!   Oooohhhh, bad pun!

I weeded part of one perennial bed for two hours, and picked some rhubarb and baked a pie.  I was righteously exhausted when bedtime came, but what a wonderful day.

Back to the Blog

Oh my goodness, it has been a while!

I have been busy though, I even did a lot of housecleaning in the studio.  I got sweeping into all, I mean ALL the nooks and crannies.  I think I got enough hair to make another kitten!  Maybe I should do this more often? Ya think??

Since I left off I have made a couple of simple purses for quick sale. Sale was so quick I do not have pictures....eeek!  They were very simple, trust me, you didn't want to see them.

I have inherited the rest of my Mother's stash from a sister-in-law, plus a large chunk of her stash.  Not necessarily the happiest way to get stash.  I have just gone through all the leather to see what is there.  Organizing is great, it has shrunk the pile by half just by flattening it all out!  I think I have seriously damaged my ironing arm.....yes you can iron leather, the thin stuff and the suedene.  The thicker stuff is still in the leather press.  Thank you to you ladies who told me how to do this.  Although I think I have done damage to my ironing muscle!  It doesn't usually get much use.

This is my leather press, I am still not sure how it is working as I think it needs a few days to do its work.

There is a whole bag of schnibbles that I just hate to throw away.....after all I am a Stashaholic.              

The pile on the TV table is all fine and kid leather and is over an inch deep in the browns!  I need to sort and bag this yet.  The rest up on my ironing table is all suedene cut into strips strangely enough.                         

I am working on another commissioned tote sized bag all in purple ties although you might not be able to see them when I am through!   I am doing a Crazy Quilt block to the tenth power.  (She never said she wanted   to be able to lift this thing...hehe)  This is the centre and right side, there is more rolled under on the left.       

Here is a detail at the top, the embroidery is not finished yet, I think I will add beads too.                                                         

This bit is at the bottom and I think it is finished...you never know!                                                               

And then just to blow a bit of the purple lint out of my system I did this wall hanging.  The Ladies are Stacked.  DH came up with the title.  They are actually a tie.                                                            

I loved the tie and I paired it with the fabric from my Great Grandmother's stash shown in the last Blog post.

 

A bit of copper accent and some purplish (just can't get away from it!) beads completes it.  I wanted to 

find a way to feature that gorgeous fabric.  The pictures do not do it justice.  This piece will be for sale.                                           

 Now to get my nose back to the grindstone and finish the purple tote as the lady has commissioned me to  do two more smaller bags.                                                                                                                     

                                                                                                            

I hope I won't be quite so long in posting again.   Happy stitching.                                                                                                                       



More of the same but different.

And I have been snow dyeing again.  In an attempt to get purple I used Scarlet and Royal Blue Rit dye and some Dylon Yellow for accent.  NOT the right method!!  I got blue and red fabric with a few small purple areas, and the yellow did not take at all!  Sigh.  It is all very permanent though as I heat set in the microwave before I rinsed it.

This was a light blue satiny fabric.

More of Great Grandmother's fabric.

Wonderfully shiny but still blue and red.

I am going to over dye with some purple and see what happens.  I will use Low Water Immersion and Rit once again.

The second eyeglass case is done. again oversized with a hard insert.

I used hand dyed purple shaded ribbon but the Mauve tie sucked all the purple out of it.....amazing!  The underside of the ribbon work and the bead work is all securely glued, as well as all the bead work around the edge.The cloisonne butterflies are both sewn and glued on.  

This is done for durability as idle hands like to pick.

This is a very subtle treatment but it was a huge amount of work.

I got a new do too:

We were trying for purple here too, but the purple dyd would not take, and a mixture of red and blue came out too blue.  Apparently purple is as hard to make as it is to wear.  I will change my Blog picture as soon as I get a better picture that is not a short-armed-self-portrait....lol

I am going to make a couple of dolls next as they are preying on my mind.  They want out and are getting impatient and I want a change from purple.

(If I was in my mind I would probably want out too!)