In the Garden

My garden is currently a very soggy jungle as I'm waiting for the Ox-Eye Daisies to finish so that the grass can have its first cut of the year. When my daughter was here a few weeks ago, the sun shone bightly and we spent lots of time outdoors. 

Having invested in a new, corded hedge trimmer, she was the lucky person who got to try it out first (I resisted the temptation to shout "don't cut the lead!" continually as she worked). This is how my much overgrown hedge ended up.

Can you spot the deliberate mistake? She was all set to cut off the last bit of the top when she spotted a nest. There's a blackbird's nest just below the sticky up bit and there were chicks in it. Which would explain why these two were watching the hedge trimming so keenly.

This is Mrs Blackbird on the bay window just outside my bedroom window. You will see that I had the window open a bit; I thought that was a small enough gap to keep the cats in ... until I found Tolly halfway to the nest the next day. Luckily, he's a very obedient cat; I just had to say "Tolly!" in a stern voice for him to turn round and come back in. Here's Mr Blackbird anxiously watching the nest too.

Rose beat a hasty retreat indoors so that they could get back to their babies which they did at once. You can't really make it out in this photo but the nest was full of little fluffy nestlings.

They've fledged now so I think it's probably safe to finish cutting the hedge. I was very tempted to put up a sign saying "no, it's not an attempt at topiary" as it looks so daft.

Meanwhile, the cats have been making the most of the long grass in the back garden. Linnet has made herself a nest; you only see her when you get right next to it.

As she doesn't really approve of Tolly, he's not allowed to share her nest so he made his own.

There he is, curled up on a patch of old honeysuckle sticks which can hardly be comfortable. It gets worse though. Look at this ...

Yes, that's a stick poking him in the eye and yes, he's fast asleep. He really is the dimmest cat I've ever known.

While Rose was here we started the last of our seasonal cross stitch samplers. It's the first time that we've worked on them in the same place.

Mine is on the left and Rose's is the one on blue fabric.

Since then, we've both done lots more on our Summer Samplers. I'm enjoying working on this one much more than the Winter and Spring ones for some reason. I really like the colours and there's lots of variety. Here's what I've done so far ...

Rose is coming again next month so we'll be able to compare our progress then. Meanwhile, I've just bought a chart for another big cross stitch project - Jane's Joy by Carolyn Manning, one of a collection of designs inspired by the Dear Jane quilt. I'm not quite sure when I'm going to start this but I just couldn't resist it.

Knitted Boxes

I am very partial to geometric shapes so my latest knitting project, Square Nesting Boxes, was right up my street. A set of five nesting boxes, lined with plastic canvas so that they keep their shape.

As with most of my work now, this one ended up taking much longer than it should have done. I make lots more mistakes than I used to and it takes me a lot longer to realise where I'm going wrong. The tricky bit about designing a set of boxes like these is to adjust the height of each box so that, when they're all together, the tops are level. It took me a long, long time to realise that I had to trust the number patterns in my knitting, rather than the measurements.

There's a temptation to stick to the tension too rigidly, thinking that 'must' give you the size you want. This led to me having to completely re-knit the green box. Once I just followed the numbers, everything worked, even though normal knitting rules suggested it wouldn't.

Have I lost you? What I'm talking about is the difficulty of taming a flexible material - knitting - to make inflexible shapes. It dawned on me that, as long as the plastic canvas pieces were the right size and the knitting covered them, it didn't matter if the knitting had to stretch more or less, depending on the box. If you study the pattern, you'll see that the number of stitches for each size and the number of rows to be worked increase in a regular way. It all looks so simple but it took ages for the penny to drop.

Anyway, enough of that. Once I'd worked out how to get the sizes right, I enjoyed knitting these. I used a slipped stitch rib which is easily learnt and gives the boxes a nice touch of texture, as well as covering the plastic well.

It's nice, portable knitting that doesn't require too much concentration and completing each box is very satisfying. I chose the colours as I went along, following the order of the rainbow but picking shades that I thought would go well with the other boxes. As ever, I used Stylecraft Special DK for my boxes; the colours are Lipstick, Spice, Dandelion, Apple and Lapiz.

As normal, I had a lot of fun arranging the finished boxes for photos. Oh look, it's a leaning tower ...

You can use them as lids for each other too, although they make rather chunky lids. Still, this might be useful if you want to knit them as gift boxes.

They hold a surprising amount of crafty stuff which, of course, is what I shall use mine for.

I decided to call them 'Square Nesting Boxes', rather than just plain old 'Nesting Boxes' to leave my options open. I may try a rectangular set and, if I can get circles of 10 holes per inch plastic canvas, round ones. In the meantime, have fun with the pattern.

Spring Samplers

Another season, another cross stitch sampler. Rose and I have finished our Spring Samplers.

That's Rose's on the left on pale blue, 32 count linen; I used a darkish cream 16 count Aida. We both had a lot of trouble choosing fabric for this design as there were so many colours that needed to show up on it. I'm not quite sure how many different blues Rose tried but, suffice to say, she'll be cross stitching on blue for quite a while. I had to change the white and one of the yellows for brighter shades to get them to show up against the cream (it's paler than it looks in that picture) and, even then, I wasn't too sure about it.

We got there in the end though. As is traditional, Rose ran out of thread for the border - the same green that we both ran out of last time - and I had to rush to get mine done before the end of the three months we set ourselves for each sampler.

The saga of me trying to sign my sampler in a straight line also carries on. With the Autumn Sampler, I dropped down a line half way through. I thought I'd got it right last time but, looking at it again, the '2021' isn't in line with the rest. Let's hope it's third time lucky. What do you think? Is it straight this time?

Would you like a closer look at my Spring Sampelr? This design is bursting with colour and full of little details.

Rabbits, birds and lots of flowers; those little purple ones remind me of Heart's Ease, the wild pansy and I had marmalade colour tulips like that in my garden this Spring. I thought the rain clouds and umbrellas were particularly apt as it rained throughout May here (which means my garden is now officially a jungle for cats again.

There are also sheep scattered here and there in the scene; my favourite is the one balanced on top of a hill, all on his own.

Here are my first three samplers all together. Don't they look good?

We're all ready to start our Summer Samplers now. Rose is coming to visit me next weekend - I can't wait! - so we're looking forward to being able to work on them together. 

I have to say, I'm quite relieved that I don't have to finish this one in three months. As it's the last in the series, it only has to be done in time to hang it up next year. While Rose is here we're planning to choose and order our sets of frames so that we're all set to hang the Autumn ones up at the start of September.