How does your garden grow?

My peonies are out and looking gorgeous, this variety is called 'bowl of beauty' and it definitely lives up to it's name don't you think? With all this warm weather we have been outside alot. Flopsy Bunny has discovered the joys of raking and planting seeds and we are going full steam ahead with the veggies although I know deep down in my heart that the slugs will eat everything ...

We had great fun making wigwams for DH's bean plants, afterwards he reminded me that they were a self-supporting dwarf variety which didn't need the canes ... oh well Flopsy Bunny and I enjoyed ourselves!

Reshuffle

Very topical at the moment I know, what with the cabinet reshuffle, but we've been having a reshuffle at home too! With Little Roo's arrival the question of who was going to sleep where seemed obvious - Flopsy Bunny would move into the spare room and Little Roo would take her room - easy! Or so we thought. The problem was where to put all the things that were in the spare room and this has orchestrated a ripple that has run through the whole house. There are still some periphery ripples but in the main it's done. Flopsy Bunny is sleeping in her new room with most of her toys. Little Roo is sometimes sleeping in his room but preferring to sleep in our room if he can get away with it! The assorted clutter and stuff has either been thrown out, found new homes or been hidden in the black hole that we call the loft for further deliberation at a later date!

One of the main problems is that I'm a hoarder and I come from a long line of hoarder's. I believe that actually I'm very green as I tend to hold on to things "in case they are useful in the future", maybe I've inherited the make do and mend war mentality of my grandmothers. Although as DH pointed out when he discovered three big bags of bags (not even handbags but paper bags you get from shops or gift bags given to us over the years) that even I couldn't use all those and that they were just taking up space - he had a point. So I've been ruthless. I've also discovered a wonderful blog about spring cleaning your house in 10 days! (my sort out has taken 6 months and is ongoing ... but never mind).

Anyway, one of the causalities of my tidy up were all my magazines - no where to store them, so I have been ripping out pages to stick into a book (when I have the time) which I can look at to give me inspiration. The photo above is a selection of the pages I've pulled out. But I have found some really good articles, wonderful photos and images and lots of recipes for jam so the whole process, in the main has been very useful! The other hit of the mass tidy up is that I've found a new home for all my craft things, everything in one place so I'm very happy about that - just need to get making now that I've got some space to do it in!

Bib O'Love ... well sort of

I stumbled across this bib on Ravelry (yes my favourite site!), it's from Mason-Dixon Knitting. A good way to use up any yarn hanging around. I had bought the green wool originally for the baby kimono as I had an idea of doing stripes or bands of colour but then decided to go for just one colour. So I used the green for the bib and the left over blue to do some stripes at the bottom. The ties are a bit too long but Little Roo is quite a big baby so I'm hoping he will soon fit into it. There has been lots of dribbling recently, with fingers in mouth so I can only guess there's a tooth or two coming through. Also we start weening him tomorrow (eek!) so the bib has been made just in time!

I can now start on my next project which is actually already underway and I'm very excited about it ... more on that later.