Stitching and Gardening

That sums up my weekend. Okay, bye. Just kidding. 😉

Saturday was spent working outside. Terry mowed the lawn, having fun repeatedly emptying the bags for the new bagger attachment he bought for the lawn tractor. Then he tilled two of the garden beds for me, now all I have to do is rake out the remnants of the weeds and get planting. I will be putting in peppers and broccoli in one bed and two types of tomatoes in the other. Actually, I may put the tomatoes in one of the other two beds, since they have already previously resided in each of those tilled beds in the past two years. I want to make sure I rotate through, especially since my tomatoes tend to suffer from blight. At least I picked resistant strains this year.

Anyway, I was going to thin out the seedlings when I realized that the tomato “seedlings” were far too hardy for me to be able to stand to throw any of the thinnings out. So, I decided to extend our garden on the spur of the moment. There are now (I think) 16 tomato plants along the backside of the house, just to the right of the back door. Since the back door is off of our kitchen, I will easily be able to pop out and grab ripe tomatoes for dinner, if the plants take. With our rocky and clay-ridden soil, it’s hard to tell if things will grow, but I dug up plenty of earthworms while I was planting, which is always a good sign, plus I made sure that I used a pick to break up the soil enough for the roots to grow adequately for each plant. They are a little close together, but let’s see if they survive the transplant before we worry about such things, shall we? I was quite a dirty mess by the time we gave up for the evening, just before some lovely (I’m not being sarcastic) thundershowers rolled through. I love rain and enjoyed leaving the back door open to hear the rain coming down, smell the atmosphere being washed clean and feel the coolness coming in as the front moved through.

Today was stitching day. Seriously, I was really lazy. I have a pile of dishes to clean, laundry to wash and lots of computer work to do, but I indulged myself. I started a new project, Heartstrings by The Cat’s Whiskers Designs, after I saw Isabelle’s announcement on the Focus on Finishing blog about a bourse finishing class next weekend. I have always wanted to make a bourse and I didn’t feel like I had anything suitable in my waiting-to-be-finished pile (which is getting a bit hefty), so I started this design specifically with the intent of completing the stitching by this weekend. Not that I made a rousing start (there’s not even enough to make it worth photographing), but we’ll see what I can get done this week.

I also put several hours into Barnabee’s Quest, to make up for my lack of work on this WIP lately. I think I’m about halfway done with Part 2 now (which puts me at the halfway mark for the project) and I can’t wait to find some time to work on it some more.