Grey Skies

Well, the gloomy grey skies have conspired to keep me indoors this week. Although, true to the saying "Every cloud has a silver lining", this has meant that I finally sanded all my polymer clay lentil beads and can now start putting them into some actual jewellery. I managed to reward myself for all that work by making a couple of pieces and one is pictured below.


And there are other benefits. The on and off again sunshine and rain has made my garden go wild and, as long as none of us get swallowed by the knee high lawn and I continue to ignore the weeds elbowing their way in between the "proper" plants, I can smile every time I look out the window. The "Dig In" seeds (www.bbc.co.uk/gardening/digin) I managed to plant last month are growing well on my windowsill and I hope to get them out into the garden later this month. I'll certainly need to move the french beans before they get much more triffid-like. A little bit of clear weather will likely prompt a gardening frenzy and then I can leave it all to itself again for another wee while.

Speaking of time, there's not that much of it left until the summer holidays when, for six weeks, work takes a back seat to being a mum. Which means that I really should be filling every moment until then with getting as much done as possible. Ahhh, but all work and no play makes Jo a dull girl - so there might just have to be a little bit of fun in there somewhere, cue more experiments in polymer clay!

Watching Nature Work

Today I'm not thinking about crafts, I'm thinking about Spring. The snow drops are out in my garden (yes, probably everyone else is over it by now but this is the North of Scotland and we're a bit behind) and it was actually quite warm in the sun.

I'm looking forward to seeing the results of all the little green spikes that are currently crowding up through the soil, which isn't bad since some of them were actually pushing up through leftover snow just a couple of days ago. Last year I had the most gorgeous forest of muscari (pictured below, lacking in sunshine) along my front path, backed by daffodils. As I leave all my bulbs to their own devices, apart from a little helping hand distributing seeds to other parts of the garden, they'll probably be thicker than ever. In fact, I doubt there is any soil left between the bulbs in that particular section, they are just too tightly packed to fall over.


And as I walked my son home from school I was admiring everyone else's crocuses because I still haven't got around to buying myself any. I probably had people wondering what I was doing leaning over their fences and gesticulating at the ground. So before my neighbours decide I'm a danger to their gardens, I should make myself a shopping list and actually purchase the plants I drool over.