It's all about the yard, baby!

I took last Friday off and powered through the rest of clearing up the garden.  I even bought two new plants to put in the space.  But, more about that later. 

I did a lot of sewing, too.  I had to take all four corners off the arc quilt and put them on again.  The corners are curved and the curves don't spread to create 45* angle where they end and join the straight side borders that end in a 45* angle.  It was causing the corners to roll up and stand up.  They were never going to lay flat.  So, I had to take off the corners and about a foot of side border in both directions and push some fabric toward the corner so that I could get them to lay flat.  The, I used a Sally Collins technique and spritzed the heck out of it, ironed it down and sat a ruler on top to hold it flat, then weighted that with the iron.  When they dried, they lay flat.  And, now that the bias edges have stretched where I need them to be, it's gonna be all right. 



 

In case you'd lost your belief that spring would ever come, here's what it's going to look like when it gets there.  I picked an Iris up from the sidewalk where someone had kicked it out of the ground and now I have several clumps.  The yard it got kicked out of belonged to a very sweet lady who loved her garden and I'm glad to have this reminder of her. 

 

I don't usually take "before" pics.  I'm usually deep into a project before I realize that the transformation would be interesting.  But, I thought to take a picture of the side bed before I started digging.  I was already nearly across the back, which wasn't nearly this overgrown and I was longing to get started over here.  Those plants were put in 18 years ago in small clumps and had been allowed to take over the entire section, choking out anything else that was there. 

This is the after.  Mostly, I dug things up, divided them, let a lot go, and replanted what I already had.  I don't believe I need a lot of new plants when I have so many sure bets in my existing perennials.  The chair belonged to Linda.  When she was in the care facility, she asked us to take it and put it in our garden.  It sat on the deck for two years before I got around to creating a space in the garden, but here it is, and she would have loved sitting there and looking at the back flower bed. 

 

At the far left, I had a little space, so I treated myself to that Shasta Daisy.  The iris and the daylilies came from places where they were getting too much shade.  The back has a row of turks cap that I dug up and replanted.  In the front, there's a verbena that I pulled from a pot where it had survived, but not thrived for two years.  And, I topped it off with some dusty miller to give it some really different leaves. 

 

This is the back bed.  It mostly looks like dead leaves right now, but I promise that doesn't last.  Soon, you won't be able to see the ground back there.  We just need the rainy season to happen first.

I thought I'd share another pic of the studio.  A friend from guild has her miniature quilts all around the top of the walls in her studio and I didn't want to do exactly that, but I did want something that would show them off.  This is what I decided on. 

They also tell a story about how my quilting has developed in a counterclockwise way, starting with the gold and blue quilt to the left of the aquarium and ending with the baskets in the upper left.  I know, you wouldn't normally tell a story backward, but they didn't fit the wall the other way round. 

Everybody have a great week!  No yard signs this week, but I did want to give a big shout out to Pete Buttigieg.  He carried the flame of gay acceptance further than anyone has so far.  One day, when we've caged the haters, it won't matter whether a candidate is gay or not.  It will only matter whether they are qualified.  Pete showed us it's possible to get national acceptance as a candidate.  He was not chased off the stage by the haters.  Every election cycle, more gay and trans people get elected to office.  That's how you solidify change.  That's how you observe change.  No matter what the haters say, time can't go backward and erase change.  And, the more they fight it, the worse it's gonna hurt when it knocks them down and rolls over them. 

Lane