Grass looks greener in my sewing room!

Hi everyone,

For too long I've been on hiatus from sewing as well as gardening. That's why I'm posting these photos of my chicken pin-cushions: to encourage me to get through today's outdoor work chores. 

Chicken pincushion in batik cottons

Chicken conference

And right about now, I'd love nothing more than to be sewing. Plus, I feel badly about skipping a blog yesterday but you see, the gardens needed me. Desperately. I abandoned them last year, though I was perfectly healthy. I just took a wrong turn on the retirement road. I'll call it Volunteer Street! 

It all started with a quilt I made that I thought could earn a lot of raffle money for our community college's annual orchid show. Last April my quilt was done, and so, I thought, was my involvement! Of course the Orchid Show Committee urged me to join. Next thing I knew, I was rounding up speakers (orchid experts, authors, and biologists), curating an exhibit of 100-year-old pressed orchid specimens, soliciting for auction donations, exhibiting my quilt around the county and selling tickets. I could go on....but I won't. Lesson learned: be careful when you veer toward Volunteer Street.

Anyway, it cost us a summer of no garden maintenance and those sneaky weeds took advantage! Yesterday's garden antics involved a version of musical chairs that my husband and I dubbed "musical shrubs and trees." Our Western Massachusetts winter was cruel, and we lost several specimens. It didn't help that I mistook the Weigelia my husband suggested be moved into a lower garden....I dug up the wrong one! Had to dig another spot for that one as there was no point in returning it to its former home, now hidden by an ever-growing Japanese Maple. 

Two more evergreen shrubs had to be dug up and brought to the humus pile. We'd already eliminated two in May. Tim reduced our departed Redbud to a 4-foot trunk, which is held hostage by a mob of late-blooming irises around its base: only after they peak, can we can move them temporarily in order to excavate Redbud's rotten rootball. Whew, I'm tired all over again! And I still have to dig in the lilac I moved to make way for the lovely red-flowering Weigelia that my husband meant to be moved in the first place! To dig in the lilac, though, I first must clear a spot in the former garden plot, which looks like, well, an embarrassment. Ha! And just try getting a patch of grass repaired....gardening is not for wimps!

Now you know why the grass looks greener in my sewing room!

I wonder, do any of you ever feel like you took a wrong turn?

Mondays seem so full of promise, don't they?

It’s Monday. Maybe because I’m retired, Mondays are mostly quiet, a bit of a break from the flurry of activity weekends usually bring. It’s a great day to map out my week so I can be ready for a bit of entertaining next Saturday...nothing big, but still, I want everything sparkling and tidy. Ok, maybe tidy will have to do.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love it to sparkle too, it’s just that I can’t envision getting it all done because I ache from weeding and mulching and the thought of so much more left to do. Sometimes I wonder if I really look like a tortoise as I plod and crawl across each garden, tugging a straggling weed here or preening a plant there, shaking out mulch stuck between leaf and stem. I sure seem to move like one. I'm oh-so-grateful that Tim and my son, Alan, spent the day with me Saturday concentrating on this daunting chore.

Perhaps next year our schedule—and Mother Nature’s too—will be more conducive to early mulching chores, so we can finish long before our perennials sprout. You see, we traveled to Sorrento, Italy in April this year. It was worth the slip in our garden maintenance, of course, but we’re paying the price now with weeds run amok. That’s why this morning I’m drinking Lapsang souchong tea: its smoky, hearty flavor seems to promise extra strength for the gardening tasks that await. Ever try it?

Note to self: Hurry and finish essential gardening chores: quilting projects await!

This is an appliquéd frog square from the “Infrognito” quilt I made and donated to our community
college raffle (2013). It's also my “Inspiration” to begin another for Tim, who really wanted that one; 

but that, my friends, is a story for another day.

Do you sew or quilt?