Working on my garden (very slowly)

I must be the slowest gardener on the face of the planet... A few weeks ago Winn Dixie had hibiscus on sale for $12 each, so John bought me two, and I've been getting the side of the driveway ready to plant... this is as far as I've gotten in two weeks, but at least I'm trying! Since we rent, I'm trying to get the garden in as cheaply as possible in case we have to abandon it for some reason, but I'm very excited to finally have some plants of my own. I've been staring at the empty grass all year long and imagining it with hibiscus and other tropical plants making it interesting. If we're still here another few years, it'll be the back garden's turn but for now I'll settle for a properly edged driveway...

Day one - Buy shovel, dig hole and plant pink hibiscus... (John dug the hole for me)

Day two - root out grass in start of garden bed area...

Day three - buy flowers (dwarf zinnia and some kind of miniature yellow daisy thing), and bricks for edging... Day four - buy hand trowel and start burying bricks. At this rate it's going to take me a month to finish the bed, I just hope I can get it done before it gets too hot...

I'm very happy with the front of the house now... I got a garden bench with the last of my Christmas money, and a cute wind chime for Easter...

Doesn't this look lovely... the gardenia is flowering like crazy this year! (ignore the recyling bin in the foreground, it was trash night) You can smell the perfume from the house when the wind blows in the right direction.

Cranes in our garden!

Last night I saw a pair of sand hill cranes circling in for a landing by the drainage pond, whooping their little hearts out. I thought that was pretty cool, and I rushed outside to take a picture before they walked away. This morning they came back and got up close and personal! John looked out the window and saw a pair of Sandhill Cranes on our front lawn. What glorious birds they are... and this pair was soooo tame! Our neighbour spends a lot of time outside and he's been feeding them snacks, so they expected us to do the same, and they came right up to us begging for treats. I pulled some bird seed down from the feeder and put it on the ground for them to peck up, and they had a snack... but then the male got overly interested in our car and started pecking at his reflection in the side mirror to scare away the 'intruder'. Silly bird!

Wildlife in our garden

I love animals and birds, so I bought a bird feeder for our yard... after a month of hanging in the (empty) backyard it was completely ignored so I moved it to the tree out the front, where it only took the critters a week to find it... so far we have a pair of cardinals who visit daily, a woodpecker stopped by this morning ( but didn't stay), and we have squirrel thieves! I think I'm going to have to get a squirrel-proof feeder to make sure the birds still have something to eat too... (oh, and the heron was in our back yard after a big storm that flooded the low part of the yard. The cats were VERY excited to see it wandering around out there...)

Craft Room again

I've finally got the craftroom kind of like I want it... when we got out new tv for the living room (doesn't it look good?) John mounted it on the wall and I rearranged the furniture to fit.

He bought me a Roku box for the craftroom and hung the old set up for me so I can watch netflix while I craft (we don't have cable in there, that would cost too much extra)... I hung my shower curtains on a tension rod, put some of my favourite pictures I'd drawn up above the closet, and I found some cute silver butterfly wall stickers at the Dollar Tree to fill in the blank space on the wall and tie the tv into it. They only had two packs left and it took all of them - if I can ever manage to find any more to match, I'll continue the butterflies up over the door (on the left side of the closet).

Problem is, that if you open the pretty curtain on the cupboard, this is what you see inside... a big pile of JUNK and empty moving boxes, a pile of stuff waiting to go to the thrift store for donation, and not much else that actually needs to be there.

 I would just love to turn it into a craft closet and get all of my stuff neatly put away so that we can bring a daybed or a guest bed into the room, while the stainless steel storage rack will move out to the laundry with the christmas decorations, cat carriers etc that we don't need regularly. But before I can do that, we have go find a way to fit all of THIS into that closet. Wish us luck...

Still to be added (if we can find the money, which probably won't be for a long time unless we stumble across some super bargains)

• - a daybed with nice cushions...
• - white frilly valances above the closet and the window (matching)... to hide the fact that a shower curtain is only 72 inches long while a closet door is 80 tall, and tie the two openings together.
• - SHELVES in the closet. Not sure if we'll be able to remove the one fixed shelf that's already there or if we should work around it. 
• a smaller computer desk. Since I have a whole table to do my crafts on, I don't need such a large desk any more, plus this one is falling apart as I look at it! 
• Some kind of decorative feature for the corner of the room under the tv. Thinking maybe a white wrought-iron style plant stand. Or we could just put a filing cabinet over there and get the paperwork out of the plastic storage bins I've got it in now... whatever we get, it just has to be white or silver - white or silver looks by far the best with the blue walls...

Watoto Children's Choir

Today we went to the Jensen Beach Community Church to see the Watoto Children's Choir... it was a lovely performance. And the Watoto community is doing an invaluable service to their community - they care for six thousand children and infants all the way through to adulthood, and women in need, educate them, teach them practical work skills, and help them to become community leaders... they've been operating for twenty years and they've helped ten THOUSAND children. The children's choirs travel the world raising awareness, and funds, and I'm sure it gives the kids a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel. Now for the pics...

Singing Christmas Tree

I can't believe I haven't posted any pics since July! I'm going to make up for it now... this month we've gone to three concerts and dinner-and-a-movie for our Anniversary, plus one day I went for a lovely walk on the beach with my camera... Firstly, the Hobe Sound Bible Church Singing Christmas Tree...

The moon was rising as we pulled into the carpark, in a HUGE golden orb.

They had a full house, and this was the third of four performances

Carolers

The children's choir was adorable

The Tree and Angels

Have a Blessed Christmas...

Two big creative projects

I've done two big projects this week... the first was to decoupage the grotty old (scratched, paint-laden) craft table that I've been using ever since we were married (a friend gave it to me for free because it was so beat-up)... I put a plastic tablecloth on it to cover up the marks and called it all good, but it finally occurred to me that I could do something much more permanent (and elegant) with a bottle of mod-podge and my scrapbooking supplies. It took a day to do the initial work, and it's going to take a few more to put the top coats on it but I'm very pleased with it.

The second project was recovering my three-wheeled walker with some lovely pastel duck tape, and then decorating the basket with ribbon and flowers. It took a full week to get the tape applied because it was a heck of a lot more fiddly and difficult than I'd expected, but I love how it came out. Today I decorated the basket with a vintage ribbon and silk flowers that I assembled with my glue gun. I didn't want to put any glue on the ribbon because it IS vintage (practically antique) and I might want to take it off again, so I sewed the ribbon onto the basket and then I rigged up wire fastenings for the flowers with wire so that I can remove them again by cutting the wires. I tried all sorts of fasteners for the flowers, but what worked in the end were long thin pipe-cleaners - the wire's more flexible than floral wire and far less pokey because it's got the coating on it. Again, it was fiddly but I'm thrilled with how it came out. I like it a lot more than my other walker... at some point I'll probably get more flowers and redo the lavender one too, but not right now! The best thing about both of these projects? I used almost entirely supplies and materials I already had on hand. I only had to buy the mod-podge and the pastel tape. Everything else was in my craft collection waiting to be used. :)

Now for the photos...

I had tons of the flowers, so while I had my glue gun out I whipped up a couple of decorated hair clips (I made the red one a few weeks ago with temporary gluedots, but I wanted to make it permanent with the gluegun...)