Preparations have been underway for the annual Jane Austen tea party that will be happening tomorrow afternoon. My kitchen smells fantastic. My carpets have been vacuumed (though Abby has now pulled every last toy out of her toy box again). I even pulled the slipcover off the couch and threw it in the washer (oh, how I love slipcovers). A few random tasks remain, along with a bit of sewing, but most of them have to wait until Abby is in bed for the night so I've got a little lull. Just long enough to blog.

I'll try to share some pictures tomorrow.

We've been busy. After a trip out to the nursery and another to Canadian Tire we spent most of last night and this afternoon playing with plants and dirt.


I've got boxes of flowers along our front deck. My sister, Jane, and I grew the sweet peas and morning glories from seed and then picked up a few more plants to fill things out.


Rob put together our new lawn mower and cleaned up our front lawn. It still needs a good drink but looks so much tidier. That's got to be the fastest possible way to get rid of dandelions.


Two big half barrels (in an awesome yellow) are now hanging out next to the tomatoes Jane gave me. In a few weeks they'll start to show the tops of carrots.


Abby stayed outside with us the whole time we were working. She had a lot of fun chasing bugs and chewing the assembly instructions for the lawn mower but got pretty hot being in the sun for so long.


We were feeling the heat too so, along with an ice cube for Abby, I got some lemonade and cherries out of the fridge. We enjoyed them while admiring our handiwork.

Yesterday marks our first anniversary in this house. It's incredible to think we have been here a whole year. It feel so different now that it did when we moved in.

Oh ... and I got some yarn ... from the nursery.

Yep. I was walking around looking for someone to tell us what the tree we were looking at was, turned a corner in the shop and discovered a nice little display of Knit Picks yarns and needles and some good looking knitting books. It's just to the right of the seed potatoes.

I wanted to get some - to show support for their endeavour you know - and saw the basket of pima cotton at the bottom of the display. The blue and green were so nice and summery and I instantly thought of the Classic Washcloth in The Knitter's Book of Yarn. I scrounged up some needles and cast-on after dinner.


It's so soft!

My last project before we went on vacation. This one probably took twenty minutes from the idea to the finished item. This is one of my favourite skirts; it's a cotton linen blend twirly skirt and it had gotten a little too small. Not so small that it actually didn't fit - that's one of the nice things about twirly skirts - it just sat a little high. On other old skirts I find this fine but this one had a really wide waistband and I didn't like the way it was always running into my ribs.

I put on my skirt and marked where I would like the waistband to be, cut off the extra fabric (cutting right through the zipper), cut a long 2 1/4" binding strip from some cute fabric, folded it in half and sewed it along the cut edge of my skirt. I pressed my seam, folded the binding around to the back and sewed again in the ditch to secure it.


Voila, a much more comfortable skirt. The zipper is still kind of short (this skirt goes on over my head) and I might get around to replacing it sometime but it doesn't really bother me much.

Sadly the whole time we were on vacation it was very windy so this didn't get worn but I know it will see use this summer.