Blowing in the Wind

We've had all weathers this week, from snowflakes to sunshine. The greenman has a smile on his face though a sure sign that spring is on the way. I also love the aging effect that the winter with all its wind and snow has had on the pig wind chimes.I took advantage of a couple of hours of blue skies and sunshine the other day to finish the dyeing that I started the other day.
It was great to see the fabrics on the line, dancing a merry dance in the breeze. As you can probably figure out I had a play with blues and pinks this time. Then to use up the last of the cotton I tried a piece in brown. This came out pretty dark in places, but some interesting colour variations I think. I also found a box of black dye in the cupboard that hadn't even been opened so for fun had a play with this too.

When it first came out of the microwave I didn't like it, but it's growing on me. I'm really surprised at the colour variations as I didn't mix anything up this is purely from the black dye powder, there are browns, greys, blues and blacks in here. I'm starting to see stormy skies in this piece.

We're just about half way through February and I'm also just about half way through my to do list. hopefully I can keep this up :)

Starting to make amends

After the sad frog disaster the other week, I have set about starting to make my garden a bit more wildlife friendly. I don't have a huge garden but there is stuff you can do even in the smallest space. I've started with something quick and easy. Some bird feeders scattered around the garden.

Having cats, you might think it's folly trying to attract birds to the garden, but my cats are mainly indoor types and don't tend to venture out too often, I've certainly never known them to catch anything. I also found something a bit more fitting to mark the froggies last resting place.

Beauty and Sadness

This is a slightly unusual and macabre blog post, definitely not my usual offering. But I'm feeling incredibly saddened by something that happened today and didn't want to let it pass by unmarked.

As it has been a dry if somewhat overcast day today I decided to venture out and do a bit of tidying up in the garden which has been sadly neglected over the last few months. I can't describe my sadness when I found not 1 but 4 beautiful but very dead frogs in the pond.

Even in death they look beautiful. I know frogs and toads aren't everyone's idea of pretty but I love all of the wonderful wildlife that is native to this island that is my home.

I am ashamed to say that although I find delight in spotting creatures of all shapes and sizes when out and about, I am very much ignorant when it comes to much of their habits and life cycles. I can only imagine that these poor fellows got trapped when the pond iced over. I feel an incredible sense of guilt about this. Having acknowledged in one of my very own blog posts not so long ago that the pond had iced over, why didn't I have the sense to go and break the ice? Would it have saved these poor creatures? I don't know.

All I know is that this poor face will haunt me for a while. Call me strange but I found it very traumatic fishing these guys out and was in tears by the end of it. I decided to bury them together in the garden, and for now have marked the site with one of my fairy toadstools.Tomorrow I will go out and look for something more fitting for a grave marker. I am resolved now to do more to encourage wildlife to my garden and to also look in to providing a safe environment for them to live in.

Home Grown

Well anyone who knows me will know that far from having green fingers I actually have black fingers and manage to kill anything I try to grow.

Our garden has been a bit of a mess for a while but this year we have finally found a bit of time and money to start tidying things up a bit. We only have a small garden (which is probably a good job given our track record) and have a small border running part of the way down one side. On a whim we decided to buy a few seeds and lo and behold we have actually managed to keep somethings alive.

We have some radishes, beetroot, lettuce and spring onions. Actually the onions don't look as though they are doing too well but everything else is coming along. Here are our first pickings.

They taste good too (and this coming from a girl who isn't overly keen on radish!). I think really some of these are planted a bit too close together but we only have a small space and TBH we didn't think we'd have much hope of growing anything anyway so not a bad first effort. I'm looking forward to sampling the rest.