Colours of Summer

I love it when my little garden explodes in Summer.

Lilium 'Scheherazade'

Queen Anne's Lace made me fall in love with the word 'umbel' because that is the name of this type of flower. 

This umbel looks humble. See what I did there? Ok, sorry. Won't do it again. (my fingers are crossed behind my back).

A funky orange trug of mignonette lettuces.

This Echeveria pops out the most gorgeous, beachy orange flowers.

I didn't get to do much during my whistlestop trip to the coast, but I did pop into a local hardware store which had a stand of these. It's Fuschia paniculata x arborescens 'Blutini' and after flowering produces edible berries. Apparently they look like blueberries but taste a little bit like kiwi fruit. After doing some research i discovered that most fuschias produce edible berries after flowering, but some taste yuck, and a few taste nice!

Fuschia paniculata x arborescens 'Blutini'

This massive beauty is Clematis 'Edomurasaki'. I ordered it online during lockdown. It arrived as a live plant. It's in a ceramic pot in the garden. Because the pot is in shade and cool, the plant shot up fast reaching for the sunny spots.

Beebalm aka Bergamot

My Mariposa plums are starting to ripen.

This planter box made out of pallets is filled with cosmos, zinnias, a dahlia, and the front row alternates with parsley and strawberries. If you look carefully, you might see some red strawberries through the parsley in the picture below.

I did plant marigolds in here too but they just disappeared under all those pink zinnias.

We're getting the most delicious strawberries.

In fact there are now loads of strawberry plants through lots of other pots and in the garden beds giving us a bumper harvest.

Many months ago I was wandering through one of our big craft shops. We had just come out of our first lockdown in May and were finally able to go out to some shops. I went in to look at macrame cord. Just one thing. I didn't buy any macrame cord. But on a whim grabbed one of these so called 'fun packs' of yarn. It was on sale at the time, otherwise I wouldn't have bought it. I was totally pulled in by the glossy, rainbow colours. 

I then shoved it under the couch and forgot about it.

Just before we went on our ridiculously short trip up to the NSW South Coast I was looking for a project which was compact and easy to crochet in the car. I grabbed this 'fun pack' (it sounds like a bag of lollies), a 3.5mm hook and scissors. I thought I would just make a continuous granny square blanket. Creating lots of little squares in the car is too fiddley, I wouldn't have brain power to work on a garment, and I wanted to play around with the bright colours.

I decided I was going to use every single skein in the pack. All the pinks, purples and blues, the citrusy oranges and yellows, the hot reds and the 70s browns. 

There was one of each colour, then 2 blacks and 2 whites.

I sometimes used a black or white stripe to transition to a new colour way.

I sort of worked in lots of 3 colours to help me decide which one to choose next. If one colour sort of looked good with the previous 2 colours I'd choose that one next.

If I ran out of a colour part of the way round, I would choose a completely different colour to pop in. I wanted it to look like a very deliberate, crazy choice. 

Like below when I ran out of dark wine red and switched to baby poo caramel. Because let's face it, most of us have found that in a nappy, am I right?

And then 70s carpet orange to white....

The yarn is a very glossy acrylic which is sold in larger skeins at that store which I had purchased in the past. I had accumulated a rather impressive stash of leftovers which I have dug out and added to the small remnants of the 'fun pack' (dear lord can they think of another name? It sounds like a lolly bag from the cinema). 

So I'm going to keep going with this stash busting blanket until all these little bits are gone!

Stay safe everyone !

Louise

Red Haired Amazona