It's the Summer of Love

I used to hate summer. Now I bloody love it. I'm not a fan of the heat. But I love it when the temperature is around the low to mid 20s, and I can spend time outside in my little garden.

Recently I bought a punnet of this stunner.

It's called Phlox 'Popstar Red'. 

I saw it amongst all the other seedlings and it was like KABLAM in my eyeballs and I grabbed the last punnet.

I love adding little surprises into my pots. Like this white lobelia tumbling out of a white ceramic pot of candy pink geraniums.

I'm a sucker for violas too. I have planted loads in terracotta pots which I've then plonked around in the garden beds.

Plonk.

I bought this little Linaria a while ago. It's not really going nuts in the garden, but sitting there prettily like a little burst of sunshine.

I have no control over the dahlias anymore. And who the heck cares? They look fabulous.

The impatiens bloody love it under our pergola. They are going ballistic.

I've stuck some morning glory seedlings in random places. I added them to existing hanging baskets like here and they're climbing up up up! I think this one is called 'Grandpa Ott'.

When I started dating the Bear, he didn't see the point of gardening. I think his idea of gardening was to stick in a few yuccas and mulch the rest with that horrendous coloured bark. Now he is outside planting and harvesting more than me!

In fact now he has graduated from the School of Louise's Obsessive Gardening as he decided that we needed to create a Verge Garden.

A Verge Garden is when you plant on the council owned space between your property boundary and the road. 

There are loads of rules about what you can and can't plant on the verge. Our local council states there must be at least 1 metre between any garden and the road, no high edging and plants can't grow any higher than 1 metre.

We chose a selection of herbs, vegies and a couple of non-edible perennials to attract pollinators.

The plants we chose were:

1 x English lavender

1 x Curry plant

1 x Rosemary

Rainbow Chard seedlings

Calendula seedlings

Strawberry runners (dug up from the backyard)

Parsley seedlings

Chives

1 x Lemon Balm

1 x Thyme

Sage

1 x flowering Salvia

Mignonette lettuce

Once the plants start to get bigger we're going to stick up a sign for our neighbours welcoming them to help themselves to the produce. We'll see how it goes!

Hopefully the garden will thrive and it doesn't get damaged. We love the idea of sharing a space and some yummy fresh produce with the people around us.

When I was a teenager, I had a very brief dalliance with embroidery and cross stitch. I Didn't mind the cross stitch but was terrible at embroidery.

Recently I was sorting through my craft magazine freebies. You know those mini kits that come with Molly Makes magazines?

I have a huge stack of them. Sometimes I'll make the kits with cute felt animals. I liked the embroidery kits but hadn't opened them. So I decided it was time to give them a go.

The first one I tackled was this cute kit called Let Love Bloom. It was from Issue 87 back in 2017? Man, I hoard things for YEARS! 

The designer is Amanda Bryde from Brynn & Co and is available to purchase on their website. (I have included the links here in case anyone is interested but I don't collect any commissions if you buy. I just thought it's nice to link directly to the designer).

Image courtesy of Mollie Makes website.

The kit came with a little pink plastic hoop, all the required threads, a needle and a small printed piece of fabric. The printed fabric and the instructions in the magazine made this really easy to embroider. 

It was super fast to work up.

And then it was done. Even my french knots looked ok!

I found an online tutorial to stitch up and cover the back.

Then I dug up another little Mollie Makes kit for 2 small cactus plants. These were tiny!

Both were in 1 kit and designed by Sonia Lyne of Dandelyne.  (Once again I don't collect any commissions from these links. I just include them if you're interested!)

The fabric wasn't printed for these, but they are small and the instructions were fairly straight forward so I don't think I did too badly.

They're all on the wall of fame. 

I'm currently working on a pattern I purchased off Etsy.

I'm a huge fan of the Netflix series Sex Education. When I found this quote online, I had to purchase the cross stitch pattern....

It's still a work in progress but can you guess what it will say?

Louise

Red Haired Amazona