Not Quite Spring Enough

 

   It's been chilly here in the wilds of urban Pittsburgh, so nothing has been planted in my new raised beds.

Tomorrow I plan to sprinkle some seeds on the soil on the north/alley side of the new fence, just to keep the weeds down.  When the overnight temps have warmed up a bit more I'll plant some heuchera and some small variety hostas back there interspersed with vinca and some impatiens for color.  I have lily of the valley and some snowdrops to go in there, too.  People walk their dogs along that alleyway, and I don't really want to plant much that takes a lot of work to maintain, but I want it to look nice.  

There has been progress made in the sewing rooms!  Hubby carried my unused desk down to my "
office" for me and cleared up about 10 square feet of floor space.  I spent a few hours vacuuming and  putting various bits of clutter away in their proper places.  The room still looks like the remains of a tornado strike, but the basic idea of what it's supposed to look like is emerging.  (We shall not speak of what the other room looks like,  I literally can't get in to it because I shoved a couple of things into the doorway so Hubby could get through with the desk.)

  My smocking chapter is gearing up for a little midweek retreat and I've been spending time pulling threads in linen to make nicely edged fabric blanks for our project.  I'd bought a yard from one of the big-name fabric and craft stores that took me nearly 4 hours to pull 3 threads! Four HOURS!  The linen threads were not tightly spun and kept fraying and breaking, so I had to dig around to find the loose end about every two inches.  The other yardage I had came from linen-store.com and it took me less than 45 minutes to do the first two thread pulls.  I ordered more so I can replace the Bad Linen.  I did come up with one handy thing: using a fine crochet hook to grab broken threads is a lot easier than trying to pry the thread up with a needle.