Gardenia Season

On Facebook, you can see what you posted on this day in years past, and it seems that just about this time each year, I am celebrating my gardenia blooming. I have had this plant for about 20 years. It was originally a cutting from a plant that my parents have had for about 50 years.

It has its ups and downs, mostly relating to where it is. Over the summer, I put the plant on my front porch where it gets the afternoon sun. In the winters, I bring the plant inside and place it in a south-facing window where I hope that it can absorb as much light as possible.

A few weeks after I bring it in, usually around Thanksgiving, the plant rebels and starts throwing its leaves on the floor. But once I put it outside, usually in late April or at Easter, but this year not until mid-May, it starts getting healthy again. When I open the windows and the plant is blooming, the scent is glorious. It’s sweet and peppery at the same time.

The blooms are small, only about two or three inches across. So that poses a dilemma of what to put the buds in. Earlier this year in England, I bought several salt & pepper shakers, but the salt had corroded the top of one of them. Viola! A perfect bud vase.

In my office, I keep a small Chinoiserie vase on my desk and when the gardenia’s blooming, I bring blossoms in every few days.

I also have some small Wedgwood vases which work perfectly.

Having fresh flowers around is very important to me, and I love to photograph them for my Instagram account in their various vases.

Limes

One of my neighbours texted me to come over, as they’d been to an Amish produce auction and had “won” a case of limes and  a load of other produce. She gave me a dozen or so, along with some mangoes, bok choy, garlic (just a dozen, from the 30 lb. box) and a few other bits and pieces.

I am trying to think of some good uses for the limes and have come up with some good ideas, but since you all always have brilliant suggestions, I thought I’d open the floor…

I adore limeade, but I think that drinking it for a week might make me hate it. Of course, there are margaritas, but since I have to work all week, I’d not be able to take much advantage of drinking more than a few. Key lime pie is a perennial favourite, but I don’t want one in the house.

I love lemon curd, so I am sure that I’d like lime curd just as much!

What are your suggestions? I’d love to know what you’d do with the limes!

The Chandelier in the Tree

In my wee backyard, I have a wrought iron chandelier which has been hanging from a branch in a tree for about two years.

I can’t remember where I first saw this, but I knew that when I got a house with trees and a yard, it would be one of the things I’d do! I was scrolling through that major time-suck, Pinterest, and found some great images of chandeliers in trees. Here are some of the best ones.

Most of the images seem to be part of wedding themes, but I like mine just for the fun of it.

Some, like this image, are way over-the-top, and I almost think that there’s too much happening here.

This one’s fun because the chandeliers are all different. They look like they were found at yard sales or thrift shops. I wonder how they’re lit.

This is pretty amazing. I am sure it doesn’t live outside like mine does!

Chains are probably a much better idea than a two-year old hemp rope, right?

This takes it a little further and adds strands of crystals with a drop.

And here’s my little chandelier, just after dusk, all lit up!

This makes me happy, but I think my yard guy hates it!

The Downstairs Loo

As you may remember, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with the downstairs bath in my house. It’s pretty small, but it does have a walk-in shower and it’s the bathroom that gets used the most. I tried papering a bit of it with pages of old books, but they make it smell musty, which makes me crazy. I also thought about some large-scaled papers a few weeks ago, here.

On the way to High Point, I stopped in Richmond, Virginia at a place called Diversity Thrift. It’s about 15,000 square feet of everything. It’s gotten very high marks for its vast and ever-changing inventory. As I poked around, I stumbled across a bin of wallpapers, many of them unopened in their rolls. The name Nina Campbell caught my eye and so I grabbed the roll of paper.

To my surprise, it was exactly what I have been searching for! It’s a pale colour, an interesting print and it will match the shower curtain wonderfully. Even better, it was dirt cheap.

So I grabbed all three rolls and stuck them in my cart. When I finally got around to checking the price, I could only find it in pounds…£52 a roll, in fact! With today’s exchange rate, that’s about $87 per roll!

The print is called Woodsford, and is named after a castle in Dorset, England, which is owned by the Landmark Trust. The house has one of the largest expanses of thatched roof in England. It’s available for rent and sleeps eight!

The pattern is silhouettes of trees, similar to the Arbres de Matisse which Billy Baldwin used to great effect.

It also comes in a fabric. The pillow on the right is the same colourway as the paper I found. Here are some images from the catalogue.

I think I got a great deal and now I am excited to paper the small bathroom!

Oh, I also picked up a great blue & white tea pot, some books for the trip and a bag of crystal stoppers for decanters. I always find decanters without stoppers, and resist buying them, so now I have a selection from which to choose!

High Point: The Road Home

I have to say that I am so happy to be home from High Point. I almost chucked it all and left on Sunday afternoon, but I had an obligation to fulfill and it would have bothered me not to do so.

When I drove down to High Point, I took the fast route – I-95 and I-85, but I realized that I missed driving the slower route, the one that skirts around the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains south of Charlottesville, Virginia. I know the route well, as I have friends whose family owned a winery about 50 miles south of Charlottesville and I went there frequently for several years.

Some places along the road have long swooping curves that follow the creeks that come down from the hills. In other places, you have the mountains rising up on either side of you.

The clouds played across the still leafless hills,

and here and there, you could tell that spring was on its way… several weeks late.

I always love getting my first glimpse of the Blue RIdge mountains, which are the eastern-most part of the Appalachians.

The six-hour long drive gave me a good chance to clear my mind, reflect on the past few days, and settle back down. Thanks so much to everyone for the kind comments and e-mails. It has meant everything to me.

I have hundreds of images to edit, and so I will probably pick up the High Point recaps later in the week.

Six More Weeks?

The most depressing news I heard all weekend was that the groundhog in Pennsylvania saw its shadow, which means six more weeks of winter. I know that here in my little neck of the woods, we’re all about finished with the snow and slush, the salt encrusted cars, bitter cold temperatures, and the black ice.

The one saving grace is that the sun is setting at 5:30 p.m. That makes a huge difference!

The Cashmere Quilt

When I moved into my house a few summers ago, I didn’t pack away my sweaters and they were selectively chewed by moths. I couldn’t bear to toss them, so I made them into scarves which I mostly sell, or give away as gifts.

However, all along, I’ve been thinking of how I can make a blanket out of the sweaters, which I now buy for a few dollars each at thrift stores. You’d be amazed at how many I find.

A few weeks ago, I came across a technique that was the solution for the blanket. I needed to be able to patch the squares together without having rough edges. I found a Korean process for seams that would work perfectly. The finished edges looked nearly identical on the front and the back, and this was exactly what I wanted. You can see where I started the project here.

I first put together strips of 11 blocks of 8x8 inch cashmere squares. I was never good at maths, and so my calculations were slightly off and the finished blanket was a wee bit bigger than I anticipated and it was very ungainly to sew.

It wasn’t until I put it on the bed that I realized exactly how big it is, so I may actually have to cut it down a little bit and maybe make another blanket. This one’s already spoken for – actually, it’s a Christmas present for my mother (she already knows because I wanted her to pick out the colours).

It’s puckered a bit at the hems, but that’s mainly because I haven’t blocked the piece yet. That will flatten it out and shape it.

Not all of the patches aligned exactly, but once I saw the finished product, I realized that I liked the slightly off-set look of the pieces.

I discovered that the patches with the cables, particularly a certain sweater, stretched more than the other pieces, so that accounted for the lack of alignment.

Over all, I am pretty pleased with the way this turned out, and now I am going to make one for myself!

And then I am going to wish for a very cold winter, because this is going to be so cozy and warm!

Oh, The Weather Outside is Frightful…

Sunday was a crazy day, weatherwise! We had just left breakfast as the first flakes began to fall.

About a half an hour later, I let Connor out and was startled to see how much snow had already fallen.

It continued to fall all afternoon at rather an alarming pace – about an inch an hour! At the same time, the Ravens-Vikings game was beginning downtown…

While we’ve had many snowy days in Baltimore, we’ve never had it snow during a Ravens home game, and during any breaks in the action, snow plows tried to clear the field, so the players would know where they were!

If you didn’t watch the game, you missed an amazing last two minutes:

Meanwhile, back at my house, we toted up about four inches of snow, with another anticipated inch of ice on top of that, and from what I just heard, a thunderstorm. Oh, great.

I took advantage of being house-bound to work on my cashmere blanket project. I mistakenly thought it would take about a week to finish, but then I got an order for some of my cashmere scarves, so I’ve been working on them.

How was your weekend? How’s the weather where you are?