there are a few highlighted words in this blog, click them for relevant links.
here are the final plans for the conversion of the outbuilding at the bottom of the garden, my area is the one marked "studio" on the right, and rog's area is the one on the left marked "study". we'll both end up with interesting shapes to work with, I'm really looking forward to it. still waiting for builders quotes - why do they take so long?
sorry to bore you with more pictures of cassie, I'm still practising my crochet, so have made her a couple of mats to lie on in her favourite places, our bed, above, entrance hall stool next to radiator below.
gerry is a wonderful sausage maker (a lovely man who makes great sausages). he comes to devizes market to sell his produce every week, I've been buying sausages from him for over a year now. rog is a real sausage roll fan and when he suggested I could try to make some by wrapping pastry around a sausage (ha ha), I asked
gerry if he could make me up a batch of sausage meat to our favourite recipe (pork and black pepper), which he did, and last night we had the most wonderful sausage rolls I have ever tasted. thanks gerry. please click on the highlighted gerry for a link to his website and if at all possible give his sausages a try, they are truly made in heaven (well hungerford, actually, but its close).
my friend rachael is a fabulous knitter, and if you visit her
fanpage you will see some lovely donkeys that she has knitted for the
donkey sanctuary. I have sent off for the pattern and am going to have a go myself when it arrives. in the mean time I've just bought some lovely yarn from ebay, and dashed up a quick square to see how it makes up, see below, although the colour hasn't come out quite right, its a bit more pinky than it appears in the photo, but I love it. (dont worry, I shant be using it for the donkeys!)
and finally, I had a lovely time yesterday afternoon pottering about in the garden, did lots of tidying up jobs and got everything ready to start sowing seeds for the hanging baskets later today, but first its off to the kitchen to make another batch of bread.
alex is a student, therefore very hard up. last weekend he completely forgot it was mother's day, so this weekend he came home, and brought me some flowers, they are freesias and as close to blue, my favourite colour, as he could find. thankyou alex, they smell gorgeous.
this is my second spring in this house, I bought some crocuses in september, but for one reason or another, I forget now, they didn't get planted until after the very hard winter we had, so none of them have showed yet. however this little crocus has appeared in the front garden, it may have been there last year, I cant remember, but its at the front and I certainly didn't put it there. welcome little crocus.
the first daffodil to open this year is also at the front, I moved it there from the back last year, its just outside the lounge window and I can see it from where I sit at my desk. there are loads more almost ready to open and in a week or two my front garden will be a mass of yellow.
whoopee, yesterday I finished digging over my temporary vegetable patch. it has a load of homemade compost and lots of bedding compost from my old pots and hanging baskets from last year dug into the dark clay top surface and greensand which is about a foot down, so hopefully it will be a nice tasty mix for the vegetables. I've already planted the desiree potatoes that I saved, looking forward to eating them already.
this is a photographic cock-up (please excuse my french). the wiltshire air ambulance is based not too far from here in the grounds of the wiltshire police HQ. yesterday it was taking off as we walked past and I was concentrating so hard on focusing on the helicopter that I didn't even notice the fencing!
