Japanese parcel

Look what I got in the post this morning!

A very beautifully wrapped parcel that has come all the way from Japan! Can you guess what it is? I'm sure that if you follow the very wonderful Lucy at Attic 24 then you should have absolutely no trouble at all in guessing what is inside the parcel!


Were you right? Yippee............ it's my very own copy of the beautifully illustrated Japanese book ~ Pretty Colour Crochet and Knit Goods ~ bought on Etsy from a seller called Pomadour 24. Now......... as it came all the way from Japan there is only one drawback and that is that the book itself is actually written in Japanese too! Fortunately for me all the patterns are also shown as diagrams and although I've never actually followed any crochet diagrams before I'm quite sure that it will be MUCH, MUCH easier to teach myself how to follow these crochet pattern diagrams that it will be for me to even begin to teach myself Japanese!!

As you will see from the photos I have busying myself this week by sewing in all the little end bits and joining up the granny squares on my colourful painbox cushion cover. I've nearly finished joining them all together now ~ I've just got to block it and then find something suitable to make the back of the cushion cover from. I usually just crochet the back of my cushion covers but this time I have another idea that I want to try out ~ I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will actually work out just the way I want it to!


I have also been out and about in the garden ~ pottering a little and enjoying the spring sunshine ~ I've been planting some pots with geraniums, sweet williams, trailing lobelia and sweet peas which should hopefully provide me with lots of beautiful colours in a few of months time. Do you see the very lovely colourful flower pots that I bought myself? I just couldn't resist buying them when I saw them ~ they really do make a very lovely change from the boring old terracotta ones that we normally use and I am really looking forward to planting those little pots up too!

Hope that you all have a very lovely weekend :O) xxx

Garden Loveliness

Earlier on in the week I just happened to take a look out of the window and noticed how bare and wintery my back garden was looking. I decided to take myself outside for a closer look and noticed that although most of the flowers had stopped blooming there was in fact quite a lot of colour still around.

Beautifully vibrant red Wintery berries::

A pretty pink rose ::


Some very fragrant Rosemary ::

And some lovely Geranium leaves ~ with a few little red flowers still out.

One of the things I love most about blogging is that it makes you far more aware of your everyday surroundings and I was actually quite surprised at how beautiful these plants were. I suppose that what I learned was that if you take the time to look a little bit more closely at everything around you then there is beauty and pleasure to be found in even the simplest of things and that there is plenty of colour to be found if you look hard enough for it.

Right ............ moving onto an entirely different kind of garden now.

Summer Garden Granny Squares to be more precise. I have now finished the first block of my Summer Garden Granny blanket ~ and I am very happy with how it has turned out. As you can see it is still looking a bit bunched up and wrinkly and it definitely needs to be blocked but it lets you get the general idea though. That’s one down and only about 29 more blocks to make!! I can definitely see this one being a very long term project! I must say that I am absolutely amazed at the speed that some lovely bloggy people can produce beautiful blankets!!

Enjoy your weekend ....... I hope it’s a good one :O)