Pulled in multiple directions on a Slow Sunday..

 Hello - well that week certainly got away from me... I've been pulled in multiple directions by several different projects in the yard, in the house and in the crafty realm.  I'm having a hard time prioritizing what should I do next, cause I want to do all of it!!! Right now!!! LOL

The weather has taken a definite turn to Spring, which means... it's time to hit the garden centers!  Now I've only gotten to 3 so far... a slow start.. but I have plans lots of plans as there are several different categories of plants I'm interested in this year.. 

I started with my favorites... petunias and verbena... it is hard to judge from the picture but this wagon was BIG...

and  in this wagon are 24 4" verbena plants... I got 12 in the Peachy Keen variety and 12 in the Amethyst Sparkler variety... there are 15 different petunias... 3 Persian Shield, 4 osteospermum , 4 cuphea and 4  Nemesia... some of these are new to me plants. 

I would have gotten more plants but that was about all I could fit in the back of my Subaru... I forgot to take out Elliott's car seat and that takes up a lot of space.... 

The next day I hit what is probably the largest garden center in the area and came home with 20 cleome, a flat of asparagus ferns, a flat of dusty miller, 2 False Indigo Baptisia in the colorway Sparkling Sapphire and 3 more petunias.

And then on Saturday I returned to the first garden center and bought 10 more petunias... definitely a binge buying bonanza... good thing I don't drink, smoke, do drugs or gamble...LOL

Now when I bought all these pretties the 10 day forecast didn't have a low temperature below 40... but as of typing this on Saturday evening there are 3 days, a week out, that have lows in the 30's ... drat!! I know I'm pushing it... Mother's Day is the 11th and around here the last day for a frost is usually the 15th... soooo instead of planting anything I'm staging stuff and keeping things on my covered patio and in my garage overnight till I can be more certain it isn't going to kill all my new pretties

I've staged this planter on the edge of my patio...

And I'm working on the petunia display... 

If I counted correctly there are 23 different varieties of petunias... I'm going to do each shelf as a colorway but in looking at this picture I think I'm going to switch the pink shelf and the peach/orange shelf... I can't wait to get them into pretty ceramic pots but for the moment it is better to leave them like this as they will be easier to move to my garden wagon and take into the garage to protect them if those 30 degree temperatures materialize... it is a week away and I know how unreliable weather guys can be...sigh...

Since I put in the sprinklers it has rained again this week... mostly on Friday... and it's forecast to rain T/W/Th/ and maybe F... at this rate it's gonna be a while before I actually use them. 

I got an estimate for the privacy  fence ... 38 ft of 6 ft high vinyl  that never needs to be painted fencing with a gate that locks... I shot off the deposit for the project right away... hoping that will get started in the next week or two... I don't think it will take more than a day to install it.  Besides obscuring the view of my neighbors trashy yards it will give me a protected spot to start seedlings  and some rose bushes and hopefully re-route the deer. Win- Win!!

I spent hours on Saturday cleaning out my raised beds... on Wednesday I cleaned out the leaves which were all from my neighbor across the street's oak tree... and no sooner did I get that done than the 2 other neighbors to both sides of my house's maple trees started dropping those little whirlybird/helicopter seeds... thousands and thousands of them.. sometimes it looks like it is snowing they are coming down so fast... this is just one pile around my patio...

And they were all over the raised beds... and if I leave them they will sprout... so I went out and picked them out of the beds and then covered the beds with a weed preventing cloth... now when the rest of them fall I'll be able to sweep them off ... and I'm hoping it will help the soil warm up faster...but this was a tedious back breaking job that has my hands aching ... time for some ibuprofen... 

The end product of that project...

There are 6 beds... each is 3 ft wide by 6 ft long... sooooo... I picked helicopters out of 108 sq feet ...yikes! ...no wonder I'm sore. 

Around the house I finally got the motivation to do some Spring cleaning... I cleaned out all the drawers in the furniture in the living room and one drawer in the kitchen. I attacked my closet and went through about 75% of it and these 5 well stuffed bags went to Goodwill.

I got into my crafty room upstairs and sorted out and filed the stacks of cross stitch patterns I've been tossing in there... very satisfying.. and there was a huge basket of floss - DMC, Crescent Colors, Weeks Dye Works - that needed to return to their proper storage containers. Glad to have a bit of control over that room again, but that took waaaaay longer than I thought it would.

As you might guess from what I've been showing you,  I wasn't very crafty this week... probably because I was too pooped from cleaning and garden shopping and garden cleaning ...LOL  But I did find time to start a new piece... Here Come the Robins by WTN&T...

I do loves me some animals dressed is spiffy outfits... 

This will be so cute in my upcoming display of bird stuff... which I had hoped to start working on yesterday but it didn't happen... all my Easter stuff is still up ... maybe by next week I'll have the bird stuff out... maybe...

Here's where I am on the 18 patch Jelly Roll quilt...

I'm going with the 5 x 7 block layout so it is longer than it is wider... a better size for throwing over a chair... I need 7 more blocks... with all the rain forecast for this upcoming week there should be some sewing time ... I'd like to get this off the design wall and I have a a pile of quilts still waiting to be bound. 

In my defense the week was busy along with all my shopping and cleaning activities ... dinner on Monday night with friends, Elliott on Tuesday, lunch on Wednesday with my quilty lady friends, on Thursday garden shopping and I had to have a plumber come for a stopped up bathroom sink, and my financial planner came on Friday for our semi-annual review... heck it is a wonder I got anything done at all ...LOL

Today we're taking Nick out for his 35th birthday... how did he get that old??? Tomorrow which is his birthday he's doing lunch with a friend... Elliott's other Grandma asked me to swap her days this week so I don't have him till Wednesday... Thursday I have a dental procedure... ugh... but so far Friday looks open...and I know I'd like to do more garden shopping... the fence it going to allow me to play with roses ... and I want David Austin roses but not everyone has them... as I recall there is a garden center on the other side of town that carries them, so I need to go and check them out... and I'd love to get my window boxes planted up... I need Nick's help for that as I have to get up on the ladder for 3 of the 5 and I feel safer if he's kinda holding on ...but that may have to wait  on the weather.

So who knows what I'll actually get done this week... right now I have so many things I want to do...along with more Spring cleaning (the kitchen pantry needs attention) I bought a new rug and some new drapes for my bedroom, but the drapes need to be steamed and putting down the new rug mean moving all the furniture and taking up the old rug... so by my reckoning  I want to clean, garden, re-decorate, sew, and stitch.... and nap... I like napping too... for a little while in the afternoon... 

I'll link up with Kathy's Quilts and Quilting is More Fun than Housework... the guy who is going to put in one more landscape light fixture is suppose to come today... and our dinner reservation is early  so I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do today... maybe start putting away the Easter stuff ... or get a binding on one of the quilts piled up in my sewing studio... hope your week ahead has time in it to do all the stuff you want to do!!

happy stitching-

carol fun