winter blooms...

Earlier this month, I posted a picture of our Christmas cactus and how it was starting to bloom with the arrival of the colder weather...

I thought I would update you on its blooms... we turned it so that the flowers that are actually blooming are facing in, normally that side of the plant are towards the window. As you can see we have lots of blooms as well as three different colours of flowers... we have light pink (almost white) a darker pink and an orange all in the same pot. If the cacti continue as they have in past years, we will have continuous blooms on them from now till about March if not April, depending on how cool our weather will be!

That's it for today, no stitching to show, but I'm working on the tulips so hopefully I'll be able to show some good progress soon!

fall clean up

Well you can definitely tell winter is on the way.. the air is cripser, the temperatures are cooler, and of course if you look at the garden there is literally nothing left after the fall clean up...

Here is our garden after hubby and my dad did the cleaning...

You can also tell winter is coming becuase our Christmas catus is starting to slowly bloom... this is a picture of our largest one, and you can see the blooms starting on the left hand side, closest to the window...

And I hate to say it but the weather man did say we may get some SNOW tonight! Eeek!! I hope it's not true... or at least if it is that it won't be too much and that it won't last too long yet...

cherry season and more.. post 3- last one

Cherry season or I should say sour cherry season is upon us here in our house. We have two small trees in the yard and they are, or I should say were full of cherries. We picked a bunch today. Here are some pictures to enjoy.

We had quite a few this year, bumper crop so to speak. We kept a little for ourselves, and gave most of it away to friends. There is still a lot on the trees but two sets of friends are coming tomorrow to continue the harvest. :O)

I made piskota out of some, as well will try making some hideg meggy leves as well with our batch. I'll let you know how the soup turns out, as we've already tasted the piskota and it turned out pretty darn good!

It also is fire season in BC, and they have some pretty nasty fires burning in the province - quite a few actually, and quite large. The smoke from these fires have blown over to our province as well as supposedly the next province over - Saskatchewan. I took some pictures yesterday of how hazy it was from the smoke. These were taken from the Hungarian hall - the parking lot and the front. Normally from the parking lot we have a clear view of the mountains, as well as on our drive to the hall, we can usually see downtown - not so for either one.

And last but not least a few pictures of our hawks and other wildlife~ :O)

The hawk babies have been getting braver, as it was only just a couple of weeks ago that they were scared of squirels, especially if they got too close on the same tree that they were on, and now the hawks are going after the squirrels.

Also we've had a lot of dragonflies this year, it seems that there are more than normal, and larger too! They are so pretty to watch, just not so much when they fly straight at you!

Well that is enough posting for now, I've basically caught you all up on everything going on here at the homestead! Till next time... and happy stitching!

stitching and garden photo update...

My holidays have been great so far, I've been enjoying myself tremendously and even relaxing a bunch. I really could get used to this!

Anyways, I thought I would update with more pictures. Yesterday was our SAL day and even the best laid plans don't always work out.

We started out with a lovely late breakfast with friends, and it was great to sit down over a bagel and starbucks drinks and just chat and catch up. Then hubby and I were to head to the mountains and enjoy the rest of the day there, but something came up and in the end hubby ended up being busy and I ended up enjoying the day stitching... so I had much more stitching time that I originally thought, so I got some pretty good progress in on Molly.

Though I'm not sure if you can tell in this picture (unless ofcourse you click it to make it bigger) but she seems to have some creepy lizard looking eyes... I didn't really notice this until I stitched them... oh well, the over all look of the pattern is what I love, so I'll just have to get used to her eyes staring at me while I finish working on her. :O)

Last week I pulled out Quaker Samplings again, and continued along with that one. Here is my progress on it as well... As of Saturday I had all of what you see done except for the center of that large quaker motiff on the bottom, I had a wonderful stitching afternoon with another friend today, and I filled that in this afternoon.

Here is a close up of what I stitched today...

And more and more flowers are starting to bloom in the garden, especially more poppies right now, so I thought I would show those off, as well as my kitty who I haven't shown in quite sometime - it is difficult to photgraph an all black kitty, but she and the weather cooperated with me yesterday when I took her photo...

And last but not least I would like to show you our "new" neighbour! The reason for the " " marks is that, we used to have a set of hawks that lived in one of our trees but for the last few years they had moved away, and I'm happy to report that they are back, this time in our neighbour's yard.

in the garden...

a little bit of spring and some stitching...

First off, here are the progress pictures that I promised in my last post...

Fairy Moon by Mirablilia:

and my Sunday SAL progress of Molly by Carriage House Samplings:

You should check out Barbi's progress as well...

And now for a little spring... finally some lilacs from our small tree...

I try not to cut too many blooms off as its still a fairly small tree, and we don't get that many blooms a year, but it so hard not too, as they look and smell so lovely...

And some pictures of our sour cherry tree blooms... I took these June 5th...

flowers, stitching and some sad news

let's start with the flowers... spring is finally starting to bloom here, my lily of the valley are flowering like crazy and the rest of the garden is slowly starting to wake up as well.

We got a few new additions this year, as not all the flowers came back after the winter and we had a few empty holes to fill...

Here is a part of the lily of the valley corner

Our two out of three of the new additions... a dark purple almost black iris, a beautiful light purple iris (which looks sort of blueish in the picture) and the third one is a yellow iris which hasn't bloomed yet...

I also picked a bunch of lily of the valley and made my first bouquet.... yes that is the knorr salty and pepper salt shakers :O) I love that commercial, he is just too cute for words! With this bouquet, I barely scratched the surface of picking the flowers, there are just tons there this year!

They are right here by my computer, and the smell is just lovely!

I did manage to do a little stitching on Fairy Moon, not a lot, as we had a lot going on the last few days. Here is my progress so far, and trust me the photo doesn't do it justice, the purple of her shawl, does look good on that fabric... my photography skills are somewhat lacking and plus it is late here so the lighting wasn't the best...

And now on the the sad news... we got news that my grandmother passed away on Monday, so now instead of planning our vacation later this summer for her birthday - it would have been her 100th, we are travelling to Europe for her funeral. So I'll be offline for a couple of weeks.

She was an amazing woman, and she will be missed. She lived a good long life, and gave all of us in her family many many happy memories to remember her by.

Rest in Peace Nagymama, love you forever

July 6, 1910 - May 17, 2010