Down By The Sally Gardens

My eldest son turned thirteen on Friday… (hard to believe I am the mother of a thirteen year old…)

We had a lovely day filled with friends and boys making lego and stop-motion movies (latest boy-obsession in our house):

  

(He even has a Youtube account where he posts his movies!!: Lego Ted: Free-running )

I bought these roses to celebrate the day- I just can’t wait until our garden is full of flowers- and the first daffodils bloomed on his birthday-

these little miniature ones are always the first up!

Today, our friends Tara and Pat (the bat-man) came over; they are making a willow dome for their local school, and we were happily providing the willow as it badly needed cutting (in between the hail showers)

and we were finding it impossible to get to (the other sally garden needs some serious cutting too)

Our small men helped greatly, and within a hour or two, there was a large trailer of willow,

sporting some beautiful silvery catkins

(took us a long while to convince our small girl that they weren’t: “slugs! urgh!!”)

While the men chopped willow, Tara and I drank tea and crocheted- Tara is using up her stash of bits and pieces, making a gorgeous, bright and colourful square, that will some day soon become a blanket for their caravan, and inspired me to do the same (I’ve been trying to decide what to start- I wanted to work with double knit (DK) and a large hook, so I could crochet rounds of granny squares for hours at night without having to think much!!)

We gathered a basket of considerably un-inspiring yarns, but, once I interspaced each colour with white, it didn’t seem so awful, and actually looking fairly coherent:

I recently followed a link from Attic 24 which lead me to Masons who are selling this pack of completely gorgeous DK acrylic yarns…

I think I will have to invest, as I’m not sure how long my gakky yarns will last, whether I will end up with a small baby blanket (poor baby!!) or something more substantial… 🙂