Shrinking Violets

Sorry it's been a while since I put fingers to keyboard (it doesn't have the same ring as pen to paper, does it?), but I have been incredibly busy both at work and at home.

The short burst of sunshine that arrived in Rhayader this week urged me to get to grips with the post-winter chaos that has been residing in my front garden. So armed with bags and boxes, I spent a gentle early evening on Wednesday pulling out all the dead leaves that had gathered over the winter and removing as many weeds as I could from the small gravelled area in the centre of the garden. Our is a typical late Victorian front garden, with straight path from the wrought iron gate to the front door and a little square of garden to the side of the path. Around two sides of the square are small borders that I have filled mostly with evergreen plants and with grasses and other easy care plants.

All over the front (and back) garden there are tiny pockets of colour, sweet violets are blooming all over the place... in lots of places that not terribly convenient and some that I wonder how they are managing to grow at all, let alone thrive and bloom. These are not pansies or cultivated garden violets, but the tiny weeny flowered sweet violet that was sold by flower sellers of Victorian times in little posies.

They are in the path and in the wall, in the gravel and under the bench, in the crack of the front door step and behind the giant pots to each side of my front door... yup they are everywhere and I just love them.

The tidy up at the front of the house made me do a double take inside. I have started to tackle Cecily's room in earnest, so that it is finished before she comes home from university for the summer. Yesterday in a moment of 'if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well', I carefully peeled all the polystyrene tiles off her ceiling and stripped off as much of the adhesive and old paint that I could. Actually this was a relatively quick task and accompanied by Coldplay (on CD), I was ready to start wallpapering her ceiling in no time.

As regular readers will know, I have a decidedly dodgy back which is made worse by any tasks that involved me having both hands above my head at any one time. As I haven't yet mastered wallpapering the ceiling without two hands above my head, it is going to take a while to finish this part of the job. I can comfortably do one complete length of paper (her room is over 15 wide in each direction), but then I need to give my back a rest for a day before doing more. I think the ceiling is going to take me a week to complete.

So in the meantime, I have been preparing our catalogue on disk to send out to everyone who has asked for one. The first batch of 300 catalogues will leave us tomorrow morning and should arrive with the recipients before the end of the week. I will continue to prepare more catalogues each evening until they have all been sent out.

So here's what the first batch looks like (names and addresses have been hidden to preserve privacy). Dave has been busying himself with printing the inserts for the catalogue disk covers for me to put into the covers before they go into the envelope. He is also printing out the catalogue on paper ready for binding with my new thermal binding machine (a very cool piece of kit!).

Well that brings me up to date and it's late, so I'm off to bed, chat soon, Liz

All images and text copyright Pretty Practicals 2006 - 2008 except where stated.