New Growth...the GOOD kind!

We planted some new stuff in our garden this year to help it fill out more and fill in some spaces with year round evergreens...and I just realized I didn't take a pictures of those plants.  Oh well, we planted three gardenia bushes along the back behind the rock , which you can barely see in this picture and then we transplanted some yellow flowers in front of the rock.

My hydrangea is looking so much better and bigger this year and may actually bloom for the first time in 3 years!

Here is our brand new rose.  The "Eyeconic Lemonade".  It's a small to medium sized rose with only about 15 petals.  They are a light yellow with an orange center and it smells amazing!

This is the "Trumpeter" and has a really nice scarlet orange color. It doesn't smell or anything but it will get you with it's thorns!

And here is the "Ebb Tide" rose that has about 35 petals per rose.  It's smells really nice too, like spicy cloves and has a deep plum color, or fuchsia color. 

Here are the hellebores plants that are overtaking and are almost bigger than the holly bush behind it that is supposed to be the focal point.

Here's what it looks like from the sidewalk.

And the side...

 And upclose and personal...

And the long and little side garden that gets all shade.  This area has issues and always looks unbalanced and boring.....

....but it's the perfect space for impatiens!  This was in 2010 and each one of those mounds is ONE flower...no joke!  I tried this last year and it didn't work because of the heat.

I love me some coleus and potato vine!

New growth, but not the good kind

Remember last week when I mentioned that the seeds from all the trees had found their home in my yard and garden, and that it's impossible to get rid of them all and that the only way to get rid of them is to wait for them to start growing and then pull them out.

Well...

We've had a lot of rain lately...so I have lots of tiny sprouts EVERyWHERE!

They've made my yard look fuller and greener...

They're in my veggie garden...

They're in my front garden

They're in every nook and cranny around the hellebores...

And here's a really cool close up shot...

Maybe after all the rain stops I'll be able to start pulling them all out...

A Spring Snow

Yeah... it really didn't snow.  However, these darn little seeds from trees sure do make a light dusting of "snow" this time of year.  And lucky for me, the way my house is oriented, they come swooping in, swirl around like a tornado and just keep piling up in my garden beds.

I have already gone out there twice and actually swept it off the sidewalk and even out of the dirt and filled an entire brown paper bag.  

It's impossible to pick out every single seed before it starts to grow tiny trees everywhere.  I experienced this last year and the only thing you can do is get out as much as you can, then wait until they start growing and are about 2 inches tall so you can get a good grip on them....and then start pulling them all out.  One...by...one.

It can be a little therapeutic.

I actually remembered to plant tulips last fall and I love them!  They are your basic pink and they are the first thing I notice when I look at my house.  Every time I look at them I remember the tulips at my house in Ohio and a particular picture of my Dad and I standing behind them on the day of  my First Communion.

We've also got our "Ebb Tide" old fashioned purple rose that is blooming like blooming is going out of style!  We might have...okay we did...forget to cut it back really short before it started sprouting a lot of new growth so now we have a really tall rose bush (for this time of year) with TONS of buds on it.  

                                      

It'll be fun to see it in full bloom, but I doubt it will be able to hold itself up.  We've already have to cut one "branch" off because it just sorta fell over.  These old fashioned roses are cool because they have lots and lots of layers!

Here is an up close of our Hellebores plant.  These plants are awesome!  They are basically evergreens and are the first plants to bloom in our garden,as early as February!  The color fades on the flowers a bit as the weeks pass, as this one used to have a deep reddish purple color, but they keep the flowers until early summer.  

The common name for this plant is called Lenten Rose because they bloom around the beginning of lent.  They are the ultimate shade plant, are perennials, can be divided, and are quite unique.  So if you're looking for some evergreen flower interest in your shade garden, I would recommended Hellebores.

And here is our impulse buy but-we've-wanted-them-for-a-long-time backyard chairs from Target.  They were on sale so we just HAD to get them.  They are very comfortable....

 ...and they stack!

We got lots of other stuff going on in our gardens, but that will be another post for another day!  What's going on in your neck of the woods?

Subway

I obviously don't live in a town where there are subways and I probably never will.

But these are just too awesome and it really makes me want to make something like this.

This one is just inspired from the Toyko subway maps.

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 This one is the Paris Metro map using embroidery floss on canvas.

 source.

And this one is the US interstate system in subway map form!  How cool is that!

Chisholm

Here is just some pictures I took of Chisholm this past weekend.  I've wanted to take some pictures of her for awhile now, but I was always forgetting about it.  I figured now was as good a time as any!

I also took some black and white film photos of her about 8 years ago on my 35mm Canon.  I took those to a photo place downtown to get some prints made.  I'm really excited to get those back.  For being an ametaur photographer back in high school, I think they turned about pretty good.  And really, I'm still an ameteur. 

DIY Art - Pinterest Challenge

Thank you Pinterest...again.  And thanks to BowerPower , Younghouselove, and two other blogs for thinking up this Challengefest!

I've long been looking for something to go above our bed since we repainted and got new bedding.  I didn't want an actual print because I knew it would take too long to find and I might have a hard time finding just the right one.

I really like canvas and I've seen some cool simple DIY crafts using it.  Like this one:

 The canvas and small letters are simly just painted white.

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 Then she spiced it up by covering some letters in glitter.

I also considered doing something like this; Organic to tie in my bedspread.  This idea got nixed because I don't have the patience and I thought it might look wierd.

Ultimately, I came back to doing something personal with letters. 

While dating, and sometimes even now, Stephen and I would say that we needed "you and me" time.  This consists of just the two of us spending time together with no other distractions, no tv, no games, just us.  It was time to just sit and chat about things and really get to know eachother.  Even now, we may see eachother everyday but sometimes we just need time away from the chores and the tv to really just talk to eachother...."you and me" time.

So, hence the reason why we decided that our DIY art would be three 14x14 canvases with the words "you & me" across them all painted white.  We had trouble finding the right font and size of wood letters at Hobby Lobby and Michaels as they are the only craft stores around here, and they have really poor selection.  Enter the Internet!  This site was perfect.  Custom font and size!  They even had videos explaining how they size their letters.

Unlike the true everyday bloggers who thought up this challenge and could start and finish a project within the week, we started this project in like November and just hung it up last weekend.

We carefully chose the right size letters, spray painted the letters and the canvases seperately, and glued the letters to the canvas using a hard core fabric glue we found at Hobby Lobby.  Then we simply waited a day until we hung them up with finish nails.

Looks fabulous to me!

Oh yeah... and we also finally got curtains for our bedroom!  It only took us 3.5 years to finally decide it was necessary.

Now our room is starting to feel more put together.  If only we could finish our bathroom soon, too!

Broken

It's raining today.  Praise the Lord!

I was really excited to be able to see how much rain we'll get today with my rain guage. 

Then, I remembered that a few weeks ago I went to look at it after our last rain and saw that it had broken.

The test tube thingy is made of glass and it must have shattered a bit with the cold weather.

Hmph...now I'm on the hunt for a new test tube thingy that will fit my custom made from the okc art festival rain guage.