Botanic Gardens - Colour

When I see forget-me-nots they always remind me of when I worked in a company that imported and distributed fine-art supplies. Myosotis Blue was one of the colours in the gouache range.

There weren't a lot of rhododendrons out in the greenhouse - this was one of them. Just behind it was the jasmine-scented rhododendron - heavenly!!

The current photo challenge on SCS is Show Your Colours, as in flags. Well, I did find a flag during the week, but it was such a still day that it wasn't worth taking a photo of. The stripes in this selection of tulips made me think of a flag, though.

Crown Imperials always remind me of the Little Grey Rabbit books I loved so much - in Little Grey Rabbit's May Day Hare steals some Crown Imperials from a garden in the village for the animals May Day procession.

Sunny Saturday...

In fact it wasn't quite as sunny as the previous couple of days, but still beautiful. I woke early and decided to get up and make some chocolate eclairs for morning coffee and our desserts for the weekend, and then after breakfast we went to the Botanic Gardens. Just as well we left a bit later than normal thanks to the baking - they now don't open till 10 a.m. at the weekend. I tried using a chocolate glaze instead of just melted chocolate - I liked how they came out, but C has requested melted chocolate next time.

Plenty of birds - we saw countless blackbirds, several chaffinches, a moorhen foraging in the grass and even some long-tailed tits, although all I managed to grab was a silhouette photo - they flit around.

I thought I had a saved image of an embroidery of long-tailed tits I did about ten years back  (make that more like twelve or fifteen, on mature reflection!), but I can't find it. I'll have to take a fresh photo tomorrow.


C took the lining out of his coat, and then felt he'd been deceived and deluded  by the sunshine, so we went into the greenhouses for him to warm up a bit. The sprinkler system came on while we were in the Palm House - it almost felt like rain dripping from the leaves. But in fact it can't have been too hot in there, as my lens didn't steam up the way it often does. Two of these photo's are actually C's - the bamboo one, and the one with me in the foreground.

Bird Time

I found it hard to believe that I didn't see one single bird on the Liffey this morning, except for a little grey wagtail flitting up the river ahead of me - no gulls, no ducks, no cormorants. But I did see these gulls in work, and thought the one landing with the open wing worked well for the recent Shades of Grey photo challenge.

There's no doubt about it - while this year's robins are still relatively fearless compared to most of the other species, and will hop around while C is working on his bike, they are nowhere near as people-friendly as last year's. Also they seem to prefer these little fruity suet pellets to the mealworms which last year's robins loved so much. I sometimes see one flying off with a pellet in his mouth, so I suspect it's part of the feeding his mate courtship ritual, but as it's not carried out in the back yard this year, I can't be positive.

And another newbie to the garden - today we had a goldfinch!  In our last house we had so many - there could be over a dozen perched on the washing line waiting to get at the peanut feeder, which is NOT their normal food. I used to spend hours watching them out of the kitchen window. We haven't seen in in the garden here in all the four years we've been here, but last week I hung up a nyger seed feeder, and today we were rewarded with a very interested goldfinch - you can see his beak stuffed with the little seeds. Unfortunately the feeder was out of the sunlight , so I've also used the first photo from when he landed on the seed feeder, even though it's not as well focussed - then he spotted the nyger seeds and spent over fifteen minutes there, with a few brief breaks any time the pigeon patrolling the ground underneath scared him off.

An oddity

 and a semi-preserve is how The Penguin Book of Jams, Pickles and Chutneys describes lemon curd. I've had a hankering for it for a while, and made some last week. The recipe in this book called for the rind and juice of 4 lemons, 4 eggs, 4 oz (half a stick) of butter and 1 lb (2 cups) of sugar. The recipe in Penguin Cordon Bleu Puddings and Desserts called for 2 lemons, 3 eggs, the same amount of butter and half the amount of sugar. I reckoned that less butter to sugar had to be good thing and went with the first recipe. It made three jars, one of which we brought away with us for the weekend.

We're having unscheduled oranges in caramel tomorrow. I was making a risotto tonight, and as there was some rhubarb that needed cooking I put some sugar and water on to boil up to a syrup, and then forgot about it. Luckily I went over to stir the risotto just when it had reached a beautiful rich caramel and before it burnt the pan!

More glass and wood...

We had some good sunshine today, and I managed to take the photo I had envisaged when my aunt gave me the little Coddington lens.

The wooden monk also came from my grandmother. I'm pretty sure that once upon a time something must have been inlaid in the cross in the Bible on the lectern, but not ever while it was in my posesssion. I also always felt that the wooden base was a much less attractive wood than the rest of it, although it does have a lovely grain.

These little glass animals are tiny - they came from a Russian stall at a Christmas fair in Paris a few years ago. They're not even as big as the top joint of my little finger.

Mother's Day...

Truth to tell, it's not a day my mother ever encouraged us to celebrate, as being way too commercial. But C always gives at least a card to his mother. She got an early delivery of this one as he won't be around to visit her this weekend. So I made the box to look pretty too - I hope she got extra mileage from having the box on display until it was time to take the card out.

A Glass Act

The current SCS photo challenge is glass. I have another photo I want to take - the last time I visited my aunt she gave me a little Coddington lens which had belonged to my grandmother; apparently gardeners used to use them to inspect their plants for little bugs. But the weather this week hasn't been cooperative - we've gone from sunshine to windy, colder days with more grey sky. Great drying weather for clothes, not so great when you want consistent bright light.
These are the photos I did use.

Antique Venetian glass beads - with a little historical interest as they were given to my grandmother by Lady Gregory. My aunt gave me these about twenty-five years ago, and although I don't wear a lot of chunky jewellery, I wear these a lot. The little perfume bottle has been around forever, I have no idea of its origin.

Modern Venetian glass - the little sweets, each one with the artist's name engraved on it, and my sweet little flying pig all the way from NJ to celebrate National Pig Day, and the message that while pigs may not really fly, we can achieve some of our ambitions and dreams.

This glass bowl came from the widow of a teaching colleague of my dad's. She used to have two, a pale blue one and this one, but she'd given the blue one away before she moved into a nursing home, I think. When my mum and were clearing her room out after she died I got a few things, and this is one of them. But in several sessions of trying over a couple of years, I have still to get a good photo that show the detailed engraving in the actual fish and the markings of weeds and bubbles on the bowl, and doesn't have too many background reflections in the silver. This is the not-very-good best of many, many attempts.

Wooden it be Good

A couple of my photos from the wood photo challenge on SCS.

The little fruit dish and fruit come from Greece - Crete, I think, though at this stage I can't be sure. The little dish is about as tall as the first joint of my thumb. I've no recollection at all where the little chalice came from - it lives in one of my thimble racks.

Needles and Pins...

Instead of "wood" photos today,  now that I know my latest knitting arrived safely at its destination I can upload a couple of photos of that...
I haven't bought speciality wool for a long time - I  buy most of my wool mail-order from Scotland - and there was quite an array when I went into This is Knit to look for something really nice.
This is what I found:

 I was disappointed that there wasn't more of the light green in it - a lot showed on the ball of wool, but with space-died yarns you get what you get.

I also had fun with this - the design was from a book of Crewel techniques. My normal scissors fob design is just 2 1/2" square, so I had to reduce the parrot by over half and change some of the stitches to suit the smaller project. The silk was left over from a dragonfly embroidery I did for my sister, and guided me into choosing the blue in the bird instead of the green I was originally going to use.

Happy Birthday, Lorraine :D.

p.s. - the mandarins were still there this morning.

Shades of Grey

I've been a bit remiss in posting some of my photos for the Splitcoast photo challenges.
Last week was Shades of Grey, and of course it was a bright, sunny week. At one stage over the weekend C even broke out the suntan lotion - hard to believe, but true.

I had two grey trees -  holly and birch.

And a gravel path. I remember seeing the black retaining mesh before it was laid down, I had no idea what it was for.

And some silver/grey kegs - taken on one of the greyer days in the week.

I'll be back with some wood photos tomorrow, all being well. We're up and down to the North several times this week, which is great for my current knitting project - a baby shawl - but is making for a slightly hectic-feeling week.