Planting Peas on Palm Sunday; Oops, Make That Wednesday

In the Garden:  I usually plant my peas on Palm Sunday since peas are a cool weather crop.  This was one of the years I would have had to brush away the snow to do so.    And braved low temps as well.  So I put it off a few days.  But I plan to plant a nice little crop today, reserving half my seeds for late August so I can have another harvest in the cooler month of October.  It will be nice to work the soil again.  I'll have to check my gardening "bible",  the old Victory Garden manual, to see what other early crops I can plant.  Probably radishes and lettuce and maybe carrots.  Mmm, baby carrots ... I can just taste the sweet crunchiness.  When my youngest son still lived at home, carrots never made it to maturity or to the table.  He pulled them out of the garden, dusted them off on his jeans leg and ate.  Other people had garden pests called slugs and birds and aphids; I had one called Dan.

On the stitching front: Yesterday's rotation piece was The Cross Stitch Shop from the Town Square series.  I frogged the brick stitch done previously since I felt 2 strands was too heavy for 32ct and obscured the desired brick effect.  I re-stitched with one strand and am liking it much better.  As you can see, I've got  the brick facade done.  I actually like the way the floss fails to totally cover the blue linen; it looks like the mortar between the bricks.  I started to stitch the windows with a very pale blue silk, Belle Soie's Bahama Breeze, one strand, over two, half cross.  I tried it with a full cross first but even with just one strand, the window glass over-powered the window frame.  The chart leaves the window glass unstitched but I think that leaves the whole piece looking unfinished. Once the windows are done, it will just be the over one sign and a few specialty stitches making up the flowers in the window box ... and one more ornament will be ready for an assembly finish.  Since I am so close to a finish with this, I'll continue to work on it today.  Even so, I hope to get a bit of stitching time in on the Wednesday rotation piece, Mystic Smalls, in the evening.

And an update on the stitched gifts that I mailed out to the grandchildren for Easter:  My daughter-in-law told my husband that the children were delighted with the chocolate goodies but loved the stitched items as well.  Piper carried her tote around all day and filled it with flowers [probably dandelions and violets] that she picked during her wanderings and Liam was equally pleased with his tooth fairy pillow using it as a headrest for a quick nap on the lawn.  So some solid granny points earned!!!  My son also mentioned that Liam carries last year's bunny beanbag just about everywhere ... like a security blanket.  I do so love grandchildren with the perception to appreciate stitched articles.  My daughter-in-law is high in my good graces as well after joking that she has so many beautifully stitched gift totes that she'll never have to buy paper ones ... the only problem being that she doesn't want to give any of her gift bags away.  Gotta love her for that!  I consider this greedy hoarding of my handiwork a worthy compliment.