Spring Wild Flower Nature Walk

The following is a pictorial walk through a wild flower nature trail. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Spring Gardens

With Willie declaring spring is right around the corner, it has me thinking of spring gardens. Here are some spring flowers from the past. The bushes above are showing the fresh green leaves of new growth.




Here are some daffodils nestled next to some spring bushes coming back to life.

A darker corner of the garden shows some white daffodils.

Beautiful colourful tulips framing the bird bath fountain.

These beautiful blue flowers provide a nice contrast to the reds and yellows of the tulips and daffs.

The picture above and below shows a perfect tulip coming into the fullness of bloom.

Being in a new house, we haven't gotten into the planting of spring bulbs for this year. I will have to get my spring flower fix by visiting public gardens and use them as inspiration in planning my spring garden for 2013.

Celebrations

It was a fun year for celebration in 2011. We started with New Years day and the boys birthdays. They turned 3 years old and as I was just finishing up my first cake decorating course, theirs became my final cake. I treated my daughter to the course as she was visiting over Christmas and she had to make her own birthday cake. Her birthday is the 2nd of January. She is a *few* years older than 3. ;-) I know that my readers are smart and can figure out which cake is which without me specifying it.

Groundhog Day arrived on the 2nd of February as usual and the great prognosticator himself, Wiarton Willie predicted 6 more weeks of winter, the little rodent! The groundhog on the cake looked more like an alien, but hey, I bake cakes... I'm not an artist!

The groundhogs on these cupcakes looked only marginally better!

Along came the Superbowl. I rather like this cake.

What Valentine Day is complete without roses and chocolate? These fondant roses are accompanied by home made chocolate hearts and roses.

St. Patrick's Day arrived amid shamrocks and green roses.

Moving into April, a very important meeting took place. On April 14, I met my future husband in the diner in Zellers. (More about that later) Also in April I celebrated my birthday. My granddaughter sent me flowers and she and her girlfriend wrote and performed a rap song in my honour! What a great day!

As we moved along through the days and weeks, we celebrated our developing love. Here with roses!

Hey Matey! Ahoy! The pirates arrived in June in conjunction with my grandson's birthday. Here is his treasure chest cake. The 2nd picture shows the inside of the chest.

You don't always need a special day to celebrate. Here we celebrate nature.

My granddaughter's birthday followed with a dancing bear cake.

Things got very hectic as the summer wore on with wedding plans and cake making. The grooms cake is a fruit cake that *cured* for a month and was decorated with a pelican in a lake, a nod to the family crest. The wedding cake consisted of almond layers with raspberry filling, vanilla layers with strawberry filling, orange layers with orange filling and lemon layers with blueberry filling. Daisies covered the cake and looked like they were spilling down over the layers onto the cake board. The women in the bridal party carried daisies and wore daisies in their hair.

This wreath cake was taken to a committee Christmas luncheon I attended.

Just aftered we moved, we celebrated my new step-daughter's birthday with a yarn in a basket cake. It didn't go quite as planned, but wasn't bad considering most of the cake supplies were in boxes or hadn't been transferred to this house yet.

The cut-offs from the cake made this great English trifle after the New Year when I found my trifle bowl.

We are back to Groundhog Day. This year, 2012, has the sweet fellow predicting an early spring! Yeah!

Following Groundhog Day, on the 3rd, is my husband's birthday. Here is his Orange Madeira Cake from an earlier celebration.

It is always fun to have a celebration, whether it is an official holiday or a made-up one, life is worth celebrating!

Cake Pops, Chocolates and Chocolate Garden

Chocolate Red Hat pop.





Chocolate Garden for a tea party.

Sum total of day's work!

Finsihed garden, chocolate pops, cake pop bumble bees and dipped chocolates, cherry centres and flowers.

Knitting Projects

It has been a while, and I figure it is best that I do some catching up. It will also allow me to pin on pinterest! Over the past several months when I haven't been posting, I've spent part of the time knitting up some projects. I made yoga socks for my dancer and her friends, socks, mittens, scarves and blankets. I will post the pictures here.

The above are a pair of mittens that I made for my older and younger granddaughters. There was enough wool left over from the larger ones to do this. The socks I made for the older. If you notice the toes of these socks are are in different wool as I either added rows or didn't follow the pattern exactly (right tension and all) and contrary to what I had been told, one ball of wool did not a sock make! My granddaughter liked the funkiness of them though and wore them happily.

Here she is modelling the sock.

Bashful girl, she models the mittens. (above and below)

These are a pair of yoga socks. Nifty little items all my granddaughters friends wanted them. So my dancing granddaughter bought the wool and had me make a few for her dance friends for Christmas!

This is a closer look at the pattern.

Here you can see the split in the heel.

Leg warmers are back in style in the dance community.

Here you have a closer look at the pattern.




Another pair of socks. This time the pattern worked as advertised (or I complied with it, let's not get too picky!)

So this is the first look at the knitting of the past few months. I will post more as I come across the pictures.