Wisteria and Lavender

I love wisteria. The house about four down from ours has a white frame car port with a white wisteria growing up each of the four corners and cascading over the top of it. A  couple of months ago I bought a white wisteria but then couldn't quite decide where to plant it. The suburb we live in has a lot of big trees which means that the ground is just one mass of roots which suck all moisture and nutrients out as soon as you put them in. Added to that the soil is just sand. Since the wisteria was quite expensive I wanted to put it somewhere where it would definitely grow.

There is a path down the side of the house with a gate across a bit over half way down. The bottom half of the path runs along the side of my bedroom and next to the Big Wall mentioned in previous posts. There is just a narrow strip (10" to a foot) wide on each side of the path. The section next to the wall was occupied by weeds and stacks of my bricks

and the section on the other side had a succulent (you can just see it on the side of the picture above). I moved the bricks to another stack further up the path and dug up the succulent and potted it. My cousin is building a new house and is happy to give it a home in her garden. Which is good because I don't actually like succulents.

 The soil is really poor so I added about half a bucket of bentonite clay, some sheep manure (collected by my wonderful daddy and sent up to me in bags) and a couple of handfuls each of blue metal dust, crushed lime stone and blood and bone and worked it all in with water. It actually started looking like soil.

I planted my white wisteria on the fence,

and a punnet of pale pink portulaca around it and along the rest of the space. I love portulaca. They grow so well in hot, sunny spots and produce a gorgeous array of flowers and they just grow so eagerly.

A couple of months ago I had also bought a pale pink lavender called Strawberry Ruffles which has pale pink 'wings' out the end of each flower head. I also bought two white winged lavenders which were marked down and looked unloved. They now all have a home along the house side of the patch where I hope they will grow up and make a hedge to hide the underneath of the house.

So I now have pink and white down each side of the path. Not planned but I think that it will look very nice. The next thing I have to do is get Dad to build me a frame for the wisteria to grow up. I am rather proud of my self since I only bought the portulaca yesterday and they are already planted out. As you can tell I often buy things before I have a space in the garden and then the poor things have to live in their pots for months before I decide what to do with them.
Speaking of which - I bought a double pink fuchsia called Cotton Candy when I got the portulaca. It is a lovely bushy plant but had been marked down as no-one had wanted it and the weather was warming up. Now to find somewhere for it. I haven't had much success with fuchsias in the past so I hope this one will grow.

Cotten Sateen

To be exact, stretch cotton sateen - 96% cotton and 4 % spandex - though I find that there are a number of interlopers in this category which have a high percentage of polyester but still look very similar.

I love this fabric. It is available in a number of fabric stores but I usually buy it in Spotlight. It comes in a range of patterns and plains which change from season to season but there is rarely any matching plains to go with the patterns - very annoying. It is wide - 2 passes across the fabric will get you a full pleated skirt.

The reason I love this fabric is that it is just so lovely to sew. It is heavy enough that it holds it's shape and the seams don't pull but soft enough that it is easy to manoeuvre through the machine. It takes creases well which makes pleating and turning up hems easy but doesn't crush too much. The fabric is dense enough that provided you wear flesh coloured underwear you don't need to line the garments (though a good lining always feels lovely in a dress or skirt).

Cotton sateen is a good weight for either dresses or structured skirts (pleats, pencil, a-line or a few gathers - no good for flowing designs). Being a mainly natural fibre it is breathable in summer and not too cold in winter. It hangs nicely. It can be machine washed, though I always hand wash things I have put the effort into making. It is easy to iron and not too expensive to buy. Great all-round fabric.

One day I may get around to posting pictures of this fabric made up. I have a lovely navy blue, pleated skirt which I wear all the time made out of it.

Things I Like... and rants about things I don't

I have no financial interest in the companies, products and patterns that I am reviewing. I am not getting paid to do this. There is very little chance that they know my blog even exists. This is just to share from one home sewer, gardener, cook, crafter to another the places and products that I have found that fit my needs. There is no guarantee that you will agree with me but read on anyway and you may find some use tips.

I was talking with a friend at church about sewing when another girl came up with a friend in tow to say that her friend wanted some advice on where to find fabric for some summer dresses. My friend passed the question over to me and after a good 5 minute run-down on my favourite stores, the pros and cons of different fabrics and linings and exactly where in the store the fabric I was recommending was, the first girl said that I should blog about it. So here I am.

Dreams of a Little Yellow Dress

I was walking past some shops last week on a lovely spring day. The kind of day that makes you want to put away all your winter clothes and bring out summer dresses and sandals. (Unfortunately it started raining and being cold later in the week.) In the window of a very cute dress shop was a yellow dress with white spots. It looked so like Spring that I wanted a yellow and white dress.

A couple of days later I went to my favourite fabric store and bought some white broderie anglais for the top of a dress and some butter yellow cotton sateen for the skirt (and some happy yellow linen just because it was there and there was only a bit left on the roll.) I went to another fabric store a few days later to help  my sister choose some fabric for a skirt and found on their discount table a roll of pastel yellow broderie anglais and got 1.4m of it for only $1.40 (discount +30% off +put through at remnant price), score! So now I think that I have enough yellow for this summer. I just have to make it all up. I have shrunk the fabric so watch this space for developments on the dresses.

Home in the Country

I went home for the weekend and being down on my parent's farm reminded me just why I love the country so much. The fresh air, the smell of wood smoke gently wafting on the breeze from a log that was still burning in the bush where Dad had been doing control burning before summer comes around, the space and being able to look up and see the stars reaching from horizon to horizon not dimmed by the glow of city lights.

Two luxurious mornings when my cat woke me up by landing on my bed then settling down to purr very loudly, a dog so happy to see you that she wiggled and an assortment of pet sheep who were pleased to see you as long as you had crushed oats with you.

It was lovely to spend the weekend in quiet pursuits: visiting all the plants in the garden, weeding the roses, planning out some new cupboards for the house and sitting sewing with Mum. I didn't open my computer all weekend and being mainly out of mobile phone reception I didn't have to worry about calls and texts. I finished my Saturday with a stroll through the bush and down the paddock where my world was bounded by bush on three sides and the purply-blue hills rising above the bush, dotted by neat squares of green paddocks.

Driving back on Sunday in the sunshine was a fitting end to my weekend. As I travelled north the rippling green paddocks of oats and wheat became interspersed with paddocks of canola in full flower, gorgeous stretches of brilliant yellow that looked painted until you got close enough to see the rows of plants. The whole world smelt of spring and life and growing things and it made me want to get out and plant something. The air was crisp and the sunshine warm and I was sad to leave it all to come back to the hustle and bustle of life in the city. But I did stop by the garden store once I arrived to buy some more seedlings.

My Garden Bed

This story begins with a wall. A large wall.

Our neighbours demolished their house and built a new one and in the process demolished the boundary fence between our house and theirs and put up a new one. The old fence had been just a thin line but the new fence is made out of limestone and is a lot higher. Since they put up such a huge fence I decided that I was going to utilise  our side of it. The block is sloping and I have always had trouble with all the water running off the bottom of my garden bed and the soil is just sand which is no good for growing anything.

So with Dad's help (to be honest he did most of it) I have put up one garden box and filled it with nice, rich soil from the garden centre.

Building a box sounds easy, after all I have done it hundreds of times with lego. But it is surprising how much work it actually is to lay bricks. You have to dig out a footing first (and avoid the reticulation) and mixing cement by hand is not exactly light work. So this is the wall ( the cement ran out before we got the last few capping bricks on so they will have to wait until we mix cement for the next wall).

I planted lettuce seedlings at one end,

2 rows of peas along part of the back, then capsicum seedlings. Several rows of carrots and baby spincah,

and pansies right along the front.

Seeing the garden grow each day is so rewarding. We have already had several pickings of the lettuce and baby spinach.

A raised garden bed is so nice to work with. The weeds can't just take over, they have to climb in and there is no bending over to work - it is all at waist height.

Next step: The rest of the wall and then two free standing garden beds on the other side of the garden. These are currently occupied by nasturtiums which are trying to take over the garden. I think that I will need the raised beds to keep them out.

The Adventure Begins...

Polka dots, pansies, pet lambs and pie.

I have always loved to cook, usually liked gardening and have recently come back (at the ripe old age of 24) to sewing and wanted to share my adventures. While I live (most of the time) in the city my real home is the farm where I grew up and which is home to a series of pets, some more permanent than others.
Since it is winter where I am there has been a whole crop of new lambs over the last couple of months, 4 of which my parents are bottle feeding as they have been orphaned or abandoned. They really are very affectionate when they are small (and even when they are big – there are few things more affectionate than a very wet sheep, wool holds a lot of water).

I have also recently finished my first skirt made entirely by myself with a hand sewn in zip (no assistance – not even advice). This marks my entry back into the world of sewing for myself. Mum loves to sew and taught me growing up. I think my first piece of wool on hessian dates from about the age of 2 1/2 years old. But I didn’t like sewing my own clothes, I wanted to buy them like everyone else and so was a stubborn daughter and haven’t done much sewing at all for the last few years. Now I have decided that sewing is fun (or rather having clothes that fit well and that I like is fun – sewing is how you get there).

So this will be my adventures  in sewing, my fun in the garden and kitchen and updates on my various pets after trips home to the farm.