Progress and plants

Good morning everyone!  I had intended to have this post up Friday night, but just as I sat down to turn the computer on, the power went out.  For the second time in two weeks.  Ugh.  I hope this isn't going to be a common thing this summer.

Anyhow, the power is back on and I can now share all the silly things I wanted to share two days ago (um, the power has been on since late, late Friday night.  I have just been busy since then).  I had mentioned in my last post that I was going to give Sous le Soleil another week's worth of work because I felt like I'd made almost no progress during the first week.  Then, early Monday morning, I damaged my foot by kicking a stepladder.  Not on purpose, I didn't realize it was in the hallway and I ran into it on the way to the bonus room.  So I spent most of this week lamed up, which is a bad thing for housekeeping and physical comfort, but a great thing for stitching.  So here's Soleil when I last posted:

 And here she is after one slow week and one turbo week:

 Most of the plant motifs you see are unfinished.  I decided to push through with the green and save specialty stitches til closer to the end of the piece.  Then I changed my mind about waiting:

 I am tempted to keep at her for another week and see how close I can come to finishing, but I am also thinking about finishing a pyn pillow from Thistle Threads in the coming week.   My lessons for "A Cabinet of Curiosities" began earlier this month, and I'm somewhat motivated to work on something intimidating as a warm up for this class.  Plus, the pillow is also on my WIPocalypse list.  Hmm, guess we'll see what kind of mood I'm in tomorrow morning when it's time to officially decide how the stitching week will go!

My vegetable garden seems to be doing well.  The zucchini plant has leaves the size of my hand (or larger) and is now sprouting this giant yellow flowers.  And yesterday I saw a few little flowers on my tomato plant. Hopefully, the flowers are a sign that vegetables are soon to follow.  Nothing to do but wait and see!

 I can't remember whether I mentioned on this blog that one of the ferns that I bought to use in our wedding ceremony was taken over by purple finches when I left the plant at my sister's house for safe-keeping.  Well, her fern is now the home of 5 baby finches.  I bought a new fern, which remained bird free, and brought it back to my new home after the wedding.  We hung them on our front porch, and for a month they were just pretty ferns decorating our house.  But earlier this past week, I noticed that there were many purple finches circling around it, and that there seemed to be a battle for control of one of my ferns.  And then we noticed that there were often two purple finches perched in our fern.  Yesterday we took the fern down to water it (and to be sure we didn't water anything that shouldn't be watered) and sure enough, there's a little nest growing in our fern!

One of the eggs is quite a bit larger than the others, and it's speckled.  The others are not speckled.  What could be the reason for this?  Has some other bird snuck an egg into our poor finches' nest, or is it normal for the eggs to different sizes?  Only time will tell, I suppose.

Til next time, I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday weekend (or just a great weekend if you're not in the US).