colours

Woohoo! Colour in the garden!

And on my feet - these are my cheapy mock crocs, paint-splattered and really too pink for me - I'm not a pink person - but very comfortable.

And my 99p bunch of flowers from the reduced stand at the supermarket!

And back into the garden for rosa glauca..

.. and dianthus.

It's been a wonderful, colourful, busy week, in which my daughter had her nursery 'graduation' - sounds so twee but actually a lovely little ceremony with the kids doing incredibly cute dance routines as well as getting their certificates.


Little Miss Mouse enjoyed the dancing so much I've had to find the tunes on Youtube for her to groove on down to in the living-room.

My parents were down for a short visit to see us and go to the graduation and they brought me this:

Can you guess what it is? I couldn't! It's bactrian camel hair (fur?) - the lighter brown is the softer undercoat. Isn't it brilliant? They have a friend who works at the Highland Wildlife Park and asked if they'd like some - they knew of course that I'd love some! I've had to put it out of reach of the cats just in case they think it's rabbit or something.

Bactrian camels are the ones with two humps - which always makes me think of Alastair Campbell. Pourquoi? Well when the Boy was Miss Mouse's age he was always singing 'Alice the Camel' only it always came out as 'Alice da Camel', so naturally I'd find myself singing 'Alastair Campbell has two humps, Alastair Campbell has two humps..' You'll see why I have a hard time taking politics seriously.

Mixed bag

I'm starting with that just because it's pretty!

I got a postcard this morning:

It's from my parents who are back up in Shetland for a family wedding (congratulations Steven and Emma!) - they know what I like! It's from the Shetland Museum and is titled 'Rowers, ready to spin into yarn c. 1920' A brief explanation found on the RLS website- 'Rowers are what you end up with when you are carding wool for spinning. The wool fibres are carded so as they are all parallel, then by reversing the direction of the cards, these fluffy rolls of wool are made. ' These look to me to be the natural sheep colours - gorgeous aren't they? I love the abstractness of the postcard - I might frame it actually.

Meanwhile in the mini-greenhouse things are growing beautifully. Time to pot on some and plant out others but I'm too busy today - Miss Mouse and I are heading up to the school this afternoon for a 'pre-school session', meeting the other kids who will be in her class when she starts school in August, seeing round the school and so on. Of course she's fairly familiar with the school anyway since she's often been with me when I've been there for the Boy's school stuff - they always do lots of things at that school that can get the parents involved if they want to be. Nevertheless, she's really excited that she's the reason we're going up to the school this time!