Winter Colour

 I thought I'd write a small post about my houseplants and the winter colour in our conservatory. It's traditional to bring in a sign of Spring into the house on St. Brigid's Day (1st Feb).

I had just bought a new orchid - but sadly managed to break off one of the flower stems when I was unpacking the plant. Luckily they make great cut flowers and are still going strong after over a week.

 I bought four amaryllis from Marks and Spencers this year- so far three of them have flowered -- two different types of red and a pink!

The flowers are so over the top and full of colour. I can't remember what the 4th one is so it'll be a surprise :)

My first ever bromeliad - hopefully I will be able to keep it alive!

 ...and then there are my lovely orchids....

The yellow one is a new one this year  -  I always try to keep an eye out for orchids (and other houseplants) in the reduced section in Tesco or Marks and Spencer.

January

Out of curiosity I've decided to keep all the labels from whatever wool I work with each month - the above was the month of January! I think it's quite impressive really - it was one hat, one shower puff and 9 pairs of wrist warmers. February is proving to be a slower month so far as I am using sock yarn and a 3mm hook and it is much much slower to work with, but I guess it will average out over the whole year.

 One rainy day last month I decided to do my big sort through all my yarns - so the above photo is just about everything that I own! I cleared out a big bagful of stuff that I wasn't ever going to use and will pass it on to a fellow crafter for their projects.

Embarrassingly, I found several lovely yarns that I'd totally forgotten ever having bought!!

For quite a while now I've been quite firm on my 'yarn ban' -- I try to only buy yarns for custom orders (or if I'm on holiday!!) so I don't have quite AS much as I used to but it's still an awful lot.

Having sorted through it all though, it's given me inspiration to use up lots of it - mostly in wristwarmers (these really are my most favourite things to make)

Keeping Going

 Apologies for not keeping this updated yet again - Peter was terribly sick with vertigo and that kind of took over for a while. Fortunately he is 100% again but it was a hard week or so.

 As you can hopefully see, I'm keeping busy - I want to try and get my Etsy shop running properly again; I only have less than 15 listings there at the moment and need to get proper photos taken of the other wrist warmers that I have, and to get them listed too.