Gardens, Crafts and Guitars

Our front yard is a barren wasteland. We have a lot of plans for our backyard, but when it comes to the front, we have just focused on keeping the weeds from taking over. Previous owners of our home planted copious amounts of juniper and yucca. We promptly removed the juniper, which was not a fun day, but have not yet had the courage to tackle the yucca. It's sharp, pokey and has very deep & hardy roots. Mostly I just hack it back when it threatens to grow over my head.

Last Saturday I spent a lovely afternoon at my colleague Cherry's house, touring her garden and eating her food. I had asked Cherry to share some gardening advice, as I knew that she was an avid gardener. What I didn't know was that she also used to create residential landscape designs! Her front and back yards are just amazing.

This is a rhodadendron in her side yard; for scale reference, that's a 6-foot fence.

Cherry's yard has lots of little hidden treasures.

Cherry and her patio

Lucy, the friendly cat

She looks like she's giving me the evil eye, but she was really gearing up for a snuggle.

Cherry gave me this azalea in exchange for some amigurumi gifts.

After touring her garden, we sat down to a great lunch and pored over "garden porn" to determine what kind of plants would work/look good in our yard. For the first time, I thought maybe there was hope for our front yard afterall!

Following Cherry's I headed over to the convention center to check out the Crafty Wonderland Super Colossal Spring Show. I did a fairly quick perusal of all the wares, and was impressed by the high caliber of work for sale. It was fun to see what is popular in the craft world right now, as there were many booths selling similar items. However, the following really stood out to me:

Swear Jar Design
Nobody was manning this booth when I went by, but I fell in love with their simple earring designs.

LEAF pdx
I purchased one of the paper houses (which I am very excited to put together). Their shop is just a few blocks from my office, so I might have to go back and get a paper bird/cage card.

My House Party
I was instantly attracted to the house design of their plant containers, and had a nice chat with the proprietor about air plants.


We wrapped up a wonderful day over at Megan and Trevor's house. Mike brought over his new guitar to show Trevor, and the two of them struck up an impromtu concert/lesson while Megs and I looked (and laughed) on. Look for Trevor's tracheotomy song on you-tube soon...