Friday, March 6, 2009

An Ode to Spring


Spring has sprung,
The flowers has riz,
I wonder where
The birdies is

My mother scribbled this in her high school English lit book and when I was a kid it absolutely fractured me. I tried researching to see where it originated and it appears that there is no consensus . It also appears to have many variations. Whatever the origin and whichever version I see, it still cracks me up.

The azaleas are almost in full bloom now. The huge native Indians usually bloom first and the hybrids come along a little later. This weekend show be a good time to start getting some photos - it's supposed to be warm and sunny. I set out a tomato and a couple of pepper plants in the garden yesterday while I was home on my lunch break. The lettuce is really starting to spring up now and the pole beans and sunflowers are up about 2". After Halloween last year I tossed the pumpkin out in the weedy garden plot thinking that the raccoons, possums, armadillos and weasels would like to nibble on it. I now have over a hundred little pumpkin plants coming up in a beautiful clump. It kills me to do it, but I have to start thinning them to half a dozen or so or I'll have pumpkins from hell all over the yard. All the herbs are doing well - even the parsley that my little next-door-neighbor Max has been pulling on. I showed him how to pick leaves off the various herb plants and nibble them to see how they all tasted differently and he sometimes gets a little carried away and pulls most of the plant up. Whenever I see him outside now, he wants to go "eat from the garden". His mama says she is going to stick all his veggies out there before she cooks them and let him harvest some for dinner every day. She's hoping that it will be a successful, if not downright sneaky, way to get him to eat the " inevitable green stuff' as my baby brother used to say. (I typed 'baby bother' just then - wonder if my Freudian slip is showing ?!)

Even with all this frenzy of planting and getting outside to ease my acute case of Spring Fever for the past couple of weeks, I have managed to be a little creative lately. I had a wonderful request from an Etsy member for a special eyeglasses chain. She wanted something sweet with a Hello Kitty sort of idea. I came up with one made with freshwater pearls, Swarovski crystals, silver plated filigree beads, and seed beads. The little pink pearls are flanked with pale green Swarovski crystals to make a rosebud look. I hope she likes it - if not, it'll be new listing in the Bead D Eyes shop. I'm going out this weekend to look for a few more Hello Kitty-ish beads to make a more casual version with in case this design isn't what she's looking for.

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