Flurry of Activity

What a lot of things drop themselves on one's plate in the spring! If one is not careful, the blog falls by the way.

There's the spring choir concert...

There's the stage play of Esther in which two of my daughters participated, one being given the role of "student director" and I helped with costuming...

The one in the yellow is my student director daughter who plays several roles in this small cast play.

The one on the left is my other daughter who has fun playing a sassy old lady.

Then, of course, since it is spring in this hemisphere, there's the joy of getting outside and gardening. Yesterday I planted veggies in the straw bales (yes, I'm several weeks late with that) as well as planting some flowers and starting to prep for a new herb garden. I'll post more on that as I progress.

I don't always remember the names of my plants like Sarah does, so I decided to give myself a little help with some simple plant markers.

Garden Therapy has a good tutorial on how to make this, so I'll just do a quick overview of what I did.

Here are my materials:

You can use 14 gauge wire as in the tutorial, but it didn't come in a smaller length and I would have had to buy too much.

Sorry that the picture of the bag of washers is rather blurry. I tried to fix it to no avail. My washers are 1 1/4" size, but my stamping letters are rather large, too.

I found this great set of stamping letters at an estate sale. They usually reside on permanent loan at the public library for the leather-crafting club to use, but I "borrowed" them back for this project.

The tutorial said to mark the washer with a Sharpie where you wanted the letters to be, so I did that for some and didn't for others. My letter placement was pretty good either way.

My difficulty was more in the realm of keeping the stamp still between whacks so that the letters were nice and clean. I whacked each about 5-6 times. Then I wrote over them with the Sharpie just to make them stand out more and to have the ink sink into the letter groove.

Since the washers are cheap, I was easily able to make a new "Aster" marker.

I think the pinkness is a reflection of my maroon shirt. :)

I put a twist into the bottom of the wire with my trusty needle nose wire cutter pliers so that the marker would have some stability in the soil.

Then I made an upper somewhat circular bend on which to hang the washer. 

Thought you'd like a glimpse of Charlie Cat who rules the roost.

I'm rather happy with how they've turned out. I have quite a few more to make over the next few days...

...but also have some ceramic ones Sarah had made for me several years ago.

I'm really looking forward to this summer's gardening, especially hoping to put in a bunch of perennials to give the front yard an English cottage look.

How does your garden grow?