Storing and Gardening

My mom used to be an avid cross stitcher and there is evidence all over her house to prove it. When I was little my room was filled with cross stitched Disney characters, our bathroom had a huge cross stitch of the three men in the tub poem, and even my dad had cross stitch pictures on his desk at work. My favourites were the set she made for the kitchen..dishes, containers, spices, and pies.

I remember she had a big blue binder filled with pages and pages of little plastic slots filled with embroidery floss cards, each one numbered and ordered. She had every colour you could imagine. When I was 6 or 7 she would let my cousin and I invade her stash to make hundreds and hundreds of friendship bracelets. Aside from swimming and hiking, this was our favourite thing to do at the cottage in the summer. We were constantly walking around with a half finished bracelet safety pinned to the hem of our shorts, which I imagine looked quite funny. This didn't stop until I was 12 or so (after I had made a three inch wide rainbow bracelet that took nearly an entire summer) and most of her stash had dwindled down. She stopped stitching, so she wasn't building it back up.

The big blue binder is long gone, but I wanted to find a more organized way of storing my embroidery floss since I've started cross stitching more and more and my stash is building up. I couldn't find any floss cards or binder pages, so until I do I decided on this much more space consuming (but cute and fun) storage..

I'm not sure I will ever run out of those old wooden thread spools, but they have ended up being so useful.

Speaking of stashes, my local fabric store was having a 50% off sale, so I made my way over to see what I could find. There wasn't a lot I liked in terms of colours, but the neturals were great. I did allow myself one floral print just because I loved it so much, but I passed up all of my usual picks in favour of the more neutral options. I picked up a huge pile of half metres (oh, Canada) for less than $2.50 a piece. The best part is I am already mixing and matching just from my stash and am coming up with so many more project ideas.

I haven't mentioned the garden in a while so I thought I would post a little update. The heat has finally broken and I'm hoping that makes a difference to my unhappy little veggie garden. While the tomatoes are happy as can be, my cucumber is wilting, the peas are turning yellow, the beans are not growing as well as usual, and of course the zucchini are only flowering and not actually growing (which I'm thinking may have something to do with our soil since this has happened for the past three years). I'm thinking of picking up a bag of soil and trying to do a couple plants in planters to see what happens.

Hopefully your gardens have been surviving the heat!