Pink & Blue flowers for Mosaic Monday.

For Mosaic Monday with Judith this week
a collection of images

 taken on Saturday evening just as the sun was going down
 using my Kindle HDX

.

Many of these plants were already here when we moved into le Presbytere almost 19 years ago.

I had never seen a blue hibiscus until this beautiful shrub bloomed a year later.

This hortensia cannot decide if it wants to be blue, pink or purple.

No mistaking the colour of these specimens.

The photograph on the left shows the blue hibiscus growing alongside a pale pink hortensia.

Special effects, title, frames & collages provided by that clever little PicMonkey.

Linking to Mosaic Monday with Judith @

Touring Blogland

Recently my dear friend Sarah invited me to join her on the Blogland Tour and featured me on her blog @Hyacinths For The Soul. 

Sarah and I have been friends since meeting at the Quimper Collectors Club’s second annual gathering in Washington D.C. in 2000. 

Sarah and I had a great day antiquing in Bayeux
when she & her husband came to visit in 2011.

As collectors of French faience in particular the pottery produced in the town of Quimper, Brittany, we always enjoy getting together with other Q collectors. I for one am counting down the days until we meet again next month in Nice, the jewel of the French Riviera.

plage Beau Rivage, Nice, France.
(photo from internet)

As part of the tour Sarah gave me 4 questions to answer.

What am I working on right now?

First of all with my Quimper Club Secretary’s hat on I’m working on preparing a report to present at the meeting next month. 

Mark Twain once said “there are two types of speakers, those that are nervous and those that are liars”. I know which type I am, addressing an audience is not something I am very comfortable with doing. Luckily I only have some statistics relating to the membership to report, so I think I’ll be o.k. 

Around the Presbytere I’m working on keeping everything “show home” ready as we never know when the Immobilier/ estate agent might call to arrange to bring a client over to view the house. 

My precious “me time” is spent in my attic craft room and it seems that lately I've been scrapping vacation memories.

L. Tulum, Mexico 1998
R. South Beach, HHI 2012

Some of my most recent pages.

L. Kos, Greece, 2013
R. HHI again with Dad & Joyce, 1992

How does my work differ from others in this genre?

Such a good question, but I’m not really sure that it does. I do have certain things that I like to include on my scrapbook pages, whether I’m following a sketch or a set of criteria set down in a challenge. I usually draw doodle a couple of lines around the edges to frame the layout. Tags! Almost every layout has to include tags wherever possible and I love to pile on embellishments in clusters and layers. These are my “signatures” I guess.

Why do I write or create what I do?

The simple answer is that I started my blog to share our life in Normandy. Our beautiful home, which we fell in love with the first time we saw it, is in a very small rural hamlet and there’s not a lot to do here if you’re not a farmer! 

In 2008 when I first started blogging I had no idea if anyone would be interested in my ramblings but just started chatting as if to a friend and went on from there.

 ice cream sundae, anyone?

I write about my garden, especially the potager, our pets, my husband, our little trips around the area and those to more faraway places. Blogging and scrap booking are the perfect hobbies for me.

How does your writing process actually work?

I always have my camera close by and anything such as my latest read, a beautiful sunrise, a bee on a lavender bush, a dog looking cute, white fluffy clouds or a new recipe can easily find its way onto the page. It’s almost always the photograph that dictates the post and inspires my words.

Lettuce soup, better than gazpacho!

Enough about me.

Time to introduce you to two ladies whose talents lie in quite a different direction to mine, you'll soon see why.

Lorrie @ Fabric, Paper & Thread is a blogging friend of many years who lives in Victoria, BC, Canada. 

On her blog you will find links to her Etsy store and Craftsy page where she says " I love to sew and create in a variety of mediums. Sewing, embroidery, paper crafts - you name it, I've probably tried it. But I always come back to my love of fabric and sewing! "

Another very talented lady is Sue @ I Sew Quilts. 

Sue and I met through the Quimper Club when we both attended the 2001 annual meeting in Quimper, Brittany. At that time she ran a very successful store aptly named “The Pumpkin Patch”. Sue’s blog is a feast for the eye, not only does she share with us the projects that she is currently working on but takes us travelling around the UK and the US, to the many museums and quilt shows that she visits with her quilting friends.

I’d like to thank Sarah for inviting me on the tour and you, too, for your company today. 

Please do visit Lorrie and Sue 

on Monday, the 18^th August 

for the next sequence of the Blog Land Tour.

A Breath of Spring.

For a few hours today we had blue skies and sunshine, a breath of spring gently wafting over the garden.
I mooched around tidying here and there, stopping to take photographs of emerging primroses,crocuses and daffodils and getting dirt under my fingernails.

Bliss!

I'm joining Susan @ A Southern Daydreamer for Outdoor Wednesday
and Kim @ Savvy Southern Style for the very first
Wow Us Wednesdays Party

click on the links, or on the sidebar buttons,

 to see who else is sharing this week.

Sunday Favourites.

One of my favourite gifts from my lovely DH this Christmas was the new Jamie Oliver cookbook "Jamie at Home, Cook Your Way to the Good Life" which combines two of my favourite things to do: growing vegetables and cooking.
How good is that?
I've only dipped into it's pages so far but already my head is swimming with ideas of new vegetables to try and of course the great recipes Jamie has devised to showcase the produce he grows.
In the spring and summer months (and I can't be the only one who's thoughts are already drifting that way) I like nothing better than to mooch around my potager for a few hours, planting and nuturing.
I am tempted to install a small greenhouse this year if only to stand a chance at cultivating tomatoes that ever change colour, from green to red.

But, what I really would like is a potting shed and so this week for Chari's Sunday Favourites meme @ Happy to Design I'd like to share with a post that I wrote back in May 2008.
Click on the link to the PastWhisperers and try and guess which potting shed is "me".

"The potting shed is a great place to be when it's raining and you can't get into the garden to work.
The various seedlings and small plants are thriving in one of our more usable "dependences", it's certainly not as pretty as some potting sheds but it serves all my needs.
Yesterday was warm so I finished planting the potatoes and also put in a row of spinach beet seeds which will come up alongside the spuds.
The starter lettuces that I got at the market last week are doing well and soon we'll be having fresh salad from the potager in the pretty bowl which I found at the vide grenier on Thursday.

In the meantime I think you'll enjoy this
http://www.thepastwhispers.com/Potting_Shed.html "