African flower appreciation station

Just look what's appeared today.  

I love my flowers on my front door step; it's the only place outside my house that's safe from the ravages of small boys and footballs/sticks/swords/any other weapon that's to hand and so has become a little island of colour in a sea of boy-related crud.  One day I will reclaim the outside space as a proper garden, but until then I'll continue to take small pleasures from my pots of loveliness.

So it's been a fairly quiet old weekend really - work on Saturday, Wimbledon today (ah, poor Rafa - he's still my number one...), a bit of a clean-up in the bathroom - generally rock n roll all round.  Actually, it sounds a bit humdrum, but I love weekends like this - we seem to spend so much time legging it around all over the place that it's nice to be at home with nothing much going on.  We've got a busy few weekends coming up, especially with big N's birthday party on Saturday (I cannot believe my baby will be eight.  That makes me feel so old...)  Oddly we really struggled to think what to get him this year, we usually have a run down of the Lego catalogue, with items listed in order of preference (usually corresponds fairly closely to size of box) but not so this year.  After a bit of head-scratching from Mr N and me, we decided to sponsor an Amur leopard (no, I'd never heard of them either) because he regularly tells us we need to sponsor a tiger/dolphin/orang-utan - he loves his animals and even though he's a big boy in so many ways, I know he'll also love the cuddly leopard that comes with the sponsorship pack.  We also got him a guitar as he's just started having lessons at school - he came back after the first lesson and told us that he'd learned how to play a Led Zeppelin track; and to think it took Jimmy Page years to master...

I'm going to end today with a glimpse of my latest WIP.  I'm using the Rowan fine milk cotton that I bought recently in the John Lewis sale; and I have discovered.....African flowers:

How could I have lived for so long without these in my life?

And even as I'm beavering away making these as fast as my fingers can work, I'm still not entirely sure what to make with them.  Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.............. x