Well, it’s the day I’ve been waiting for, the day I allow myself to spin again. And I’ve got a photo. No, I haven’t yet actually sat at my wheel, but this is something I never posted prior to my self inflicted month of exclusive knitting.

You may remember that I created these batts to coordinate with each other? I decided to spin a 2 ply, each batt a separate skein of coordinating yarn. I got started with the most saturated pink color, spinning half the batt onto one bobbin.

And…that’s where I stopped. But, it’s certainly pretty! And it’s a bit thicker than I generally spin. Which is nice.

We had an extremely productive day in the gardens. I started out transplanting 3 columbines all in different gardens that weren’t doing well to one garden that had a different color columbine doing very well. One of the transplanted columbines was in my veggie garden, an inappropriate place, the other was in too much shade and didn’t do well at all, and the third was in a great place but getting choked out by very well established Rudbeckia. We’ll see how they do next year.

Then I moved onto my peonies, and made an extremely full vase of them for the house.

Mr. Ink is not a peony fan, due to bringing ants in the house. But me? I just hang out next to the vase of peonies for awhile, and remove the ants and put them back outside. Small price to pay for such beauty and fragrance in my home if you ask me!

Then I decided it was time to divide out my irises, as some of them weren’t doing a great job flowering, so smashed in they were. Initially I tried to dig them up, and broke a plastic spade. Then I realized that they’d been neglected for so long that most of them weren’t even in the dirt anymore, they were just in the leaves and mulch on top, continuously spreading. That meant I never did have to dig. I just yanked gently, and the ones that wanted to pop out did so.

I transplanted some of them to a different area in the yard, used them to fill back in the areas in the iris garden that looked bare and the rest I will be giving to a friend.

I gave Mr. Ink the duty of spraying around the foundation for bugs. He went to do so, and ended up getting sidetracked by our beautiful retaining wall. He cleared some away from the foundation, and then realized that there was more dead in there than he knew, and he made a huge mess.

He trimmed the creeping junipers to a point where they had no dead remaining, he fixed the wall itself, moved the rock alyssum up higher on the wall, and then planted some moss roses in some of the bare space. When he started, you couldn’t see the rocks at all. When he finished?

Amazing! We also ended up with a wheelbarrow full of dirt.

I yanked weeds out of the other retaining wall while he worked on this wall, and I admit, I am hoping he does the same job on that wall he did on this one. What an amazing difference.

Will I spin today? Probably, but first, a wander through my gardens and a bike ride is in order!