Getting Potted......

This Morning I spent a couple of hours over at the Mini Time Machine Museum. They asked me to talk to the docents about my restoration work on a lot of the older buildings. It was great fun. It was kind of like reminiscing about old times.... It has been years since I did that. I worked on them until Pat had the antique room full to the brim. She has almost doubled her collection of old houses! No wonder they had to build a whole new museum. It is beautiful place. It was very hard to leave after the talk was finished.

When I got home, Tessie and Mookie were on the bed. She had somehow dragged one of the landscaping boxes out of the workroom and I just barely averted a disaster.

There was Tessie sitting in the middle of one of the supply boxes with an Exacto knife in hand. Mookie was right behind her, egging her on. The two of them should never be left alone together. One thinks of something that they have no business doing and then they proceed to execute the deed.

In this case, Tessie decided that I was not working fast enough on the tea shop. She got it into her head that she would plant the flowers in the pots that go on the front window sills......I am just trying to figure out how she was going to do it, using an Exacto.

Mookie was really just more interested in chewing on the plastic bags in which I have loose leaves and flowers stored. What can I say? He must have a plastic deficiency. Those and cellophane are his favorite things to snack on.

With the Exacto crisis averted, I put her to work cramming floral foam in each of the pots. Then I covered the foam with glue and dipped the top of each one in model railroad ballast.

She then proceeded to poke a hole in each of the pots and stick in a piece of Nandina(Heavenly Bamboo). I harvest this from the back yard every year and let it dry. It makes wonderful plant stems of all kinds. It is pretty sturdy, but can be strengthened even more with a spraying of clear varnish.

Next I laid out the leaves and flowers for geraniums on a double thickness of leather. She used a small stylus to cup the flowers and I used a larger one to cup the leaves in four different sizes. Then I turned the leaves over and poked them in the center to make them look more like the real thing. That is as far as I got today. I will have to do the rest tomorrow. The lesson continues then.

I was hoping for help with cleaning up...... Tessie took one look at the stuff scattered all over the bed, perched on her director's chair and said....."OK, I'm done with my part. I will expect the window sills to be filled tomorrow. No more of this wandering around telling tales to people about your past exploits. Back to work! By the way, I still need more desserts to fill the shelves in the tea shop.......Now!"

I guess that tells you what I will be doing for the rest of today and part of tomorrow.

See you then.