Well it isn’t much. But I managed to brighten the dreary days of March, eager with anticipation of spring, measuring the bulbs as they poke their heads out of the damp earth. In anticipation of tomorrow’s rain, I did manage to get the deck boxes and a couple pots planted with pansies, a wonderful gift from my friend and neighbor, in celebration of my husband’s birthday over the weekend. Thank you Deb! Everything is so bare and cold, but pansies add a 
little bright color in mid March, the first color of the spring.
Of course you realize that a week ago, the deck looked like this:
I’m seriously crossing my fingers we are done with the spring snowstorms.
I worked hard on the website today, managing to figure out one of the things that was eluding me. I knew it was just a stupid click, somewhere, yet I sweated how to do this simple thing for days, and then all of a sudden, Wham! The proverbial 2 x 4 hit me over the head and you could hear the “DUH!” all the way to Trenton! Now that I figured out that little detail, I can start on the gallery pages, and get them moving along. I want to reprocess all the images I used on the original site, make them more uniform, and a little bigger in their thumbnail size. So lots of photo processing, finding the originals in the archives, oh goody, a treasure hunt of sorts…
I worked for a bit tonight on the jacket, getting the left side of the jacket sewn in. It fits like a glove. I’m so glad I added the additional two inches in length. I’m really loving the lime green piping, and when I looked at it on me in the mirror, I loved the way the belt brings in the jacket in the back. But I decided, after mulling over some of the comments from the original posting, that a hint of the color someplace else would be a great idea. I have some DMC floss in the exact color as the felt piping, so I took off the back belt, and couched the floss on, get this, I realized I didn’t have the right color thread, couching only works if you have the same color thread, so I rooted around in a drawer, and voilá, there in the back was a very old wooden spool of poly thread, in the exact color. Go figure…
So I couched (which means a very narrow zig-zag stitch over a cord or yarn, in this case I used floss, aided by a little foot that has a groove to feed the cord or yarn). I plan to use this couched floss to topstitch the collar and the top of the sleeve cuffs.
I love the wavy movement of the felt piping, it looks like the aurora borealis in the northern sky, and that’s the effect I was looking for, the jacket is called after all, Arctic Sky.