dining before and after

my husband and i bought our first home a year ago january, and this summer is the first that we've had a chance to really do anything at all to the backyard.  we really wanted to make it a little oasis in the city, somewhere that we could linger over late summertime dinners or spend a saturday afternoon in the hammock with the paper.

i wanted to have a really great table out there, for said dinners (we live in a house full of great cooks, so the kitchen and the table really are the heart of our home), but i was also on a budget, so i ended up revamping a table that was a curbside score (toronto is an amazing city for this), along with some chairs that the previous owners of our house had left behind.

here is the before shot.  my supervisor is clearly not impressed.

a few coats of paint, some great fabric and an umbrella, and voila:

i used nani iro oilcloth that i got at the workroom for the seats.  i adore this fabric. karyn just got a bunch more of the line in cotton gauze - her photos always make me want to rush in and fabric horde.

 our backyard is even more magical right now, since the mock orange is blooming.  the entire tree is covered in white blossoms that smell amazing.

 and when the wind blows, the petals fall and it feels like it's snowing.  snowing beautiful, fragrant petals.  it's lovely.

 

growing colour

i received a small but exciting package in the mail today - the seeds that i had ordered for my dye garden this year.  i got them from richters, a great seed company here in ontario that specializes in herbs - they have tons of medicinal herbs as well as the dye ones which i ordered.

i grew some weld a few years ago, and was thrilled with the yellow colour that i helped create, literally from the ground up.  this year i decided to try a variety, including weld, coreopsis, golden marguerite, black hollyhock, dyer's broom and a few different kinds of indigo.  i think i'm already a bit late for starting the indigo seeds, but i'm going to give it a go anyways.

i always find myself realising that i'm too late for starting seeds indoors - so many things seem to call for being begun 4-8 weeks ahead of outdoor planting, and i seem to miss this (probably because at that time it's usually still snowing, and it's hard to even imagine gardening yet).  but this year i did manage to get some veggie seeds on the go, relatively early, and my studio window is delightfully full of little green sprouts right now.