Happy Monday everyone! I hope you had a fabulous weekend. I spent mine with Anne and family.  It was very low-key. I made blueberry pancakes on Sunday for breakfast and we BBQ’d pork chops for dinner, YUM!  Today I have my friend Jessica from Noguchi Designs here for you. I first met her through a sewing group on Facebook and we learned that we have a lot in common and have become fast friends. She is sharing a fabulous recipe with you today. Make sure you check out her facebook and blog – she is wonderful, and I will tell you more about that next week!
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Doesn’t that just make you hungry!  Have a great day!

Today I have Karen from Quilting, Losing and Tea. She has been such a wonderful blogging pal, even helping me proofread my very first pattern. She is quite talented and is here today to share with you her love of charms.
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I love charms!

Thank you so much Karen, your quilts are absolutely beautiful and I can’t wait to see what you make with The Charming Travelers!  Now head on over to Karen’s corner of the blogging world, Quilting, Losing  and Tea, to go learn about a chance to receive those traveling charms (and follower her too while you are over there, you won’t be sorry you did!!!).

My dear family friend, Susan, is here today. She has a great article for you on gardens and finding inspiration everywhere in your life! You are going to love it!
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How Does Your Garden Grow?

Creativity comes in many forms and some of the same skills one taps into when designing quilts and sewing projects can be applied to a garden as well. Colors, shapes, patterns, and even a little randomness all come into play.

In sixteenth century England, formal pleasure gardens were just coming into their own, thanks in part to the in-migration of professional gardeners from Italy and France and to social and cultural changes that brought more social order and security and meant that owners of the “big houses” (kings, earls, dukes, and the like) had more time and money to invest in pleasurable pursuits. Gardens thus became status indicators and were often very large and quite complex.

These gardens might include small orchards and all manner of shrubs, flowering plants, and herbs. They often featured walls or hedges enclosing smaller areas or sub-gardens, and gardeners employed walkways, arbors, benches, and even small hills known as “mounts.” Heraldry features and beast sculptures might be used to emphasize some element of family history or status, and sundials, fountains, fishponds, mazes, and topiary all eventually came into use.

The most notable feature of sixteenth-century gardens were knot gardens. These were usually a square composed of four “knots” —plants in an arrangement that resembled a knot—often surrounded by a railing or some other feature to set them off. Knot gardens are still found today, such as this one at St Fagans museum of country life in Wales:

Often gardens were laid out under windows or balconies to provide a vantage point from which to truly appreciate the design of the garden and its features. The value of this was brought home to me late last summer when I was up on a ladder holding something for my husband and happened to have my camera with me.

I could see how colors and shapes worked together:

And I could appreciate how I, like the Renaissance gardener, had incorporated places to stroll and places to sit and enjoy:

In 1577 a practical guide for gardeners appeared called The Gardener’s Labyrinth. Authored by one Thomas Hill, it remained in use for many decades, even in the “colonies.” Among it’s many illustrations is this one:

And another one features the gardener working in his raised beds, so mine are simply part of a tradition hundreds of years old:

Medieval gardens had generally been smaller of scale and used for growing plants and herbs for food and medicinal purposes. Those kinds of gardens certainly continued, as members of the lesser social classes would still have needed the garden’s bounty and would not have had time, money, or need for a formal pleasure garden. However, large or small, formal or not, I suspect that there have always been those who enjoyed the challenge and the beauty of growing things for their own sake. And, I’d like to think that rather than lions sculptured from shrubbery, one might simply have “guarden-cats”—living or not!

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Thank you Susan! I find inspiration for my quilts all the time in gardens. There are color combinations in gardens that I never would have thought of, but when I see them in nature I get suddenly inspired.  PS. I love your “guarden cat”!