Flowers everywhere!

Spring has really taken hold on me!  This weekend (another beautifully sunny one), I cleared a little space in the greenhouse and started sowing seeds.  I must confess that I didn't clear the greenhouse out completely - just enough space for me to stand and to work.  Got to leave a little job for another weekend, yes?

I found these shallow pots to do the initial sowing of some snapdragons and rudbeckias.  They'll get individual little pots later, when they've germinated and are big enough to handle.

 These are the rest of this weekend's sowings - they don't look much like this...

 ... but this is going to be the end result, hopefully.  Sunflowers (short, multi-headed ones), stocks, begonias (seeds like dust!), ageratum, rudbeckias, sweet peas and snapdragons.  I have to keep these lovely pictures in mind while the seeds are germinating, because nothing's happening right now.  (Only sowed them yesterday, of course nothing's happening yet.  Even though I keep going to look...)

 In the meantime, pretty gardening gloves.  I'm not really a pink and white girl, but these are light enough for me to feel what I'm doing and waterproof enough to keep my hands clean.

 This is what I'm planning to plant the seedlings into when they sprout.  They're cardboard pots that can be planted out as they are, and rot in the soil without disturbing the plants.  Once I'd bought them, I remembered you can do the same thing with eggboxes, so I've saved some of those too.

 The seed trays are on the shelves in the extension, soaking up the light from the Velux window.  My little crochet hanging birds are watching over them.  No eating the seeds, birdies!

 So if my seeds aren't flowering yet, I can still have flowers!  I'm trying to choose light summer colours for these flower brooches, and I've used some slowly variegating yarns, so that each layer is different without changing the yarn.  I've borrowed a pattern from Lucy of Attic 24 for this bit - her beautiful Triple Layer Flower pattern - and then I add fabric, ribbons, beads and buttons to make them all unique.  Many thanks to Lucy for sharing her patterns!

And even more flowers, using the granny flower pattern this time.  These are for some bunting.  I have lots of different colours of Paton's 4 ply 100% Cotton, and I'm planning to make a few flowers in each of those colours, before mixing them up to make bright strings of flower bunting with randomly mixed colours.  I'm not very good at 'random', so that might be a bit of a challenge.  Maybe throwing them all in the air and seeing how they land will work for that...