10,000 visitors to our blog!

Wow we never dreamed that we'd get 10,000 visitors to the Temari Addict Australia Blog. It is a tiny number compared to many websites but considering this blog has only run this since early last year and the special interest content it is pretty amazing.

Thanks to everyone who has visited, especially all our regular readers!! I love reading all the comments you post too. I am terrible at responding but I read all the comments.

I wanted to celebrate today and seeing as the weather is cooperating this morning I thought I'd have a special temari photo shoot in the garden.  We have a flowering plum tree in our garden and while the branches are still bare of leaves, it is starting to bud... spring is indeed around the corner. I dressed it up in some temari. Our usually quiet street had quite a number of walkers along it today. I got a few funny looks from a neighbour mowing his lawn and the leaflet delivery lady, our around-the-corner neighbour who was walking back from the corner store and a lady from up the street who is rarely surprised by the weird things that happen in our front garden.

So here is my temari tree.

I chose temari that were either stitched in sakura designs or in shades of red and green.

Look at our gorgeous blue sky this morning.

 Here are a few close up shots of sections of the tree.

Can you see the shadows on the ground cast by temari higher up. We are getting a few spring flowers now but as you can see the ground is still quite bare.

I don't usually hang my temari so I used some paper clips to gently hook into the thread wrap layer and hung them over the branches. We also use them to hang our glass baubles on the tree at Christmas so we can hook decorations anywhere along the tree branches without having to feed a thread loop from the end of a branch.

 

I would have liked to get temari all over the tree but it is in the corner of the yard surrounded by hedge on 2 sides, a pond and our small Japanese Maple tree. Besides the fear of knocking off any potential blossom buds, biggest worries were falling into the pond or dropping my temari in the dirt. So here is what the ground level looked like. Yay for plastic tablecloths and IKEA stools.

My Son's goldfish live in the pond. We had to cover it with mesh a few years ago because Ibis and Pelicans were flying over from the local wetlands to snack on the little fish and some of the bigger ones too. I know it is a law of nature that birds eat fish but try explaining it to a 4 year old who insists that those fish are his fish and not bird food. We got couldn't bear his little tears so we covered the pond with this ugly mesh.

  

Here are our little family of fish. The solid red and little red/white fish are always together.

 Our front garden is a little Japanese styled. We created it a few years ago in homage to my brother and (now) sister in law who were living in Japan. We decided that if Japan had a little bit of Australia in it (my Brother) we should have a little bit of Japan here. There is a bamboo water feature in our pond, Flowering Plum and Japanese Maple trees and a stone styled lantern with a hedge wall.

Now I'm off to stitch again so I have something ready for my next post.

Hope you find time to do something you love today!