Dried flowers, a campfire, one knitted owl…

It’s a sunny weekend! And now that the spring is just around the corner, it’s starting to get miscellaneous again… 😉

March

dried peonies

It was finally time to take these friends outside for a pic yesterday. My dried peonies from last summer… beauties… lovely memories…

dried flower crown

My dried flower crown from the summer of 2015 is hanging on a door window in our hall. What actually dominates this picture, however, is an unfinished door window curtain project. 🙂

campfire

Our garden campfire last night. It was warming so nicely in the beautiful but cold darkness.

knitted owl

I started knitting again. I love knitting, but I’m not always doing it. 🙂 And… I always need some practice with it. This, for example, is my first ever owl!

-Leena

Blueberry gold, the next peony poppy, the very last peony flower

We’ve been doing quite a lot of Nordic walking, but I don’t always take pics of it… On Thursday I took a pic – I tried to demonstrate what we’ve been doing quite a lot lately; Nordic walking and during that activity picking and eating blueberries, too (isn’t that a healthy and pleasant combination 😉 ) in the forest where one of our favourite walking trails goes.

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The starting and ending point of the trail is by the lake Pyhäjärvi, I took this pic after our walk – trying to get some of my blueberry fingers, too, in the pic. 😀 This previous blog post about Nordic walking was from the same forest, our raven forest near our home. We just love it! – There’s always a raven or many ravens croaking. Once we heard, and saw, many many ravens. We tried to count them; there was at least 15 if not over 20 ravens dashing, flying and croaking. Amazing it was. Ravens are both funny and noble birds. 🙂

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A muffin again yesterday evening… We’re lucky enough to have a lot of wild blueberries in our back garden, too. Yesterday evening we made some blueberry muffins. Muffins of gluten free flour; whole grain oat flour. Oat is the best! 🙂 So delicious and healthy. And traditionally Finnish!

poppy

Two pics of the next peony poppy flower today. This, too, is one of my ‘wild poppies’. This was hit with rain – yesterday, heavily…

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peony

And the very last peony flower – just had to take pics today… Yesterday I was hoping that this would survive the rain and grow bigger…

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…so that I could cut it for drying today. And that was what I already did, because I thought the flower is big enough to cut, to save, now. The other peonies that I cut for drying earlier, are still doing (drying) just fine. 🙂

-Leena

All peonies, every pic…

Today the peony pics I talked about yesterday, I said that there would be poppies, too, but I’ll have them in an another post. This one’s devoted to peonies – the last ones for this summer… I took the first six pics on Saturday, they all look almost the same… almost, but not quite! I have them all in this blog post, for myself and for everyone else who loves peonies.

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peony

peony

The peony moments go so fast every summer…

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There cannot be too many peonies in one’s life. 🙂

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peony

The next two pics are from Monday.

peony

And drying peonies:

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First I must thank my friend who reminded me about the drying – as much as I love peonies, I would have just let them all go without realizing that I could dry them and have a lovely memory of summer in the dark wintertime, some of my peonies still with me! So, thanks A! 🙂

So, this is the traditional and simple air-drying that I’m doing. – My peonies are drying in our storage room which is the darkest and coolest place in our house, and yet, not very dark and not so cool – we live here in this warm but light jungle in the summertime. 🙂 My peonies were also fully opened as I cut them to dry on Monday, but I checked them today and the process was going just fine – the dream of my peonies being still with me in the winter is still alive! But if I cut the last peony to dry, I’ll cut it before it is fully opened.

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And the very last peony bud in the bush today…

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I think I’ll try to dry this one, too, if it still grows – I wasn’t so sure that this one would start to open… 🙂

-Leena