Watching a Tulip Bloom

I've mentioned that this was an excellent year for the tulips in our garden.

This wasn't a complete surprise because we planted some new ones last fall (posted about here) which turned out to be quite spectacular. Without knowing what we were doing when we got the new ones, we managed to get some which bloomed early, some later, and some really late, which continue to grace us with their beauty today.

But what did come as a surprise was the number of really old ones that bloomed that haven't done so for years. Some of these were planted by the people who lived here before us, and some were planted by me the first couple of years that we moved in. For more than five years these bulbs have been dormant (I'm not sure of the exact gardeners' term for what happened to them) and then suddenly this year decided to bloom their little heads off.

This resulted in a stunning display to tulips at our place this year. It was thrilling! (It's the small things, right?)

We have already decided that when fall rolls around again this year we are going to add more because it was just too much fun seeing them all come up like magic.

You can see some photos I took of the flowers and how I made greeting cards from them in this post, but today's post is about this particular random one which, before any of them had bloomed, I had found broken off by an animal. Not sure what animal but it could have been the same skunk that Nick shooed away from our front door only last night. Don't worry, it went away peacefully.

Anyway, I found this tulip laying on the ground but I had no idea what it would look like because at that point they were all green buds. So I brought it inside and this is what unfolded.

Caturday Goes to the Dogs : A Good Girl Waiting

Hi. I may have blown out the cute-meter with these shots of a little hound dog I came upon while walking along Queen Street the other day. What do you think?

There Were Wings and Crowns and a Flower Strewn Chariot

When we got stuck on one side of the street we wanted to cross a week ago Sunday, at least we had something to watch while we waited, because the reason we were delayed was that a parade was going by.

Dinner with Friends at Our Place

On Saturday we had some friends over for a late lunch / early dinner meal.

Our original intention was to barbeque the food and eat it outside, but only one of those things happened as it was just too cold to eat outside.

Making Greeting Cards with Photos and Some Pictures of Our Flowers

ass="aligncenter size-full wp-image-17130" src="http://www.loulou.to/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/make-greeting-cards-with-yo.jpg" alt="make-greeting-cards-with-your own photograph" width="640" height="426">Update : Since making these cards using our home printer, the printer stopped working and we chose not to replace it, however, I'm still making greeting cards with my own photographs, by getting them printed up at a regular photo printing shop.  They turn out nicely.  See examples linked in the "You May Also Like" section at the bottom of this post.  Thanks for reading!----------I have shown this greeting card making technique before when making Christmas cards with a picture or my cat Eddie on them, here and here, however I've not posted about making other types of cards this way too.You can use any of your digital photographs to make nice cards. Imagine 'Save the Date' cards with an engagement photo, or a 'Thank You' card with a picture of you using/wearing the gift. How about a birthday card with a picture of the birthday person celebrating a childhood birthday? Or next time you're at a birthday party take some shots of the decorations or cake and use those pictures to make future birthday cards.