Corners of my home: Living room

 I'm starting a new feature on the blog called Corners of My Home. I love home tours on blogs and I'd like to give you one, but my house is never tidy enough, so I thought I'd just do corners. It's easier to clear all the junk out of a corner! I have kind of got redecorating on my mind, as we are hopeful that this will be the year our earthquake damage to the house is repaired. So you never know, maybe some time the house will be cleaned out and painted and tidy enough to show. In the meantime, this is a corner in my living room, or as we call it, the lounge.

 In Timaru there is an amazing Salvation Army op shop where I always score lots of good things. Most recently it was this beautiful tapestry panel. All I had to do was sew it into a cushion. It's sitting on my hexagon quilt blanket, which I still work on sporadically. Over the back of the couch is a panel destined to become another cushion - see the heart pattern? I'll tell you more about that at a later date.

It's January, so it must be time to pick buds from the Cecile Brunner rose and put them in my bubble vase. This little posy looks cute anywhere, whether it's the lounge or the bathroom counter or my bedside table.

Hope you enjoyed this little peek into my home. More soon!

(Linking up to Op Shop Show Off at Blackbird Has Spoken)

Abundance

 With the warm summer weather, the potager is thriving. It's such a joy to pop out there in the evening, pick something, and cook it for dinner. In the front right bed I've planted some sweet corn seedlings. They were an impulse buy - I'm not sure if it's too late for corn - but I put them all in, in a block because I seem to remember it grows best that way. We had some strong winds after I planted them and half the plants were bent in half. Happily most of them have now come right, so I'll keep hoping for their survival!

In the front bed on the left are carrots that have gone to seed. I like their soft, billowy flower heads so I've let them be. Behind them are some spuds ready to be dug, so the whole bed can be cleared when the spuds come up. After that I'll plant some brassicas for autumn harvesting.

 The beans are looking lovely with their salmon pink flowers. They are covering the arch in a most pleasing way. I like it when plants do what they're told.

 Borlotti beans are tumbling gracefully at the front, with a few cosmos just because I like them. In the back is a little tent I made from a scrap of net curtain and some bird netting. It's to keep butterflies off the cauliflowers. I'm not expecting it to work, really, but I have a few test subjects which didn't fit under the net, so we'll see.

 These are the outdoor tomatoes, planted companionably with some basil and chilli peppers. I'll put some lettuce seedlings in the front. Then all the salad ingredients will be together.

This is all I've been harvesting in the last month! I must say I'm most pleased. The garlic haul was the most disappointing, as some of the bulbs were tiny. I think they got crowded out by some rogue phacelia. The gherkins have been steadily producing, and I bottle a jarful every week. We've had broccoli for stir fry, cabbages for coleslaw and boysenberries for fruit salads. (Actually, after the Christmas glutton-fest of trifle and fruit salad, I haven't been in the mood for more berries. So these have gone in the freezer for a rainy day.)

Life is so so good at the moment. For me, warm weather makes everything easier. I've got my lounge chair and my umbrella, and I'm going out to sit and look upon my little kingdom. I hope you're having a good start to the new year, and enjoying the summer weather if you're lucky enough to be experiencing it. (Keep warm, my northern hemisphere friends!)

New year, new name, same blog

It's a new year and I've decided that it's time to rebrand my blog a little bit. When I first started blogging here I intended it to be an art blog, but over the past few years I've become more of a homebody, doing my house and garden and pottering happily away in my small corner of the world. I try to make my life beautiful and that's what I want to share here on the blog.

I chose the name Camellia Rose because those are two of my favourite flowers. I love tending my flower garden and picking the blooms to decorate the house. It also represents two opposite seasons. I try to live as seasonally as possible, which means embracing whatever is blooming or fruiting in the back yard and allowing that to influence my life indoors, from cooking to decorating.

Aside from the name change everything is going on as normal here. My web address has stayed the same, however if you have linked to my blog on yours, it would be great if you could change the link name from Deep Into the Darkness Peering to Camellia Rose.

I have also created a couple of pages (at the top of the blog under my banner), so far there is an About Me and a Potager page. Thanks to everyone who stops by and reads my blog, and especially those who leave comments. I really appreciate hearing from you. Happy new year everyone!

Photos from a rose garden

While I was on holiday over Christmas, my mum and I visited the Timaru Botanic Gardens, and took a stroll through the rose garden. The roses were all blooming beautifully and smelled gorgeous. We also walked through the fernery (the scroll patterned door above) and through the scented herb garden. You can see the cutout in the hedge that leads to the herb garden in the first photo. I wish my garden was big enough for a hedge with cutouts. I'd also like some of these scented roses, but of course I didn't write down any names.

Hot

You know it's hot when...

 The thermometer in the glasshouse is almost off the scale...

 The cat is lying in a melted puddle on the mat...

 Plants are wilting before your eyes...

 It's too hot to recline in your favourite lounger...

So you go sit under a tree and it isn't any cooler.

I have to give kudos to the weather gods, because summer's been quite satisfactory so far. Sunshine and good temperatures, with rainy days to balance it out. The garden looks good and I feel good.

Happy new year to you... and I hope life is good to you wherever you are.

How to make LED lights look softer

 I posted earlier about my cold blue LED Christmas lights, and how I'd learned that the trick to warming their light colour is just to apply some nail polish in an orange or yellow colour. Recently I was at the mall and spotted some horrible orange nail polish. After wondering to myself why anyone would paint their nails that colour, I remembered the lights.

When I got home I tried the polish on the garland in my hallway and to my great excitement, it worked.

 Before.

 After. It's subtle, but they are much less garish.

The (slight) downside is that when the lights are off they are orange coloured. But no one really looks at Christmas lights when they aren't on, anyway. I'll be painting my other lights after I take the tree down.

(I'm kind of curious to get other colours of nail polish and try them out... you could have a whole rainbow of lights!)

Christmas decorating

 I didn't restrict myself to just a Christmas tree this year. I've also decorated several spots around the house including this shelf in the kitchen. It's difficult to photograph because this room only gets a little bit of early morning sunshine coming through the back door, or else in the late afternoon it beams right through the windows you can see here. I tried my best with the early morning light...

 The string of beaded lights is battery  powered so it's easy to drape over a shelf. 

I used flower frogs to display some Christmas postcards.

 The tall green tree has a white organza ribbon at the top. It's disappeared into the background here...

 Displaying baubles in a glass is a good way to add a pop of colour.

I'd love a proper Christmas village! For now I'm using my little houses and some bottlebrush trees that I need to glitter or paint or something.

 This is the window overlooking my garden. I painted a branch white and suspended it upside down by a ribbon.

These are some handmade ornaments I received in swaps.

I love my decorated kitchen this year. All the extra Christmas cooking is much more bearable with pretty things to look at! Have your decorated your kitchen?

December flowers

This month I'm making the most of the early summer stunners. The peony that I grew from a tuber dug from Mum's garden has finally flowered! It was in bud forever, at least 2 months I would say. Then suddenly the flowers opened, and in a few short days they were finished. They still did better than my shop-bought tuber, which put out some lovely leaves but no flower buds. 

Some late aquilegia are still blooming. And the miniature gladioli have burst into colour. I like the compact size of these little plants, the colours are so vivid that I wouldn't want them any bigger.

As the weather warms up, every day I go outside and something else is blooming. I love this time of year so much. Summer days forever!

As usual I'm linking up to Garden Blogger's Bloom Day.

Christmas, yay

I have a love/hate relationship with Christmas. Some years I'm into it and can't wait to decorate, and some years I'm a grinch and just want it all to be over. This year it's Christmas, yay. I put my tree up in the last week of November and have been enjoying it ever since. I went with a blue, pink and silver colour scheme, mixing it up with cheap shop-bought balls and my favourite handmade decorations from previous years. 

Last year I bought LED lights thinking they'd last longer than classic fairy lights so it would be a good investment. When I got them home and plugged them in I really wasn't too fond of the cool blue light they gave off. This year, I notice LED lights now come in either cool blue or warm yellow tones, but I'm not going to just buy a new set. Thanks to blogland, I've learned that the trick to warming up your cold LED lights is to simply paint the bulbs with nail polish in an orange or yellow shade. Of course, I found that out a couple of days after I'd set up the tree, so I'll wait till next year to try that one out. At least the blue fits in with the colour scheme!

What's on your Christmas tree this year?

Weird Cat Behaviour #7

WEIRD CAT BEHAVIOUR #7

Killing a bird and eating it under the Christmas tree.

I killed a bird, I liked it!

The taste of that chewy chaffinch.

I killed a bird, just to try it

I hope my stomach don't mind it.

It felt so wrong, it felt so right

I'll throw it back up tonight.

I killed a bird, I liked it!

I liked it!

(Weird human behaviour: writing alternative lyrics to Katy Perry songs. I didn't do it all on my own though... thanks to my mum for being as silly as me!)

Weird Cat Behaviour is an occasional series on my blog. For other weird things my cat has done, click here.