Spring has POUNCED!

The town I live in is a very pretty town, always full of flowers in the spring and summer, very brightly-coloured in autumn and in winter, stark in that picturesque Christmas-card fashion that tends to involve snow and robins and sheep and occasionally Shetland ponies. It is, all in all, a very inspiring place to be and it's no wonder that we have, at my last count, six galleries and a community art college across the same half-mile stretch of ground.

Only right now? I am far too busy for this.
Spring has sprung like a well-aimed mantrap, offering me bright flowers in all directions. There are planters, memorial gardens and instances of guerrilla gardening all over the place, all of them bursting riotously into bloom and I am up to my neck in Things I Really Should Be Doing, so there is no way I can drop everything and start embroidering pointless bits of cloth in frivolous pastels.

But it is at least a beautiful day out there, so the daffodils look sunnier than ever, and there are thousands of them. The Patmos war memorial garden in the centre of town has so many, and they bloom all down the sides of the train track - if I wasn't so busy with ofther things I'd be making yellow satin stumpwork daffodils right now. Or maybe forget-me-nots.

Forget-me-nots are possibly my all-time favourite flower, like a little scrap of sky with a sun in it, and they're abundant round here, too - and in a few of the communal beds, someone's made them grow in white and hot pink and navy blue as well. Incredible.

But the bloom that is reminding me of my duty projects and making me really happy that I'm doing them is this. The cherry blossom, or as they call it in Japan, the sakura. There's a lot of these in my town - they're just starting to really come into flower now, in a couple of weeks these and the apple trees will be in full flower and the air will be full of whirling blossoms like something out of a Japanese film. Before I came here I thought the showers of blossoms blowing in the wind in romance scenes was just a special effect but it really does happen just like that - at the end of my road, at the right time of year, you can stand under the cherry tree and feel like a romantic film star as the petals swirl around you and get caught in your hair.

So how much have I been motivated? Well, I had two Psychobats and two keyrings to make, and yesterday afternoon I was at this stage:

Today, I've done a little more on that second keyring and the turquoise bat - oh! and the blue and fuchsia bat is finished and ready to post! Here he is!

I call that progress, don't you?