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Advice For Beginner Gardeners

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There are few better hobbies than gardening. Gardening allows you to improve your living space, be outside enjoying the sunshine and fresh air without leaving your home, and it is an active and rewarding hobby. These are just a few of the main benefits of gardening as a hobby, but it is also something that can be challenging to get started with. Therefore, it is helpful to be aware of a few tips that will help you to get started with gardening and hopefully allow you to enjoy these many benefits. Keep reading to find out a few handy tips for beginner gardeners.

Create A Plan

Before you get started, it is important to get to know your garden and then plan how you want to use it. You need to know important factors like areas that get the most (and least) sun, what direction it faces, and the type of soil that you have, just as a few important factors. With this information, you can then create a floor plan for your garden and figure out what to plant and where and how to really make the most out of the space.

Learn How To Plant & Nurture Plantlife

Gardening is all about knowledge, so you need to make sure that you know how to plant and look after different types of plant life to make sure that they grow properly. Fortunately, the internet is a brilliant resource for gardeners as you can find out how to grow just about anything online with various different websites, blogs, and podcasts. Additionally, you might find it helpful to join online communities where you can get advice, ask questions and engage with other gardeners.

Protect Yourself

When you start spending a lot more time outside and in the sun, it is important that you protect yourself. Being outside is good for you in many ways, but there are dangers, so you should always wear sunscreen, try to avoid spending too long in the sun, and wear UV contact lenses. UV contact lenses will protect your eyes from harmful UV rays and prevent you from needing to wear glasses, which will often fall off when gardening.

Start Off Small

As with any home improvement project, people often get over excited and bite off more than they can chew when it comes to gardening. Instead, you need to start off small by simply working on one area at a time. This will make it much easier to manage, help you to stay organized, and gradually improve your garden. You also need to avoid overdoing it as gardening can be physically demanding and tiring, so taking regular breaks is important.

These tips should come in handy for anyone that is looking to start gardening as a hobby. Gardening can improve your home and your life in many ways, but it is also a hobby that can be tricky to get started with, and you will want to know these basic tips before you begin.

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How to Finish a Cross Stitch Bookmark

One of my favorite ways to introduce new crafters to cross stitch or embroidery is by having them make a bookmark. They’re useful even if they don’t turn out that pretty, and it’s a small enough project that it can be done pretty quickly, even if you don’t have a lot of stitching skills.

For little kids I love to have them start stitching on burlap because the holes are big and forgiving, and they can play with cross stitch or other kinds of embroidery all in one place. These are usually finished with duct tape on the back both to hide the stitching and knots and to seal in the edges so the fabric doesn’t unravel.

There are, of course, prettier methods for finishing a cross stitch bookmark, especially if you are working on Aida fabric. A common thing to do is to fold the fabric over on itself and then sewing down the edges. You can do the same thing with regular fabric or felt sewn on the back, but if you’ve planned to have extra cross stitch fabric on your project that makes it even easier.

If you need help making your cross stitch bookmarks pretty, check out this post with a tutorial from A Stitch of Blissfulness.

The post has plenty of photos to make it clear what you need to do. You can finish all the edges in the same way so that they are closed, or you can make fringe along the top and bottom of the bookmark by unraveling a little bit of the fabric on the ends. She shows how to do this too, and it’s a cute look though I don’t know that I would always do it this way.

If you like to stitch bookmarks, how do you finish them? I’d love to hear about it.

[Photo: A Stitch of Blissfulness.]