February snowdrops

A few days ago I was telling a friend that I had recently felt that first promise of spring coming. At a stoplight on a windy corner at quarter to 6 in the evening I noticed it was still a bit light, hadn't it been pitch black the last time I was here at this time? Also the wind felt different, even though it was cold there was just the slightest hint of warmth that made me feel in my bones for the first time the promise of spring. 

We moved a few months ago, and something I've been telling people every since we started searching for a new house 2 years ago, was that I had dug up my snowdrops (the same ones I dug up from my grandma's garden and wrote about here), put them in a pot and was waiting to take them to our new garden. However, I'm not actually sure that pot made it along. There was a pot of unidentified small bulbs that I planted and that are coming up already, but so far all I see are crocuses and no snowdrops.

I've been thinking about that pot of bulbs. Did they get thrown out by mistake because it just looked like a pot of dirt? Did I plant them somewhere and they just didn't come up yet? For me they were a symbol of hope. Hope that in the long phase of searching for a new home, I did actually believe we would find it. Hope that there would come a place where I would put down roots and bloom. I haven't minded very much, not finding that pot, because our new home and our new garden is more beautiful than I ever quite dared imagine. And last week I looked out the bathroom window and saw a small patch of snowdrop blooming. Not ones I had planted there myself, but ones that were waiting here for me. 

Last February I published a new pattern with snowdrops, it is part of my series of video courses, but also made it into my mini kit collection. The snowdrop design on the wallpaper, the same design I used in my snowdrop bedroom pattern, is based on a carving of snowdrops I made years ago. Back then I wrote "I’ve already seen the snowdrops start to push up through the grass and I love the idea of plants, which die off in the winter and grow again in the spring, as a symbol of my memories of my oma and the things I’ve learned from her being given the space to grow in my life and be passed on to my children."

Something about hope, the persistence of beauty through periods of darkness and cold, and the small delicate strength of the snowdrop speaks to me. If you stitch one of these patterns, I hope the process brings you the same promise of warmth and growth and colour coming again.