unQuilty Domesticity

Remember this plant?

Its the Angelwing Begonia which outgrew my mother's apartment. She referred to it as, "The Elephant Plant" and with a little imagination you can see why she did. I broke off a few of the longer branches and gave away the plant that grew from them.

It grew even leggier than in the first photo and measured about 44 inches tall. While looking for care instructions for it on the internet, I found out that Angelwing Begonias can grow up to 5 feet tall in ideal conditions! I don't think my house qualifies as ideal conditions but taking no chances, I finally had enough and decided to prune it down and now it looks like this!

To see it is quite a shock and even my husband feels sorry for the plant! I could have cut off all of the stems at 6 inches as the website recommended but lost my nerve. We weren't really sure if it would live or die.

I'm happy to report that there are new little growths appearing from the stems so it may live afterall. I planted all the cuttings and leaves from the original plant and if all of them live (highly doubtful), I will have 15 new plants. Since I don't need or want more than one, I plan to give away a few and donate the rest to the upcoming MCC sale. No promises though because quite a few of the baby plants look rather sad.

So what else have I been doing instead of quilting?

Last week when my husband moved our older mattress set and frame to make way for a new set, I had a bout of spring cleaning. It was just something I could not ignore. I knew it would be dusty under where the mattress had been so I was ready to tackle vacuuming and wiping down woodwork. My next step did me in though. I didn't think the light bulbs were bright enough to let me see if I was really getting things clean or not so I opened the window shade blinds. When I did that, the lace curtains and swag fell off and the blinding sunshine revealed all! Yes, I had quite a dust and cobweb collection going. Instead of an hour clean up, I spent the entire day moving furniture, washing every textile in the room, cleaning windows and mirrors, wiping down all the woodwork, sorting and putting away things and oh yes, vacuuming. I tried to think of it as aerobic exercise!

I was tired at the end of the day but when I got up on Wednesday, I decided to tackle the living room, dining room and kitchen. I have to admit I didn't clean as thoroughly in those rooms as in the bedroom but they got cleaner than normal. I'm not sure what came over me except to blame it on spring cleaning fever! It is nice, though, to walk into our bedroom and find it clean.

Read this on an LQS' sign:
Whenever I get the urge to clean, I lay down till it passes!

Since this is supposed to be a quilting blog, I'll say that when I'm not tormenting plants or ridding my house of dust, I'm working on Bonnie Hunter's Criss Cross Applesauce quilt and thinking about how to fix the Selvage Spiderweb quilt. Looking forward to some quilting time at the end of this week!