Collecting seeds and sewing birds

In case you think I spend all my time doing wooly stuff...well, I do spend a lot of my time at the moment..here are a few other things going on..
These are some beans I grew this year. A friend gave them to me and they were labelled 'Dalmation bean'' you can see why can't you, they're really pretty. They were also labelled 'climbing french for eating/drying' Well they weren't climbing..they stayed resolutely down at ground level at the bottom of the canes I put them next to! I didn't eat any as I wanted to build up my stock of seed, and I'm not sure if you're meant to eat the pods or dry the seeds for eating...I must ask her...or look it up on the internet!
Let me know if you'd like a few to grow. I've got some other fab purple climbing french beans, it would be good to share them around too.

Dalmatian beans

I didn't have a very productive year on the allotment because it was so dry and everything stopped growing in July. The beetroot are just swelling to about golf ball size now. Because the veg weren't doing well I let more free range poppies than usual fill in the spaces.

see photos of them here (oops, I've lost one photo!)

 It was very pretty, and I now have a HUGE harvest of poppy seeds to put in bread, cakes and puddings. This is the bowl of empty seedheads, so pretty.

Poppy seed heads

And finally here are some birds I made after a late night blog browsing session. They are stuffed with some not very good wool (oops, did I mention wool). I thought that with red breasts they'd make good Christmas decorations. I haven't decided if they need eyes or wings adding yet. I found the pattern here.
http://www.spoolsewing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/birdpattern1-1.pdf