• Eldest daughter passes her Matura and graduates from high school …tick
• Younger daughter passes the school year (by the skin of her teeth)…tick
• Audit completed and survived without major mishap….tick
• Husband packed off to Asia on a business trip…tick
• Mother purchases a new phone…hahahaha…next….(but she did manage to make her first phone call in what may be years last week because I went on strike and refused to call her….does that count as progress? I think it probably does…at least it fits into the minor miracle category!)
• House and garden back under control..mumble,mumble…but who cares anyway?

I made it! I got through June and the first week of July, albeit with a LOT of hard work and several sleepless nights. Things did finally slot into place as I had hoped they would. You never quite know though till it happens, do you? So I guess we are where we need to be. My son will repeat the school year in a different school, but maybe that is just something that needs to happen and let’s face it, worse things happen.

So now I have a weekend to get things under control a bit. The FQR Retreat isn’t far away now, so I’ve been putting my supplies together and trying to make the bee blocks that I want to be able to take with me. I’ve calculated that from the 4 bees I’m in I need to make a total of 7 blocks.

This is the first (and only so far)…

For the Stitch Tease bee for my good pal Quiltova.

One down and six to go…..

I also had a lovely treat this week. Look what arrived in the mail from Elisabeth at Shark’s Dinner…

Isn’t it gorgeous? The workmanship is just fabulous…

…and look! It even has pockets inside with presents in them!

This is what I’m going to use it for…FQR supplies.

Thank you so much Elisabeth – you made my day!!

Righty ho..back to the blocks. I might even make it back here tomorrow if I manage to get anything done to show you!

Have a nice weekend – I hope the sun is shining on you!

Helen

For some reason best known to herself, my mother has a thing about phoning me. She doesn’t. Not ever. Even though she lives in a different country and we have no relatives there, she will never, ever pick up the phone and call me. She seems to think she would be intruding…

(at this point you have to excuse me when I say: ‘she’s my mother for heaven’s sake! Do cold callers care when they ‘disturb’ me? Do they heck. Is it conceivable that if she did call at an inconvenient moment I would tell her and call her back? I don’t get it. Is this an old lady thing (she’s 86)?’)

Anyway I ring very regularly to check that everything is Ok. I tried last night…for hours…and hours….she wasn’t picking up, which was odd, because she’s always home on Sunday evenings.

So I had a bit of a disturbed night and a couple of hours between 3 and 5am of worrying about my mother having fallen down the stairs …..as you do…you’ve probably been there. You know what I’m getting at.

Today when I got in from work I tried again…off and on for a good two hours…ring, ring….no answer.

By this stage I was starting to get really concerned, so around 8pm I called up a neighbour of mum’s and asked her to go round and check. I waited very very nervously for the 15 minutes until I was due to call her back. Very, very nervously, going through various too awful to contemplate scenarios in my head.

When I finally called back it turned out that my mother was as right as rain. The phone was broken…actually it had been broken for a month, bits fall off and she shoves them back in again, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Right now it clearly doesn’t ring and she is dependent on a phone in the bedroom which has a ringtone that is so quiet you have trouble hearing it when you are in the same room.

(I should add that I had to ring her to find this out – she was waiting by the phone in the bedroom, but still wouldn’t pick it up and call me to say she was OK).

I very politely asked my mother to please go and get a new phone tomorrow. Will she? No, because she thinks you can get by by shoving bits in again and you see…and this is the crux of the matter…she’s absolutely fine, so there’s no need to worry.

And I’m supposed to know this how exactly?

Unfortunately my psychic powers are a bit on the weak side.

My mother really truly cannot see why I am upset about this situation.

I’m rather a a loss…and my blood pressure has just hit the stratosphere.

Now where’s that knitting??

Helen

I feel like I’ve been knitting this forever. Endless rows, round and round, all the same apart from a couple of increases or decreases every two inches or so. One and on and on….

Vanilla knitting of the best sort really.

There are times when I really want a challenge with my knitting, times when I whack through a pair of fancy socks in a week, times when I have to concentrate so hard on the pattern I’m knitting that I can’t manage to watch TV at the same time. But right now that’s not what I need at all. Right now I need something calm and soothing, something where I don’t really have to engage my brain at all, something where I can pick up where I left off without having to think.

This is when I see the zen beauty of plain knitting. Mindless, soothing, calm and yet at the same time productive. I need to do , make , create, see progress, but all without taxing the old grey cells to much.

In short I need relaxation knitting….

…and girls, this is it!

Lightweight by Hannah Fettig from the Knitbot Essentials book knitted in Chickadee by Quince & Co, colourway leek.

The joy of knitting. It really makes you wonder how non-knitters manage without it!

Helen

Things are on the up here on the hill. Summer has arrived in Switzerland and as usual I am amazed by the fact that after months of complaining about the weather being lousy it takes only two days before people start moaning about the heat….that being said it was steaming hot in the office this afternoon…but I refuse on principle to complain about it.

Several of the ongoing problems here seem to be resolved or at least on the way…..I knew that it would just take time and hanging on in and plodding through the days taking one step at a time. Several problems are not likely to be resolved….particularly those concerning a certain elderly member of the family’s refusal to consider any senior living options – but I’m just putting them all in a nice little drawer somewhere in the back of my mind and refusing to worry about things I can’t control.

I’m snowed under with work….counting down the days to an audit in 2 weeks time….but I think it’s all doable and I know it’s going to be wonderful when the audit is over….at least I hope it will be…that’s what’s keeping me going. I spend a lot of time on the train just imagining how wonderful the sense of relief will be!

Anyway in between the hectic I managed to make some blocks for Katy for the Stitch Tease 2 bee. I love the newspaper fabrics and haven’t found many chances to use them, so it was fun to make these blocks!

I really find my zen when I’m sitting at the sewing machine. I should really make myself sit down at it every evening – I know it would do the world of good. What I tend to do when I come in – and which is every bit as good, if I’m honest – is wander round the garden, ignoring the weeds that are springing up everywhere, and seeing what has burst into flower that day. Today was a really good day in the garden – a lot of my favourites are flowering…

Gorgeous aren’t they? I’m enjoying them while I can because I know a lot of them will be shredded by the first big thunderstorm that comes along.

I hope the sun is shining where you are too and that life is on the up!

Helen

A Siblings Together block for Di aka Quiltova….

Easy sewing to ease my way back to the sewing machine!

It felt good and as the days go by things are getting sorted out and moving forwards. I think I can almost see the end of the tunnel…..and along with other things, there is the FQR retreat at the end of it!

Helen