Now I’m on my own and I’m motoring….can’t believe how much I’m getting done!!

Today’s finishes……

Zig-zag quilt top (Happy Mochi Yum Yum)

The first Waving Lace Sock (Evelyn A Clark, Madeline Tosh Sock yarn)….I’d rather like to rename this the Wiggy Sock after a certain young man’s wonderful success today!

My first manicure in living memory. It takes the Olympics to make me sit still for long enough for the nail varnish to dry!

Just to prove that I really am wonderwoman and to make you all hate me, I also managed to hoover the whole house, wash the floors and clean all the bathrooms before my better half went off with his biker buddies at 9.30 this morning! I needed to leave him with the impression that I’m really a wonderful housewife….whichl I am of course (not!)….and it meant that I could just sew to my heart’s content without feeling even remotely guilty!

Can’t tell you how much I’m loving this even if it is about a billion degrees up in my sewing room. It’s a little disconcerting when the sweat is running down your back when you’re sewing…

I wonder what’s in store tomorrow!

Helen

Tadaaaaa…..

Today once the teenagers had headed off and I had finished editing a couple of things I managed to get down to some hard sewing at lunchtime. Five hours and half a billion petals later I’m done. The Soda Pop quilt has officially been renamed Lime Fizz and is ready for basting. This is such a fun quilt to make. The petals are added using bondaweb and then just straight stitched down – which turned out to be much easier than I thought it would be. I made it to take part in the quiltalong run by Sew Allegorical. The pattern is by the inimitable Katy Jones aka I’m a ginger  monkey and features in the Fat Quarterly Shape Workshop for Quilters. The fabrics are mainly Sweetwater’s Lucy’s Crab Shack and Reunion.

This is such a totally different project for me – way out of my comfort zone – and I love it! Even the teenagers were surprised (I think at the fact that I could produce something so cool!!). If you want to have a look at what the others in the quiltalong have made, you can head over to the flickr group by clicking here.

So…on with project number two….

By the way, I’m a bit disillusioned with the Olympics – Britain’s medal hopes seem to have been rather over-egged – I’m wondering if we will ever manage to get a gold medal in anything at all and if the Chinese will end up with twice as many medals as the rest of the world put together. 

Helen

It’s Monday and my sewing week is up and running – a little slower than I’d hoped because the teenagers only leave tomorrow, so I’ve had to spend much of today running around and sorting out stuff for them and being the perennial taxi driver, but my head is in sewing mode and in between I’m doing what I can and at the same time dreaming of what four uninterrupted days is going to feel like….whoopeee!!!

The plan is as follows:

Sew EVERYTHING!

No, just joking…

it’s…

1) Finish the Soda Pop Quilt top and maybe even get it basted and ready to quilt.

2) Finish the Happy Mochi Yum Yum quilt top…again possibly sit in front of the Olympics and get it basted.

3) Finish the cover I started for my sewing machine a million years ago.

4) Make my next Stitch Tease block for Katy

5) Do some test sewing and make some decisions and prepare packs to send out for September for both the EPP bee and the Sew Euro-bee-an bee….(How did I end up having September for both bees?)

If I get anywhere near having that little lot done I’ll be incredibly happy. It probably won’t happen because dealing with the jungle that was my garden is on the agenda too – but I can ration myself to an hour a day on that front and whatever happens I should make some pretty significant inroads into all the projects. Watch out for regular progress reports!

It’s making me feel incredibly happy. Which is what I need right now!

The red velvet cup cakes my daughter is making help the general mood….particularly as it looks like I will be the only one here to eat them 🙂

Please don’t mention the diet!

Helen

So here we are – after a long, hot and finally torrentially rainy drive home from Italy I’m now home in cool and wet Switzerland. Which is just fine by me. I have been stuck in front of the TV today watching Team GB being slightly less than sparkling…but hopefully things will improve, and whether they do or not, I shall thoroughly enjoy two weeks of blissful sport watching.

The main sports I’ve been indulging in today have been in the areas of sock knitting (Waving Lace Socks by Evelyn A Clarke in Madeline Tosh Sock in dried rose) and petal cutting out, ready for cracking on with my Soda pop quilt top tomorrow.

I’m now realizing that I really need a TV in my sewing room! (Which probably isn’t going to happen). I wonder if I could at least get Olympic commentary on the radio soI’d know when I need to run downstairs and watch something!!

Thank you to all of you who have left such kind comments over the past few days – it really does help to have so many lovely friends out there in blogland. I think now I’m home my the loss of my friend will start to sink in. It’s good that I’m going to be on my own for a lot of this week – because I know I need to grieve and grieve I shall….

Helen

It’s been a strange week, this week. Cool and windy to start with and now insanely hot. We started out with a fair bit of sightseeing and have slowly but surely ground to a halt. A trip to the village to drink Latte Machiatto with the old men in a street cafe and buy Bistecca Fiorentina to take home are about all we’ve managed today. The pool is a blissful relief and I’ve finished reading the last of the three books I brought with me. The evening will be filled with packing, dinner locally and trying to watch the Olympics opening ceremony on a satellite system that only seems to pick up Al Jazeera, Bagdahd and Yemeni TV and other assorted unidentifiable arab stations.

For the most part the teenagers have been reasonable. We left them to their own sunbathing devices much of the time because it really wasn’t worth the effort to try to drag them off with us sightseeing. There is a limit to how much moaning and muttering I want to deal with.

On Tuesday I heard from a friend that my dear friend M had died in the night. Not unexpected and in many ways a blessed relief having battled cancer for 9 years, but I’ve spend my week trying to imagine life without her. She was one of those friends who was big in every sense of the word and in the last few years when she wasn’t very mobile I’ve spent a lot of time with her. For the last month I’ve been at the hospice every second afternoon watching the slow physical decline, but an undimmed spirit. Her last words when I left last Thursday and told her I’d be back this Sunday to see her were: ‘Well if I’m not here, you know where I am’. Said with a wry smile. And that is how I’ll remember her.

So tomorrow I’ll drive back north to the Alps and home. I’ve missed my sewing and knitting. I’ve even missed weeding the garden. It was lovely to have a break and see something new, but I’ve promised myself that next week is going to be a sewing week. The teenagers are off to visit their adopted granny at the Bodensee and hubby is motorbiking in the Alsace. I shall be at home being quietly contented 🙂

Helen