What I have been upto to since the last post

I have decided to retire from full time employment and concentrate on the more pleasurable things in life. These include our garden and my craft.

Our garden is an ever evolving project. Plants die and new ones take your fancy, either because I have read  about them, seen them or been given them. The next major project for the garden is to build my husband a workshop. This involves moving 2 compost bins and getting rid of two sheds to make room for it. I am currently digging out the compost bins and spreading the compost round the garden, it is lovely stuff and should do the planting no end of good. I may have to do a bit more weeding than usual, but retirement should allow me the time to keep on top of it. We have to lose the arbour and move some of the plants in the area. Well that's the summer months of retirement sorted, then it will be into the autumn/winter garden jobs. My colleagues seem to think I will have time to miss work!

Craft wise, I have not progressed any further with the Ferret workshop quilt, detailed in the previous post, I still need to over-dye the fabric with more yellow. I have however started loads of other stuff and rediscovered the joys of crochet with one waistcoat, a scarf and two bags, not to mention numerous flowers and several charity blankets. 

The crochet bag patterns come from Lucy, who lives in Skipton and publishes beautiful pictures of this area and the things she sees and makes on her blog, Attic24. Several of my crafting friends follow her blog and introduced it to me. It is inspirational and well worth a look.

The blankets I have been making are for a charity that sends them to Romanian orphanages. I got involved with this project through a quilting friend who also crochets.

I have been making items for the Hearts tombola at the Festival of Quilts, in August at the NEC, with my quilt group Quilters of Sutton. You can see our results at http://www.quiltersofsutton.blogspot.co.uk.

At classes, I have been making a red, pink and white (with a bit of yellow and green) quilt, red is not my favourite colour but it looks lovely so maybe that no longer applies.

I have also made some cute zipped containers with CD's as stiffeners from a pattern I found on the internet. They are quite straight forward and give you a great opportunity to embellish them to suit the recipient. I have given a total of five as gifts and made one for myself. Unfortunately, the link for this pattern no longer seems to be available. 

Once I am retired I hope to get time to make more Project Linus quilts. It has also been suggested that I could run my own workshops, that is a little daunting but I can't rule it out.

For some reason I did not publish this post written in June 2014, probably because I wanted to add pictures.