1st – 7th January. Blue Ridge Beauty & RSC.

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It’s been a lovely week here, weather not too hot and I’m finally up and able to walk around again.  I’ve spent lots of time at the sewing machine and in my sewing room decluttering.

Rainbow Scrap Challenge. The colour for January is green. I had heaps of green 1.5″ strips so I have made little trees. I might make a Christmas wall hanging with these, not sure yet but having fun with this.

Kathryn Kerr 365 Challenge.  This challenge is making a block a day for a year. The final quilt is really beautiful, with lots of very small blocks. I’m using green and Autumn colours for this. It’s a free challenge and her patterns are well written. I have several on them waiting in my ‘make’ list.

American Patchwork & Quiltings UFO Challenge. I’ve listed 12 projects to work on and hopefully complete this year. Blue Ridge Beauty is my project for January and I’m finally up to putting the top together. It’s taking quite a bit of concentration to ensure its correct so it might take me a few days. But I’m excited to see it coming together.

Donations.  I posted these lap quilt tops off to Comfort Quilts Against Cancer. 

 

 

 

Home. The bookcase is progressing nicely, undercoat is done and now the final coat of paint should be done later this week. Can’t wait till it’s finished and I can move on to the next room! We also have a new front verandah being installed later this week which should cut down the heat in living room quite a bit.

 Reading. I want to get back to more reading this year, including the 1001 Books to Read before you Die List which I made no progress on last year at all. This week I’m reading:

Legends & Lattes – Travis Baldree. After decades of adventuring, Viv, the orc barbarian is ready to retire and open up a coffee shop. I’m enjoying this, its a short, easy, cozy read.

The Nightingale – Kristin Hannah. “The story of two sisters in France during World War II and their struggle to survive and resist the German occupation of France. The book was inspired by the story of a Belgian woman, Andrée de Jongh, who helped downed Allied pilots escape Nazi territory.”  I’m listening to this on Audible and its really good, great story and a good narrator.

Linking up with: SoScrappy,  Oh Scrap

All I want for Christmas… (liberty fabrics & walking again!)

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A belated Merry Christmas to everyone! We had a lovely relaxing day with family yesterday. DH’s mum had been in hospital for some urgent, unplanned surgery in the two weeks prior so it was nice to have her home and on the mend.

Well December did not go as planned. Unfortunately I have spent the last month dealing with a very bad flare up of arthritis, mostly in my ankles & wrists, and I am only just able to walk about a bit better the last two days. So needless to say I did no Christmas decorating, no sewing at all and a lot of watching TV – finally watched all five seasons of Poldark! But today I am finally up and walking and feeling able to sew and generally get moving again.

I was given some really beautiful fabrics for my birthday and for Christmas by DD.

These two for my birthday.

 

and this gorgeous Strawberry Thief bundle for Christmas!

“Strawberry Thief is one of William Morris’s most popular repeating designs for textiles. It takes as its subject the thrushes that Morris found stealing fruit in his kitchen garden of his countryside home, Kelmscott Manor, in Oxfordshire” (Wikipedia)

Sarah Fielke is doing a beautiful quilt -“Stop Thief’ inspired by Strawberry Thief fabrics so since I was given the fabrics I had no excuse not to buy the pattern so that will be one of my quilts for 2024.

On the home front we finally got on to a good tradesman who came and built two walls of bookcases in DDs room in just 4 days! Such a relief after so long and I’ll happily get him back in the future. Now it needs painting to DH is working on that this week.

This week ahead I’m packing up some donations, making my sewing lists for 2024 and setting up my planner. I’m hoping for big things around the house this year, lots of quilt finishes ( finally), more regular blogging  and a great holiday/cruise in August.

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

William Morris.

post cruise & post covid! – Owl Hare & Hollow

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We had a great time in New Zealand and it was so nice to be back on board a cruise ship again. The weather was perfect, it’s a beautiful country and we enjoyed having a balcony cabin so we could just watch the views from our room. Sydney Harbour put on a good show  for our sunset sail-away.

We had a few days scenic cruising starting in Milford Sound – it really is a beautiful place, reminded me of Alaska. It wasn’t as cold as last time we were here but there was still snow on top of the mountains.

Here’s me in the pink.

 

Of course everywhere you go in New Zealand its just filled with picturesque scenes of old lovely old buildings like this church perched on the side of the hill and its just green everywhere!

The highlight for us was visiting the Whakarewarewa  Village. The steam pools were so hot the geyser was spraying quite high and the ground is hot under your feet. It’s not a tourist village but a real home to the people who live there. Unfortunately I can’t upload the videos I took but I have a couple of pics.

Overall we had a great time, but near the end of the cruise we had a bit of a cough and a sniffle and tested positive for Covid. Fortunately we were not too sick at all but as we did not want to bring it home to DD we decided to stay away until we both tested negative. So our holiday was extended another week or so while we lay around at a house at the  beach just resting and recuperating.  We’ve been home a few days now, still not 100% but pretty good.

I took my Owl Hare & Hollow embroidery panels with me on the cruise and I really enjoyed doing them – it’s so relaxing – and I was glad to have them with me when we extended our time away.  I just love this quilt pattern. I think its going to be a long term project though as I’m not so good at English Paper Piecing which I’ve been putting off but I was able to complete five more panels while away.

and I’ve started on some of the easy blocks:

On the home renovating front we’ve been ‘ghosted’ by the tradie who gave us a quote for some work so we have had to start again – finding a new person to come and quote. It’s so frustrating, this is the second tradie who has done this, given a quote then ghosted us when we ask for details to make the deposit. I wish they would just tell us if they don’t want the job and with Christmas coming up that will probably slow them down as well.

Bonnie Hunters Mystery Quilt starts today so I am planning to do that over the coming weeks. I need to pick our my colours so I can get to work on the first clue and finish up a donation quilt thats almost done.

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