Many thanks for all your birthday wishes. Had a lovely family meal out on the day to celebrate the three birthdays and a wedding anniversary which come in the same week. Excellent meal and the sun shone.

We are now at day 9 of May and here are my first nine days of the Stitch Journal.

Four days of Chevron stitch and four days of Buttonhole/blanket.

I have spent a bit of time this weeke shortening this beautiful prom dress for our grandaughter. It has been waiting on the back of the door for a few weeks while I plucked up courage to attack with the scissors.

I still need to cut the net - 3 layers eeek! - but the dress itself has been done. I had to herringbone the lining to the skirt and it is a long way around!

Remember the partly knitted jumper I showed you last week that I was planning to unpick? Well, that idea lasted about 5 minutes! Fortunately there were plenty of balls of wool in the bag so I cracked on with my crochet basket which grows quickly while I am watching TV.

I think it is going to hold it's shape nicely once it is a bit taller.

The garden is growing beautifully after some nice steady rain last weekend followed by some warm, but not too hot, sunshine. The runner beans are in - always a major highlight for Philip who loves runner beans. And the tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers are in their growbags in the greenhouse. The blue tits have been busy feeding their young this week and there is a lovely family of blackbirds feeding regularly on the green at the front of the house. Spring is well under way.

Have a good week everyone and happy stitching.

Summer!! came and went

 Yes, for two days this week we had temperatures of 23/24 which is very pleasant summer weather and we all cast off our woolies and socks and basked in the sun. Then spring/winter came back with a vengeance and we were back to 11 degrees along with winds and April showers. 

We have had a quietish week at home with a few short outings - it's Easter holidays so we tend to avoid anywhere touristy/child friendly. But I have been cracking on with a few projects.

First up my Stitch Journal - here is April so far.

Chookshed Challenge - this is to make some snap top bags for Christmas presents. I plan to make 8 with 4 large and 4 matching smaller ones. Not having made these before I thought a trial run would be in order. So having finally found a tape measure of the right width and ordered it, I pulled out some fabrics to make myself a small one. These pretties fell into my bag at Quilt group sometime last year and have been looking wistfully at me.

So I chose two to work with.

And made this little pouch - all by hand as I couldn't be bothered to pull the machine out.

It still needs it's 'snap' but the tape measure only arrived this morning, so that is a job for this afternoon. Once I am happy with my pouch I will pull ot fabrics for the rest and have an assembly line session with the machine later in the week.

I have been a good girl and kept up with my 'one pattern repeat a day' on the Ryegrass sock and it is coming along nicely.

I have also made a start on another Winwick Mum basic sock using some of the yarn very kindly sent to me by Stylecraft.

This is great TV knitting and I am pleased with how the colour repeats are looking. A pair for the Christmas box.

The garden is starting to grow at pace.

Grand National day here and like us, Liverpool are experiencing April showers. We just watched an earlier race happening during a hail storm! Not nice. The spectators had all disappeared inside, unsurprisingly. Fortunately our showers have just been of rain.

Have a good week everyone.

Another week....

 ......has flown by! The weather cooled, now it is getting hot again! However the garden is at it's best and I will add in a few photographs at the end. But first up this weeks progress on my stitch journal.

Coming to the end of the month, the end of the fabrics I have been using and threads are now restricted. So it is time to finish up this journal and make a start on a new one, so more on that next week. However, I have been working this week on a small envelope bag which will be a home for this journal.

Some years back I used some of the same fabrics and threads to make a small memento of our home in France following a Cas Holmes online workshop.

6 was the number of our house, the sunflower was made for me by a friends son and we could see fields of sunflowers from our terrasse each summer and lots of flowers from our garden.

I tea dyed a damask napkin, cut it to size and hemmed all around. Then I covered it with the picture and other oddments of fabric before stitching all over with running stitch to hold everything in place. 

I then just overstitched the two sides together and I have a bag.

You can just see that I have added the date to the front flap. Now all I need is to do is add some threads to make a wrap around tie - my brain is still working on that one! I shall be back on Tuesday with more pictures.

I opened up a couple of my solar jars this week with interesting results.

I am afraid the colours do not show up well in the picture. However, the threads on the left were dyed with carrot tops which gave a very pale lemony yellow. The threads and fabric on the right were dyed with Sambucus flowers which look very similar but have a definite lime green tinge which you may be able to spot better in the silk waste. Both very pretty.

Now, as promised, I will leave you with a few pictures of the garden. Have a great weekend.

I made another book!

 I thought that another zig zag book would make a great holiday sketchbook and so having purchased a large sheet of nice quality paper I set to. And this time I remembered a few in progress shots.

First up I folded the paper down to the size that I wanted for my book. I then randomly printed each side with some simple sponge shapes and acrylic paint. I used blue and yellow as I am hoping for plenty of both those colours while we are away! Here you can see the two sides which I remembered to photograph after I had cut them so you can see here how to make the cuts.

I wanted my book landscape but if you wanted a portrait book then you would just make the three cuts from the other two sides.

Having folded my book I then set to dealing with the awkward bits and made pockets out of the two that face upwards.

These will be useful for storing bits and bobs while I am working on the book and will be handy for postcards, tickets or other collected bits.

The awkward bit in the centre faces downwards but there were conveniently placed circles on each side

which I cut around to make windows.

I will be able to stick something interesting behind these before I sew up the base and side.

I had a rifle through my folder of odd bits of paper for something to cover the two end boards and found these which I thought fitted the theme.

They are crumpled brown paper which I have 'cleaned up' my print roller on at some time and then over painted. These bits will always find their moment to shine.

Anyway, I covered the end boards, glued them in place and voila! one finished book.

Summer came to visit briefly last week so I took the opportunity of taking some garden pictures - just as well as we are back to wind and rain today.

Also last week my quilt group - Apple County Quilters - had an open day which was very successful. Having no idea how many would come we were pleasantly surprised by how many people turned up - and by how much they spent of the sales table! It was a bit of a squeeze in a small village hall but we put on a good and varied display of quilts large and small, with the odd bit of knitting thrown in for good measure.

Well, that was a long one! Thanks for making it this far. Have a good week.