The Tropics?

No - the Palm House at Kew Gardens. Last weekend (yeah, I know, I'm Johnny Come Lately when it comes to posting) my Mum and I had a city break in London. On Saturday afternoon we took the train to Kew and believe me, it might as well have been the tropics it was so hot. I don't think I've seen so many pretty summer dresses in years.

You can just see the edge of the Palm House peeping out of the top right hand corner of the photograph above. We only managed a small portion of the whole gardens - I'd like to go back again. On Sunday we went to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in the morning and in the afternoon to the final performance of Latin Fever, starring Darren & Lilia from Strictly Come Dancing. (The next series of which, by the way, I shall boycott if the newspaper reports are true and they are going to get rid of Arlene Phillips in favour of a younger model - good grief, she's only a year older than Len Goodman and no-one's talking about getting rid of him.)

So, nothing on the creative front to report, think I've got ennui.

Wales

Some pictures from our annual holiday to Wales at half-term. My family have been going to the same place since 1948. It hasn't changed much, we always joke that it's like stepping back into the 1950's - yellow cellophane on the dress shop windows, a 'Picture House' with the week's film chalked on a blackboard above the door. My kids fish in the same rock pools that me and my cousins used to and make sandcastles on the same beach.

I've gone back to the knitting - I've seen this little bunny egg cosy on so many blogs that I had to buy the pattern from Little Cotton Rabbits. I'm not very good at doing the faces - the one on the left is about the best - the one in the middle has one eye that is larger than the other and the one on the right has a funny nose. I hope I'll improve but the sad thing is that I did the one on the left first.

I wanted to try out some different colours but cotton yarn can be on the pricey side so I went online and found Texere Yarns - they do lots of yarns at very reasonable prices so I ordered these nice bright 4ply cottons in 40g reels.

A Finish

The cot quilt is finished - big enough to last a while I hope. I had some red and white wavy stripe fabric on hand which was ideal for the backing. You can see how very simply I quilted it - but it was enough, I think, and meant I could avoid the bulky bits where 8 seams meet which would have been a recipe for disaster as far as my quilting is concerned.

Remember these?

Well, I'm pleased to say that they did eventually transform themselves into a bear. I don't know why I left it so long to sew them up because it was easy peasy when I finally got round to it, mainly because you don't need to darn in the ends if they are going to be inside the bear anyway.

I think I might call him Norbert (pronounced the French way - i.e. 'Nor-bear').

Hour Glass Quilt Top

I finished a top! Yay for me! Can't you just tell it's Easter and I've been on holiday over a week? I've had a lovely time doing whatever I wanted whenever I wanted - no deadlines to meet, no 'to do' lists to worry about. Just a bit of crafting here, a bit of spring cleaning there (but not too much - got to pace myself, you know) with a bit of reading in between.



This is the cot quilt I'm making for my friend's new baby. (If you click for a close up, excuse the stray threads but the sun was out so I had to run outside to photograph it whilst the going was good - I will snip them off later.) Had the devil of a job to avoid the same fabrics being too close to each other - I just gave up in the end and hoped for the best.



I'm hoping it won't take too long to quilt - I'm just going to do nice, simple, straight lines. Next up will be a quilt for DD to take to university in the autumn - she has requested it especially so I can't disappoint her. It reminds me of when I went to university and my Nan crocheted me an afghan to put on my bed - it really brightened up my room and everyone liked it ... seems like a long time ago now.

Better late than never

Okay, so I missed the Easter boat - I did change my blog banner to show my Polish painted eggs but as I didn't post before Easter that was a fat lot of good. Then, I saw these chicks at Knot Garden, who linked to the pattern at Fuzzy Thoughts. Quick, made all in one piece, got to be my kind of activity - albeit that I made it yesterday instead of before Easter.

I was full of good intentions at Christmas to really make an effort to post more regularly but I seem to have fallen by the wayside again - I think I'll stop going on about it and just accept that work gets in the way and there's only so much that I can do.

How do you keep patterns that you print off the Internet? Not long ago I bought a laminator from Aldi - they are really cheap nowadays. I've found it really useful for laminating instructions - saves them from getting all creased and I like to be able to prop them up where I can see them when following the instructions. I keep them in a box file.