Happy Easter

I thought I would show you some of the blocks I have finished for the quilt I am making for Emily.
So far I have made 9 of the ten blocks. but I have only given eyes and noses to these four. I had thought that I would have finished the whole quilt by now but the hassles we have been having with the telephone company really put me off my stride!

Emily has a birthday on the 18th of this month but I don't think I will be anywhere near finished so I will have to go and buy her a girlie pressie - she will be four, so something pretty to wear or something girlie to play with .

To day we are all (the whole family) are going to dinner at our Sarah's (Emily and Joshua's Mummy) - she is cooking lamb..mmmmmm. I am looking forward to seeing everyone together again - there are so many of us that it only happens on big occasions now. Must remeber to take the camera with me.

My daughter in law Sarah had a fright on Thursday evening - she was up in London at Kings Cross with a lot of her medical friends when she was attacked from behind and her handbag was snatched while the guy held a knife to her throat. As you can guess she was very distressed and the thing is that it happened so quickly that none of the others realised! the bag was thrown to another guy who was waiting and then to another - the police say that there had been similar muggings in the area that evening . She lost a very expensive Mulberry handbag, two phones (one is her NHS one) her wallet (yes - all her credit/debit cards), her keys, a memory stick with a lot of private info on it and her filofax! She is terrified that they will have so much info on her that they could clone her identitiy! The police say that the muggers were only after money.........time will tell! but she has changed her bank account and stopped all her cards. She has also had different locks put on the front door and has bought a Crooklock for her lovely little Mazda convertable! Through all of this Kevin was in Switzerland skiing! he has been worried sick about her, the phones must have been redhot with all the calls they have made to each other of the weekend! At least he is home now to give her the kind of support she needs.

April comes with flowers

April already? I don't believe it!

Lots of daffodils in the garden and other things are blooming (weeds!) too, the garden is showing promise of things to come.

I went to the garden center yesterday and bought some 'little' things in modules and then spent the afternoon planing them in to flower pots. White Geraniums and red and white Petunias for my pots and hanging baskets.

The three tomato plants that I bought last week are still in their pots and are going to go into hte prepared bed in the greenhouse later today. An Alicante, an Ailsa Craig and another I cna't remember the name of at the moment. Three plants will give enough toms for just the two of us and as I can pick them as I want them they won't rot in the fridge! as the shop bought ones do......

I have also planted some of the seeds that SAGA magazine sent as a thank you for renewing our subscription. they are under the little closhes in the green house. Echinacea, aster and Cosmos so far and there are three more packets that need to go directly in to the ground later in May.

I have been doing some sewing too this last week, still hand quilting on the Houses and Heart strings quilt. I have made more of the panels on the Teddy bears day out quilt too. Just have two more of those to make then I can put the top together - then I will show you what I have done.

We have had to accept that Virgin cannot find our old telephone number - it has got lost between Sky, BT and Virgin - after nearly three months we have a new phone number.....the family are not happy. As our Son-in-law said 'how am I supposed to get the old number out of my head!' If he is having trouble just imagin the trouble we are having! We had the old number over forty years! and we have lost it just because someone in this house wanted to have Sky TV! ......he is not flavour of the month and is doing all sorts of things to try and make it up to me......flowers, choccies, meals out.......

Quilt finished

This morning I have taken pictures of the second Caterpiller quilt I have made and a bag from a pattern in McCall's Quilting magazine. I should have phoned Asdings for some Pellon, then it would not be so wobbly when standing on it's own - but I didn't because i wanted to make 'then' while I was between big projects! It was such an easy fun bag to make that I will probably make more........

March - and nearly over already!

Since the last posting we lost our internet connection and our phoneline!!! Why? how? WELL!
himself decided that he would like to have the same facilities with the TV that our younger son Stuart has - a Sky + box that allows you to pause, rewind, record, playback and a lot of other things.......while we are going to Sky for their TV we may as well have the package that includes cheaper phone and broadband!!! OH how I wish we hadn't even started all of this.......we could have had a similar box from our original service provider! Virgin also do a +box! and I had been reserching it on line and had told him about it - problem ?- Sky was cheaper......Virgins was a £5 a month.......Sky's you bought for a one off payment of £49 !
The Sky dish was installed, the +box connected to the TV, then we had to order our Sky Talk and Broadband.......their phone system is dreadful! too many options and no one answering.....but we got through eventually (India?) - told them we wanted to transport our phone number over and were told 'that's Ok, no problem ' - I then went down with the flu! didn't read the mail from Sky till I was up and about again - only to find that they were installing the phone the next day BUT with a different number! Back on the phone to them again and got the assurance that they would change it as soon as possible - three weeks later we cancelled Sky and now a month later we have a tempory phone number from Virgin as Sky have mislaid the number! Only one fly in the ointment - Sky have not acknowledged our cancellation letter......have they had it - is it still sitting in their intray with the other three letters we have written? Who knows - but after over 5 hours of calls to them and the letters, and being told that once we have our own number it will be ANOTHER two weeks before I can have broadband back again! we have now written to the Telecomuncations Ombudsman! and are happily back with Virgin........ who installed the broadband and tempory phone with-in three days of contacting them!

I suppose that having no internet has been good for me for a while - I have done quite a lot of sewing and knitting, but I have watched far too much TV!
I have made another caterpiller quilt and a large bag from a pattern in a magazine, from the lovely pack of Moda charm sqares that my good friend gave me for my birthday last year. I have no pictures yet - I will take some later ......

Today is lovely and warm (14c) and I have actually been in the garden doing a bit of tidying up....I always leave the seedheads on my plants so that the little birds have some extra seeds for the winter and something to shelter under. The stalks and dead heads have now been removed from the border nearest the house and when I feel like it I will do one of the others......I should really dig the borders over too but the ground is so wet......now I have cleared the rubbish perhaps the sun will dry it a bit - then it wont be so heavy to dig.

February already?

Where did January go? I know we have been busy - a week in Bath and a weekend in Leicster quilts being made, sandwiched and quilted, sitting for grandchildren etc but the month of January seems to have just disappeared!

The week we spent in Bath was a lovely break away after all the hassel of Christmas. The hotel we stayed in was a pretty, private one, close to the city. So we walked every day into the city to explore. It was very cold that week and we just wrapped up warm and of we went, finding places to warm up and have hot food when we needed to. We have been to Bath once before and had done most of the main touristy things then, like visiting the baths and the pump room, Jane Austens house and the house that is 'open' in the Crescent, so this time we went to the Assembly rooms and the exhibition of Fashions, to the Cathederal and the museum in the crypt (fascinating) .

We had a lovely walk along the river and round the outskirts of the city and came across a glass blowers.....what a lovely way to keep warm we thought....so we went in and watched a demonstration of men blowing glass and making the most beautiful blue glass vases and jugs. There in their display cases were over 100 small pigs.........these were done by the children of a school in the city, each pig with a different decoration.....

We kept on hearing about the 'Pigs' and while walking through a covered market we came across a full size one - then a second one. Apparently last year they had these pigs everywhere! they were plaster casts that had been painted by various groups, shops and individuals etc and they were put on display all round the city. In the autumn they gathered them all up and did a few repairs and put them up for auction for charity.

We had such a lovely holiday that we were reluctant to come home, the journey was a bit hair-raising as there was a freezing fog and the temperature was -5 on the M4....froze the windscreen washer bottle! So we had to keep stopping in service areas and pulling off the motorway to clean the windscreen! The ride home was very pretty though with the hoar frost all over all the vegetaion........trees and shrubs like fairy tale grottos, all silvery and sparkly in the weak sun that was trying to penetrate the fog.

The weekend in Leicester was to celebrate the 60th Birthday of a neice! can't believe she is that old. It was nice to catch up with the other side of the Bailey family for a while. Pat is the local Vicar of Cosbyand we thought she was also retiring but apparently not so, her contract keeps her there untill July, when there will be 'discussions ' about her next move.... My sister-in-law looked well, but she had decided not to drive herself up to Leicster and had been brought up by one of the other neices. Laura lives in Sidcup and even at the age of 86 still drives round that area, but she thought that the drive North would be too much for her! some woman that one. She always frightened me when I was younger and terrified my children.

Since then I have been doing a lot of sewing. A friend of mine had a stroke in October and has been very lucky in that she has only limited damage to one side of her lower body. It has curtailed her freedom though and she has always been a very independent woman and has found this very hard to cope with. She was looking particularly distressed one evening and I gave her a hug, but thought perhaps she should have a permanent hug in the form of a quilt - so- I made her a lap quilt in the colours of her sitting room. She is usually the giver of gifts and has found this pressie (unexpected and unasked for) very hard to accept. I gave it to her on one of the evenings that several ladies (we are lace makers meeting in her house every Wednesday evening) meet together and they all persuded her to keep the gift (she wasn't going to accept it as it 'cost too much and took such a long time to make') . I hear from one of the other ladies that she uses it a lot so I am glad that I have done this for her. She has had us in her house every Wednesday for many years - without her our group would have broken up long ago.

Well, we have had a super Chrismas! Youngest Daughter Sarah made her house available for us all to gather in and we each took something for the meal. There was just one missing from the whole family and that was my eldest Grandchild Terry - he decided to spend it with his girlfriend and their baby son Louey. So we sat fourteen down for dinner.

Sarah has had a new extension built and the family gathered in there before and after dinner - she can seat us all.......it is that big! and what is usually their sitting room became the dining room - it worked very well, but a lot of furniture moving - we have to go and collect our dining room chairs later today - and my shoes - we just could not find them when we were leaving - so I came home in my slippers!

I got what I wanted from my Secret Santa - the dvd of Mama Mia - which I watched yesterday afternoon while the boys were all watching Chelsea win in the freezing cold.

Nativities

After a super holiday in the Lakes with my eldest daughter and her friend we have come down with a bump. Our birthdays are over and now we must prepare for Christmas......the time of the infant school and playgroup Nativity plays is upon us! Yesterday we went to our youngest Grandson's nativity play at his school and today we went to see our youngest grandaughters one in the Church. Joshua's one was good but Joshua was a sheep and we think he thought that precluded him from doing anything else in the play! he did not want to join in anything else -even th singing of songs he knew. On the other hand Emily this morning sung her little heart out with all the songs she had learnt, and played her part of an Angel well.

This afternoon Jackie brought the youngest of the family -her grandson Louie -to visit Gran-Gran and Great Grandad, he has grown since I last saw him and he was only just toddling, now he is going up and down stairs on his own. Next thing will be going to see him in his Nativity play when he is old enough to go to playgroup I suppose! We didn't manage to go to our other Great grandson's nativity as it clashed with Joshua's so his Mummy has bought a DVD of it and we will see him in that - probably get a better view of that than we did of Emily's this morning.