Seasonal

Spring has come very late in Britain (if you can call it spring - it's the coldest one for 65 years, according to the paper, so therefore even for someone as ancient as I, it's unprecedented). I've just been gardening and my fingers are frozen. The air temperature isn't too bad but the soil is very cold. Above, the garden today...

... and this was 25 March last year.

I can see why American ladies have sewing rooms.  I had a further fiddle with my Anna patches last night and Cassie was very keen to help. The table isn't big enough, anyway.

I think I've decided that I don't really like red and green together in large quantities (yes, I do realise that this is supposed to be a Christmas quilt and that red and green are kind of traditional) so I've separated the very red ones out with the thought of making a separate quilt. (Pause for laughter. Yes, it's taken me since August to think about making this quilt.) I like the quieter effect better, though it's not supposed to be quite as quiet as it looks here - some of these white pieces of paper have things like "green spots" written on them to remind me that I'm going to cut the larger pieces into squares and place them in the pattern. Or, I might.

Of course, removing the red squares means that I don't have enough material so I went up town today with the thought of acquiring some more. They don't make it easy for a person, do they? There were no packs nicely cut into squares in the shop that I decided to patronise, which was a pity as I had carefully calculated how many little squares I needed. There were, however, oblong bits of one size and long bits of a completely different size, and one could also buy cloth in multiples of 10 centimetres. It's all in centimetres in Britain and I'm really an inch person. I had to go and have a cup of coffee and do sums on my napkin and I've yet to find out if my arithmetic was right.

Do you all prewash your material, o quilty gurus? Having looked at various patchworky/quilty videos on the internet (so much easier than actually doing anything myself) I decided that I should, so I washed all the ones you see above. But I suppose I'd better do the new stuff too. Not that it's a problem. I'm good at washing things.

Yes, I definitely prefer the mainly green (and, separately, the mainly red - though don't hold your breath for that one) to the exceedingly-festive mixture. It may be, though, that I don't feel very Christmassy at the moment.

Quite Eastery, though. Happy Easter!