I feel an addiction coming on...

 

Well, here's the thing. I have at last found a few days with no visitors or other major interruptions. (I've no idea why my life normally seems so full of things, but it does.) So I've got back to thinking about this very very simple patchwork thingie that I hope to make. Don't get excited - the photo above is simply a whole lot of squares laid on a bed. No sewing has so far taken place.

 

The story so far: the wonderful Thimbleanna very kindly gave me a cutting board, a rotary cutter and some (oh dear, haven't got the technical vocabulary in my head) - some charm squares and some jelly rolls? Anyway, some lovely bits of material with a Christmas theme. This was (ahem) August last year. However, my mum had just died and I was feeling a bit wobbly, so Christmas came and went and I hadn't done anything with them. In February, I got them out, saying to myself that this couldn't be that difficult, could it? - laid them in a pattern and decided that I didn't like quite so much red and green together so I'd get some plain green fabric to break up the patterned ones. So I bought some. I also decided not to include the very red bits at all but to set them aside to make (HAHAHAHAHAHA) a separate red quilt. Which of course meant that I'd need more material for the green one. So I put it all back in the cupboard and suddenly the end of September loomed and I thought, ah. Christmas. Yes.

 

So the other day, I decided that I would actually do some cutting. Actually, to my surprise, the cutting was good fun (though I did discover that you really need to stand up to cut or your cutter has a tendency to drift over to the right. Grrr.) And cutting out 197 squares is remarkably time-consuming. (I already had 24 squares from Anna's selection.)

 

At this stage, I'd like you to be Very Impressed, because after I'd finished cutting, this (above) was the amount of plain green material I had left from what I'd bought. And you thought arithmetic wasn't my strong point, didn't you? Well, there you are. (Bow.)

Anyway, I then decided that I needed some bits of patterned material with a wee bit of red in them, to make it all look more Christmassy, so I went up town and...

... oh dear...

got them but also rather fell in love with some entirely unChristmassy materials and bought bits of those.

So: I now need to: sew together the green (and greenish) squares, make something with the red bits, and do something else with the new bits.

ohdearohdearohdearwhatwasithinkingof?

I seem to have started a minor stash.

And - this is the really sinister bit - I've been thinking about material as I go to sleep; and the night before last I actually dreamed about bits of cloth.

However, let's look on the bright side: it's quite probable that I'll make such a pig's ear of actually sewing the squares together that I'll give up, donate all my materials to the nearest charity shop and go back to gardening. Watch this space.