Lockdown week 13 - Friday fabrics

Thank you for your very kind quilt comments. You really shouldn't be so impressed. My kind of quilting is very easy - just time-consuming and fiddly, with quite a bit of ripping out and adjusting. The wonderful thing about quilt-making is that you don't have to finish things off neatly on the back, because it's all hidden once you put on the backing fabric. I do enjoy it, especially during lockdown, when it's given me a sense of purpose. And I enjoy making something unique - made up with ideas I've pinched from other quilts I've seen online, but not exactly the same and of course with different fabrics. Unprecedentedly, I've made three quilts this year so far. My normal speed is two a year, but there's been so much less family-visiting since March, sadly.

We usually see the Edinburgh grandchildren on a Friday afternoon - well, I say "usually" - we used to in the pre-lockdown days and have been doing so again when the weather has been good since Stage 1 started. However, it was damp this morning and Mr L had to go to Daughter 2's Edinburgh flat to let in a carpet fitter. So we decided to make it tomorrow instead. Can't wait!

Stage 2, which we have theoretically started, isn't terribly different from Stage 1, but garden visitors are now allowed to go into one's house to visit the bathroom, which will help - and also one can go more than 5 miles to visit family - though not in their house. So we hope to visit Son and the little ones before too long. As for Daughter 2 in London ... not for a while, alas.

I made cheese scones in Mr L's absence as a reward for his recent hard flat-work. Mr L is very fond of a cheese scone and I like them myself. We pronounce "scone" in Scotland to rhyme with "gone", not "moan" as the English do (or some of them, anyway). Perversely, we have a town called Scone, which we pronounce "Scoon".

It dried up in the afternoon so we walked along the river.

Everything is very lush.

This looked so beautiful to my eyes, with all sorts of shades of green and different leaf shapes, and the pink comfrey and white cow parsley and yellow dandelionish things - but somehow my photo doesn't really capture it.

And then up the steps to the closed Gallery,

saying hello to the swans in the pond, and home. 3 miles or so.

I've promised to make a quilt for a younger friend who's half Zambian and half Scottish. She's very beautiful, with perfect skin and huge, lovely eyes. And she's asked me to use these Zambian fabrics, which will suit her style perfectly. But they're a bit of a challenge to me, being so different from any fabrics I've used before. I really don't like orange! or much purple, or red and green together in large quantities. I'm much more a pastel or dark colour person rather than a bright colour one - or at any rate, lots of bright colours together. I'm a bit non-plussed but also quite excited.  Only six fabrics, too... is this enough, I wonder, even with some plain ones too? Hmm, food for thought.

It's good to have another project, though, and my friend is so sweet and is finding life a bit difficult at the moment - indeed, has found it so most of her life. She was brought up in a smallish town in the west of Scotland, where her family was the only mixed-race African one, and the recent events in the US and here (with the controversy about statues to people who made their wealth from slave-owning) have stirred things up for her. So I'm delighted to do it. But it needs some consideration!