Keeping on

This is my fifth lockdown quilt. I can hardly believe it - my normal rate is two per year, so this shows how long I normally spend socialising or visiting places of interest. Two of these have been cot quilts, this one for Daughter 2's friend, who's having a baby on her own by sperm donation, having despaired of finding the right chap. I do like what I now know is called a piano keys border. It's a bit of a fiddle but such fun. Indeed, I've loved choosing the fabrics for this quilt. The recipient had seen some of my other efforts in photos and had liked the one I did for my nephew and his young lady, so this is very similar. I got to choose from my stash and of course I like all the fabrics, so this was so pleasurable. 

She's an architect and artist and also a keen cyclist, so I did buy two extra fat quarters, the paintbrushes

and the bikes (but the rest was all from my stash, honest). She didn't want it to be over cute. though I did sneak in the odd sheep and bunny - he's a baby, after all and I needed all the blues and greens I could lay my hands on. 

And I took slight liberties with the back. Houses for architecture, some vehicles stolen from my next project and smiling moons for... well, cuteness. 

That was my 17th quilt. I started after my mum died in 2012. Thank you so much to Thimbleanna, who jollied me into starting - it's a lovely, if very time-consuming, hobby. None of them has been very complicated - I maybe need to challenge myself. But NOT till I've sorted out the archives!

It was beautiful weather yesterday so Mr L and I had a walk round the Cammo Estate. Here's the old Cammo House, built  in 1693 and largely demolished in 1977 because it was derelict. Well, you can't keep everything, I suppose, and we have a lot of old buildings. 

The estate now belongs to the city and is beloved of dog walkers

and other local inhabitants, including this old chap with a beard. 

It was a bit muddy underfoot

but mild and windless.

These trees have fallen down on opposite sides of the path, forming archways and shooting branches upward, undeterred, to form a kind of tunnel. They're more opposite to each other than they look here. 

Our various British leaders have decided that we can meet up for five days at Christmas with a maximum of three families and (I think?) eight adults - but only these people for the whole five days. It sounds like one of those awful arithmetic problems we used to get. (If it takes a forty-gallon bath ten minutes to fill up, but there's now a hole in the bath that leaks five pints every minute...) They don't actually want us to do any of this, understandably, since it's bound to produce a spike in infections, but they were bowing to the inevitable. So... not sure what we'll do. It depends on the family. Daughter 2 is staying in London, since it's not wise to contemplate battling with crowded trains, but the others? We'll see. 

And so we beat on, boats against the current... but, hopefully, into the future.