Colours and scents

 Ah, Blogger has uploaded my photos backwards again. Still, never mind. 

 

Today we took the Edinburgh Two to Lauriston Castle, a big house (with a medieval tower house incorporated) in lovely gardens, given to the city by its last inhabitants. Look at the length of Big Grandson's hair! It's very nice hair, but I'm not too keen on its length. However, it will eventually get cut. I hope. 

It was a beautiful day and they're such good company. A croquet club meets in the grounds. 

You can see over the water to Fife. 

I've finished my rainbow quilt top. I didn't design it, but copied it from a photo that I saw somewhere or other on the internet. Well done to the designer. My brain could never have thought that up. It was fun to do, but I still don't like orange. I've still to put a border on it, piece together the back (much less elaborately than the front) and quilt it, so there's a long way to go. 

It's been warm, and the doors and windows have been open a lot, and the garden smells divine, especially at night. I've planted night scented stocks and nicotiana - what a lovely scent. 

This astilbe hasn't got any scent but I love the colour - however, the thalictrum has, after many years, suddenly taken off and entangled itself among several other plants. My day lilies have also gone rogue. I shall have to Take Steps. 

This clematis is doing well. 

And, back to scent, this trachelospermum jasminoides, just outside the patio doors, fills the house with perfume. Son gave me it, years ago. 

And here again are the night scented stock, nicotiana and (unscented) cornflowers, all annuals. The others have somewhat overwhelmed the cornflowers, but hey ho. 

In a few months, I'll have to cut it all down. I'm getting a bit old for this... 75 last birthday, which was July 4. Hope you celebrated it in style, Americans. 

How to spend lots of time

I haven't really

been doing much

except cutting up fabric (and tidying the garden a bit).

After cutting the fabric up, I've been sewing it together differently.

I don't like orange at all - it makes me feel slightly ill -

but you have to have it in a rainbow. Luckily I've finished the orange stripe and am now on to the yellow one. 

Such a waste of time. But such fun. And I do like having something to show for my days. Something, I suppose, to leave behind.

I didn't invent the pattern, but am copying it from a photograph that I found somewhere, a couple of years ago maybe. Thank you to the clever designer; I wish I could give you credit. 

Big wind

Well, spring is springing here, or at least the end (ish) of winter is being a bit flowery. Most things are still pretty dormant, but you can always find something colourful at the Botanics. 

Azaleas or

skimmias or

witch hazel or 

just a little robin. Traditionally, robins here are known as robin redbreasts, but their breasts are really orange. We didn't have a separate word for orange (as opposed to red) until actual oranges arrived here, and their name then got made into an adjective. So this is really a robin orangebreast. Doesn't have quite the same ring. But Christmas cards tend to have robins with red tummies, such is the power of language versus observation. 

I've started to cut out a quilt. It's to be a rainbowish one, so against all my principles I'm going to have to use some orange fabrics. I have to admit that Richard Of York Gave Battle in Vain. 

We've had a Big Wind, Storm Eowyn, which has done a lot of damage, though thankfully not to our house or garden. This happened on the path beside the golf course (apologies for the blurry photo) but, much more seriously...

this happened in the Botanics: its tallest tree, with 14 others, was damaged beyond remedy.  

This is what it used to look like - the tree right at the bottom of this path. Very sad. But worse things, much worse things, are happening in the world. 

Quiltquiltquilt

I feel a rainbow-ish quilt in the offing. Thanks to my lovely friend Thimbleanna, I have enough orange and some purple, but I think I need to buy a little more purple. Even with all this on the bed, the stash cupboard is still full. But there's no purple. I did claim I would never buy any more fabric but... what can a person do? 

Keeping busy

I've at last finished Big Granddaughter's dragon quilt. I started making it ages ago but then got diverted into making a cot quilt for Daughter 2's friend's baby. This type of thing is VERY easy - all you do is choose a big patterned fabric for the middle and then add lots of borders until it's big enough - so, no planning involved, really, and none of that pesky fiddle of getting rows of squares to have corners at the same place as the rows above and below. In this case, Big Granddaughter - who's eleven - chose most of the fabrics from my stash. The exceptions are the purple and violet ones, which I had to buy because I don't really do purple (but this is her current favourite colour) and the dragon fabrics, which I got from the same source as for Medium Granddaughter, who originally requested a dragon quilt.  Big Granddaughter, on seeing that, asked for one too. 

When she was five, she asked for a quilt with "bunnies and hedgehogs" but I made the fatal mistake of including maybe six squares of Peter Rabbit fabric, which she considered, by the time she was ten, were too babyish. How long, I ask myself, will she consider dragons suitable? 

By the time I was quilting her new one she was interested in the quilting itself and, having inspected my various templates, chose which designs she wanted in the different borders and in most cases also the colours of quilting thread. I have only a few darker colours and hadn't used them much, but I'm now a convert - they show up so much better. 

Anyway, what fun, but it's not really my creation. I just did the sewing. I really prefer having more of a free choice, but on the other hand it was really nice that she took an interest in the design. 

On Saturday, Mr L and I did the recce for a walk we're leading (well, he's leading, being the one with the sense of direction; I just follow along) in May. We got the bus to Linlithgow and walked down this path to the river. 

It was a pretty walk, 

though a bit muddy and rooty, which made it quite hard work. 

Then, after a detour into Muiravonside Country Park, we walked back to Linlithgow along the paved canal path, which was much easier. 

According to Mr L's device it was over 6 miles, which was further than I'd walked in a oner since my new hip - and it was fine, which was very good. Also there were various flights of steps, and Mr L's angioplastied heart was also fine, which was even better. Mind you, we were happy to sit down on the bus on the way home... .

And on Sunday we walked in the Botanics with Daughter 1 and family - lots of rhododendrons

of various colours

and some jolly good magnolias also. 

Not to say ten thousand or so daffodils, tossing their heads in spritely dance. 

 

The young and the old

Talking of dementia - the day after my last post about my choir friend who's been diagnosed, I sat down in the dentist's chair, swung my feet up and noticed that I was wearing odd shoes - both black and flat, but from two different pairs. Then I went home again and Mr Life pointed out that I'd buttoned my shirt up wrongly - one too many buttons at the top, one too few at the bottom. Hmm!

I remember this stage so well with our own children: when they know things and can do things that we didn't and couldn't. And it's so interesting and heart-warming. These are cereal packets that Big Grandson designed in some class (Craft, Design and Technology?) at school. I couldn't do this on the computer if my life depended on it. The flavours, by the way, are: Classic Oat & Wheat, Chocolate Chunks, Lemon and Lime, Canadian Maple Syrup and Blueberry. I like his wording as well as his pictures (though I am his granny). 

Of course, the next stage is that they become so competent that they grow up and move away... .

Biggest Granddaughter is now 11. She's at that grown-up-in-some-ways stage. For her birthday cake, she requested that Daughter 1 make a sophisticated unicorn. Sophisticated, she decided, meant in this case black. She and her friend went ice-skating at the rink near us "and then we're coming here for pizza and ice cream, Granny". What, my house? Oh, ok. So they did and it was lovely! 

Littlest Granddaughter took pictures of her gap and her very wobbly tooth with her mum's phone. 

I'm sitting here listening to Rheinberger's Mass in D, opus 194, which we're singing at one of my choirs. I'd never heard of Rheinberger until a couple of years ago, when we did something else of his (can't now remember what...) but he's wonderful and should be better known. 

So yes, nothing's really happened, though I'm nearly at the end of Biggest Granddaughter's second quilt. I made the mistake of including a few bits of Peter Rabbit fabric in the one I made for her when she was 5 and wanted "bunnies and hedgehogs" and now it's too babyish. Ooops. She requested a dragon quilt like the one I made Middle Granddaughter, though I'm dubious that she's going to want that when she's older. Ah well, I can make a third... if I'm spared... .

 

Here be dragons

On Saturday, Son, Daughter-in-Law and their two arrive for about a week, and on Sunday, Daughter 2 and her little one arrive for three weeks. In the middle of August, my brother, sister-in-law and nephew and his fiancée will be here for about a week also. This is obviously all very nice, but will be busy, so I've been getting Big Granddaughter's dragon quilt to the stage of being pinned together, ready for hand-quilting, so that the fabrics and sewing machine could be tidied away. I was about to go up town to buy wadding the other day but thought I should just check that the odd bits I had wouldn't be enough to cobble together. And the first photo shows an arrangement of every last bit I had!

So, with saving the planet - not to say our bank account - in mind, I crawled around the floor for some considerable time and sewed it all together. I hope the planet appreciates this. My knees weren't so sure. 

I'd already done the front, but I had the back to make, patching it together the back because surely no one else I know will want dragon fabric. (Obviously it needed a bit of a trim. And an iron.) Apart from dragons, the back mainly features books because she's a total bookworm. 

It's all embarrassingly simple but she's only ten and now it's done. And it was fun to do. 

And then I packed all the fabrics away. Mine are arranged in categories: plain, stripes, spots, checks, animals and birds, flowers and leaves, Christmas, and then whatever doesn't fit any of these descriptions. I did once try arranging them by colour but too many of them had multiple colours. And anyway, I always seem to end up riffling through them all to find just the right thing. I need a bigger cupboard but - no - that way would madness lie. I will never use up all that I have. 

It's been very wet in Britain generally, but the rain cleared yesterday and we went out for a walk along the river. 

It was very full. 

Today the sun shone so I hope that's us back to normal summer weather. Not sure that it is, though... .

 

Living things

Well, we've had a fairly nothingy week - thank you, Covid. Not that I was ever particularly unwell - just a lot of nose-blowing and coughing, and I'm now ok again - thank you very much, medical science. I had to postpone various social engagements, but none of them was particularly one-off, so will be just as good in a week or two. Except, that is, a visit to Daughter 2 in London. I had booked the train - I usually go on a Friday, but the train drivers were on strike on Friday so I opted for Thursday at 9am. And on Wednesday I was still faintly positive, so had to make the decision not to go. And of course, on Thursday morning I tested negative. I was so disappointed: I could have gone. With missing Daughter 2 so much, it's a bit like (as a teacher) pacing yourself to the end of term. When that comes, you feel as though you couldn't possibly manage another day; though you probably could have, if you'd always known there would be another week of term. So I felt that I couldn't possibly bear not seeing her and Littlest Granddaughter for another day - even though we've not seen them since the end of December, and they're coming up next weekend. The same, of course, applies to Son, but he's not so far away. 

One good thing about not seeing various friends that week was that I spent much of three days in the garden and got most of the late-winter tidying up done. My garden, though not large, is quite labour-intensive, which is entirely my fault because it's mainly planted in herbaceous perennials, which need to be cut down every year, thinned out from time to time and so on. When we come to sell the house, the garden will probably be marketed as "easily-maintained" because it's quite small. (Hollow laugh.) Anyway, my three-day marathon resulted in my being somewhat crippled - the arthritic hip really didn't appreciate all that kneeling down and standing up again. Still, it makes me feel much better to see it tidy, and there are snowdrops and crocuses blooming and lots of other bulbs showing through the soil. 

On Wednesday we had our first outing, to the Botanics, because it's outside (obviously) and I was in less pain by then. This was good for the soul. 

Trees...

and rather more snowdrops than in my garden

and their first rhododendron to be flowering this year. 

At home, it's the time of year for the amaryllis forest. I took three pots of them to church a few weeks ago for other people to adopt, but the four remaining pots are still too many. I must do the same thing next year. The timing is crucial, I feel: there need to be flower spikes showing or no one would want them, but these mustn't be too tall or they're liable to break on the journey. I should really just throw the plants away after flowering and buy another one next year for £9.99 or whatever, but never have the heart. 

This sort of thing is also the reason why I keep more fabric scraps than I will ever use. 

We saw the Edinburgh Two yesterday. So that was lovely. Big Grandson is now taller than I am. A fortnight ago, pre-Covid, he wasn't!

Today, when I couldn't be with Daughter 2, we went up to visit Son and his family, which also consoled me. We had to cancel a visit to them last Saturday because of Covid. We went to the small zoo near them, where a couple of marmosets were extremely interested, for about ten minutes, in Middle Granddaughter's toy cheetah. They really stared at it and you could almost hear them saying: "What is that?" Middle Granddaughter was very intrigued. 

And they had a lovely time in the playpark. And then we went back to theirs and I handed over their quilts, which they seemed to like. So that was a good day. I'm grateful for all those lovely descendants. And not being dead. And living in a peaceful place.