Collecting

I've been having a happy time choosing fabrics from my stash. I have quite a lot of fat quarters and other material but it does all fit in one smallish cupboard. Nevertheless I have no chance, at my age, of ever using it all up.

I've been doing this. It's very simple but soothing. 

Occasionally, of course, the mind wanders and this happens. Oops. 

It'll probably become less easy when I start joining the blocks together and find that they don't meet at exactly the right places. Still, I'll get them to meet. And very few people will ever see the quilt, anyway. 

I should really try something more challenging but don't at the moment feel like being challenged. The quilt is just for one of the bunks that we put in the study for the rare occasions when all of our distant grandchildren visit at the same time. Then after this I'll make a quilt for the other bunk. In the same fabrics, I think, but a different design, as yet to be decided. 

Mr L brings me a cup of tea in the mornings (lucky me) and I've developed a habit, as I drink it, of looking at my phone, which often offers me, on Facebook, an extract from an American programme about extreme hoarders. I watch this with horrified pity. I had always imagined that hoarders kept piles of newspapers or shoes or something, but these poor souls keep everything: household items in huge quantities, more clothes than anyone could ever wear but also unwashed dinner plates, half-eaten takeaway meals, fridges full of out-of-date food... . Often the men have multiple decrepit vehicles in their gardens that they plan to (but never will) renovate and sell. 

Then teams come in and help them sort their stuff, throw away the junk and clean and redecorate their houses. But it's obviously deeply painful for the hoarders to discard things, even obviously ruined items. And will they be able to keep themselves from filling their houses all over again? 

I'm so sorry for them - living in crowded and dirty houses and unable to stop accumulating more and more stuff. I like pictures and glass, but it's all arranged tidily. And dusted. Though of course there's the fabric stash... .

Isn't the human mind remarkable? - in both a good and a bad way. 

 

No news from any foreign coast

Yesterday we went up north to visit Son and family. We took with us the kilt that Mr L's mother made for Son when he was 6 and we were invited to Mr L's cousin's wedding. Kilts, made properly (and this one was - my MIL was a very good seamstress) take a lot of material and kilt-making is a skill. Medium Granddaughter is only 5, so it was a bit big for her, but having tried it on, she wore it for quite a long time. Notice also the sporran that used to belong to my brother when he was a little boy. He's going to be 74 tomorrow (happy birthday, P) so the sporran must be almost 70 years old. I'm not sure that either Medium or her little brother will get a lot of use out of the kilt but there might be the occasional school ceilidh or something. Or maybe not - she goes to a very small village school - but anyway, the kilt has been handed on. 

It was so lovely to see the family. I miss them. 

We've gradually been putting pictures back up on the walls that were recently redecorated. One of my excellent ideas (how my husband loves my ideas...) was to move the paintings that were on the staircase (that I was a bit worried would get faded by the sun) into the darker back part of the hall, and to move the blue plates in the back hall on to the staircase, since the sun wouldn't damage them. 

We've had these plates since shortly after we moved into the previous house - so, about 45 years - and I bought them in bits and pieces at antique fairs because I liked them and I wanted to distract attention from a rather bumpy wall in the dining room. Also they were quite fashionable - it being the era of Laura Ashley, Victoriana and so on. Over the years I'm sure they became unfashionable but I still liked them, and now I'm told that they've become quite trendy again. Having taken them down for the redecoration, I considered not putting them up again but am quite fond of them - though did manage to cull my three least favourite.

We've been putting off hanging them again because of course it's much more difficult to hang plates of different shapes and sizes on a slanting wall than a straight one, in any planned and sensible-looking arrangement. However, today was the day. Here's Mr L considering the situation.

We tried various configurations. 

The piece of string that you can faintly see on the floor is supposed to represent the slope of the wall. 

We did it in the end. Mr L was very patient. They will never move again till we downsize, by which time they may go to a charity shop because I don't think I can do this to the poor man again. 

In other words, nothing much has been happening. I haven't quite been able to justify starting another quilt (there are a few pictures still to go up) and I feel rather glum what with one thing and another. But one must count one's blessings. 
 

Decisions...

What an uncommenty world Blogland is nowadays, and indeed how few of the blogs that I used to read still exist, alas. In several cases I'm now Facebook friends of these ex-bloggers, but I don't think that Facebook is the equal of blogging, though I do like FB as well. Ah well.  

I've uploaded these pictures from Google photos, unlike my usual habit, and I can't get them to go in the right order. I started at the bottom of the ones I wanted on Google photos, and they came backwards on to the blog, so I tried again by starting at the top and the same happened. Anyway, we've had our smaller living room sofas recovered and I've been looking at cushions, worthy of the new covers, in John Lewis, where I was horrified to find that they cost £40 or £45 each. The one above might match quite well but I'm not sure it's really my style. But hey, I thought, I can make cushions. 

For example, I like these fabrics. But it turns out that they're £35 a metre, which makes the £45 cushions seem not so bad. 

So I bought this one and will consider my options. 

We've got decorators in at the moment, which seemed like a good idea some months ago. Annoyingly, they came on Tuesday, said that they couldn't come for the next two days and then the boss left, leaving a Lithuanian chap to strip the paper as above. He worked hard and tidied up after himself but I hope they're going to be here from now on. They're doing the kitchen, a bathroom and, argh, our bedroom. 

Earlier in the year, when sorting out Stuff, I put all postcards, other cards and letters in a big box, unsorted. I am now doing the sorting and finding all sorts of things such as this card from my parents on my 40th birthday. I'm now 71. How I would love to look 40 now! - or indeed to be 40. Life is fleeting. 

That's my lovely mum's handwriting. Can't throw this away - indeed I can throw almost none of it away. It's all very nostalgic and a mixture of heartwarming and sad. 

There are lots of home-made cards, such as this from Daughter 2 when she was very small. She's mildly dyslexic but extremely nice! 

Before the decorators came (see, this is backwards) we took down all these blue plates from the back hall. I've had them more or less all our married life - they were originally acquired to hide a bumpy wall we had in the previous house, bought in 1976. Will I put them up again? Ironically, Daughter 2 (who knows such things) tells me that plates on the wall are fashionable again. 

And here's a more modern drawing, which I found around the place - Biggest Granddaughter doodled this. Rather sweet! 

 

Not achieving very much

My brother and sister-in-law stayed for a week, which was very nice. He's my big brother and we're not at all alike in most ways but we've always got on well, and my sister-in-law is very nice. He hasn't lived in Edinburgh since, I think, 1972 - 7 years in the US plus 2 years later on, and the rest of the time in England. As a result my nephew and niece, splendid people both, are also pretty well English (though their mother is actually American so they have no English ancestry) and live down south. Which from my point of view is a pity but there we are. 

A member of one of my choirs very kindly remembered that I did patchwork and brought me these three curtain samples. They'd already decided on their curtains: the right hand design. These are... let's say,... not at all to my taste; also, they're velvet, beautiful quality and I can't imagine that they're washable. I can't see myself using them. But it was very nice of her. She's younger than me, a very stylish dresser and I suppose that I can just imagine her curtains looking - well, striking - in a modern house. If one liked orange. Which I don't. 

It struck me as an initial sketch for "The Scream". As Daughter 1 said, there appears to be a volcano behind her. 

Apart from that, we haven't been doing anything very interesting. Not quite sure what we have been doing, actually. A bit of gardening, which I would be doing at this moment had I not been discouraged by rain. It's the sort of rain which makes you think, oh well, it's not heavy; I'll just stay out a bit longer. And then you find you're slowly getting quite damp. 

Big Grandson and Biggest Granddaughter have been making masks. 

 Now I must go and look again at the box labelled "Correspondence, various" into which, during lockdown, I put cards, letter, postcards and email printouts from the past many, many years. It would be sensible to throw some of it away. But I probably won't. I might, however, sort it into categories. Would that be useful? Not sure.

I've just been reading Gyles Brandreth's latest memoir - very interesting and entertaining - and he keeps everything. He says that his wife claims that when he dies, she'll phone for a skip before she phones the undertaker. In many ways I would love to be like GB - his enterprise, his enthusiasm, his confidence - but I don't want to leave my family with quite those problems.

And now the sun's out but I've taken off my gardening trousers and everything outside is quite wet so I'll proceed to the archiving. And perhaps a cup of tea. 

Forever and forever and forever...

Not a lot is happening. The garden is blooming beautifully. 

Daughter 2 gave me this camellia for Mother's Day some years ago and it's so lovely. Some years it gets nipped by frost at just the wrong moment but this year seems to have been ideal for it. 

This is the study, the part of it behind me as I type. One of the major difficulties, as I've said before, of having children who've moved away is that when they come to stay (and of course, we want them to) there needs to be somewhere for them and their children to sleep. If they lived in Edinburgh, there wouldn't be a problem. People in our position can't downsize; in fact, really need to upsize: though we have three spare rooms, it's not enough for two visiting offspring, their spouses and their children. So I had this idea (I specialise in ideas - poor Mr L) that instead of having two desks and two desktop computers in the study, we could share one of each. If Mr L got rid of his desk (!) and also the filing cabinet, we could fit bunks in that space for visiting grandchildren. 

This all seems like fantasy since it's SO long since we had anyone to stay - particularly Son and his family, who don't often actually stay anyway. We more often go - went - there.

Anyway, Mr L nobly emptied the filing cabinet but we were waiting for charity shops to reopen so that we could donate the surplus furniture. Then we were browsing for bunks, phoned the company to ask a question and then found ourselves, somewhat rashly, ordering the bunks. In this need-it-tomorrow society, we actually got them tomorrow (or yesterday, in this case) - which we didn't want. So I hastily advertised the desk and cabinet on Facebook Marketplace and Gumtree - no takers so far. They're only £20 - I thought of making them free but wondered if that might somehow make them seem undesirable. Anyway, I'll change them to free tomorrow if there's no response earlier. 

Meanwhile I'm quilting the ice cream quilt and getting back to the archives. Why did my dad keep all his university notes?? - well, not all, but some. There are several thick, heavy notebooks with maths in them. I have no idea at all what it means and would throw them away except that they're in my dad's handwriting, which makes me hesitate. Also it's possible that my brother and his scientific family might be interested in them. But they're in Surrey and can't just pop in to express an opinion. 

So yes, nothing is happening but I feel a bit burdened with things. Still, for the third week in a row I went walking with some teaching friends on Wednesday, so that was nice. Onward and upward.