Septembers furtle

 So September! wow, first full month of retirement .... the first things i had to do were re arrange my rooms, the ones i use the most, so obvs lets start with the sewing room! yes this was the state of it ...

Much tidying and fabric folding later and this is where we are now. It will stay like this for a while while i bed into being a pensioner 😂

And then this happened! Like i need more fabric??? but hey when a store owner advertises a closing down sale with fabric at 5 pounds a meter you dont question it.The sale was in a village hall, the poor owner was quite overwhelmed, she was on her own and when the doors opened she didnt expect the amount of visitors she had. A lovely other shop owner came out of the queue and helped her cutting, otherwise i might still be there, her husband had a tea point for the husbands (good tip!) so I texted scoobs telling him i might be 15-20 mins and he appeared at the door waving a bourbon biscuit and a cup of tea 😂 I got Tilda, Lewis and Irene and Alison Glass, 15 meters in total for 70 pounds. I am so sorry she had to close down but this fabric will go to Linus and Siblings quilts so a happy end for the fabrics.

I was all prepped for the Glasgow quilt guild and was going to do my mini SAL series, but took along everything apart from the templates .... numpty. One of the rest of the guild was selling scrap bags for her church so i bought some of those and will be making a scrap quilt, so i did get to do some sewing!

This is my mini series SAL so far, really enjoying it, using up Lucy Engels scraps, I have found a new quilt group which meets during the week so i am doing these there.

We went to skye!!! first (non annual leave) retirement holiday, how strange but how wonderful! My lovely chum gave me a bottle of 18k prosecco so I had to drink it! Slainte!

I finished Lughansa in the celtic wheel of the year just in time for Mabon to hit my inbox, love making these.

So September you have been a blast! much more crafting for Octobers furtle 😊

Scrap quilts

 Now I have time, time to really plan what I do with my quilting. Most importantly what I do with my scraps, a.ways a dilemma for me  scraps do scare me! 

I have decided to concentrate on making 2 scrap quilts, one with bigger scraps, this one by stash bandit quilts:

It's the star silhouettes by Diane Harris for APQ August 2022. I've not started mine yet, this will be a long wip!

The second one will be for smaller scraps. Its the string sane quilt by Sarah Fielke

I started making this on at the guild meeting this weekend because I forgot to take my mini series templates with me!

This will be a nice one to use up all those strings which are left over.

Settling into retirement!

 Well I'm entering week 3 of retirement and bedding in. It's been a journey, very very strange to begin with and still is, you don't go from driving 100 miles then do an emergency stop without any whiplash. And there has been whiplash, but thats to be expected. Physical and emotional fall out.

For me it meant revisiting and remembering why i retired,  i did this to protect and repair my physical and mental health to give me the best quality of life in my old age, and at 58 I am getting older. No 2 ways about it.

I didnot do this to revisit old ways of thinking and living, I did this to repair and protect. 

So, while elements of the past may try to sidle in, they do not belong here. Move forward not look backwards.

Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Now I don't need to worry about getting caught in the rain and looking drookit in online meetings!

My Scoobs took me for afternoon tea!

From WFH office to sitting neuk!

The past two years have been hard, no one can deny that, I was lucky in a sense because i could work from home for most of the time. I wont say it was easy, work began to seep into the bones of the house. I think it was the same for a lot of people.

This was my WFH office I know I was lucky to have such a room and a fairly good set up, I had a great chair but it was from my sewing room! I had a table which was my mams old kitchen table, that brought a lot of memories with it, working on it all day was sometimes hard especially while i was shielding, I had things in there to cheer me up, presents from chums etc, I hung up some quilts to make it feel cosier and they became a feature of my teams meetings sometimes. This was the house WFH office.

And this was my real office! some scamps wrote on my whiteboard!

To rise up my laptop and get the screen to a decent height i used a shoe box with a brick in it! the brick kept the box from moving about, it worked just fine!

My mams kitchen table! she gave it to me when she got a new one, this table must be nearly 60 years old .... it did the job though!

The silk quilt was hung here because i cant use it as a quilt, it would need specialist cleaning as it is silk, so lets hang it on a wall! This was my prosecco countdown wine rack, one bottle a month to keep me going!

I had these on my office desk for years, my beloved Bud and my floofy pal Rocco so of course they went into the WFH office desk too.

This is it now, transformed into a wee neuk, for breakfast, for a cuppa and just for generally having a chill.

 

Thank you WFH office but you can stand down now, you have done your job.