Thank you, thank you, thank you.....

.... To all you lovely peeps who leave me such wonderful comments.. 

It boosts me as you all know and today I really need them, because at my weigh in yesterday I had put on a pound!! I was so disappointed because I don't know where that came from. We had followed the food plan and I hadn't  had anything extra, so I thought,  but I must have because the scales showed I had!

I wanted to lose a pound a week up to Christmas, which is only 14 weeks away and that would have been a whole stone.. so this week I am trying especially hard to lose that extra pound and more!! I was doing so well too, now I have to take a pound off my ticker weight measure thingy! Boo hoo!

XX

A Quilt for my daughter

 My daughter has a significant birthday at the end of this month, so I decided to mark the occasion by making her a quilt.. I love the colours.

It's a batik fabric called Shades of Peace.

I bought it from a little  shop in Portland, Victoria, Australia, last year.

I have just been waiting for an excuse to use it! 

The quilt design is 'Birds in the Air.'

I have loved making this and have sewn most days to get it finished. It's all triangles and to cut them I was working with 7/8th of an inch, not my favourite sizing, but after cutting out 490 triangles I have got the hang of measuring such a weeny part of an inch!!LOL

Hope she likes it. It is the sort of colours she likes and so I hope it will fit in with her colour scheme.

The redder colours are slightly darker than the photos show.  

Thank you for all your kind and encouraging comments it is so lovely to be part of this generous blogging world.

Happy Days

xx

End of the Summer......

We have had a beautiful sunshiny day here today and really warm.

Washing was on our line early,  so a true Monday! And we do have lines that straddle the garden between trees, our rotary line broke last year and because we couldn't  find time to get out and buy another one, we made do with the plastic coated rope across the garden and it is lovely to see the washing filled with the breezes.

Here are some of my pots still going strong as we do water most evenings. Each time I look at them I do feel proud,  as most of my flowers are all grown from seed, so my heart skips a beat just to see their colours in the early mornings.

And I have survived another weekend with out blowing my food plan. We ate following SW recipes and our Sunday dinner was mostly our own grown veg!

We still have cabbages to harvest and the beans are still going strong so a few more dinners from them.  But the garden is beginning to look as though it needs a good rain fall.. we don't have enough here in the East.

So it's the end of the summer.

We have had a really good one. With several days out in London, we also saw  a play with  Maureen Lipman called 'Daytona' and it was excellent. We've had long weekends  away and then visitors here. Even some  cousins from Australia before they were off to Paris. DH's daughter and hubby of 4 months came for the Bank Holiday, and that was nice. And of course went to our favourite place several times... Southend on Sea.. last week it was to see the Tall Ships sailing down the Thames. And yes we had an Italian Ice cream and because we had to wait a long time for the ships to pass, we went to one of the 'under the arches cafes' and had fish and chips and amazingly I still had weight loss the next day at my slimming group!

And we haven't finished yet as we're off to Skipton for Yarndale at the end of the month.. I am so excited I have had it all booked for months.

So happy, happy days!

XX

 

Three days at home in Wales

We have just had three sunshiny and very happy days in Porthcawl, the town where I was born and lived till I left to become a nurse in 1960.

We stayed with my mother's cousin, so she is my first cousin once removed.

She lives in a small town 4 miles from Porthcawl.

When we were young we saw quite a bit of each other, as like me her mother had died when she was a baby, so she came a lot to our house; my gran was her aunty.

We spent a lot of these last few days remembering  of how things were when we were growing up.  I can remember when she said she could help me with my knitting and dropped stitches  so it went all holey and I went crying to my aunty who said.. don't be such a baby!! And started my knitting all over again!

 

She couldn't remember that,  but it must have been important to me.. she has planned a huge party in October when she will be 80.. so a great big family get together.

 

Of course we had to have a Sidoli's ice cream and it was lush.

Nell had some too.

 

 

 

Such happy times.. we spent an hour before we started the 223 miles drive home, sitting drinking coffee on the prom and looking at the sea, me dreaming of living back in Wales. But I probably never will, here is home now.

xx

My next quilt ...

I bought this batik fabric in a little shop in Portland, Australia.

A lovely little shop where I had been before.

 

I am thinking of using Birds in the Air design which I also got there.. can't wait to get started.... but we do have to get our garden straight for the winter so maybe sadly this will have to wait a few days!

Thank you for all the lovely comments, they give me such a boost.. and in case you hadn't notice my weight is going down albeit slowly!

I am working on a cross stitch as a Giveaway so keep watching!!

XX