A less stressful caravan holiday

 We got away for a long weekend in the caravan, first time towing with the new car.  The new car actually towed really well, it's a bit more powerful so the ride was smoother and the fuel economy was significantly better (new car is a faux-hybrid so electrics kick in occasionally). Although I realised as I was directing DH to reverse up to the caravan for departure, that we need to add the extra step to our list of actually attaching our  new detachable towbar. Luckily bystanders were few at our rural campground near Shrewsbury.  So rural that the bunnies significantly outnumbered the campers.  They were scampering around and grazing around the units almost without fear. Very cute to watch out of our caravan window.

We had a nice country walk to Haughmond Abbey ruins and around Haughmond Hill, with views over the countryside.

And we had a nice day in Shrewsbury which has some wonderful old buildings. We'd been before but not for decades so we enjoyed a self-guided walk around the city which nestles in a loop of the River Severn. I saw some lovely Victorian tiles in Shrewsbury Cathedral which would make great quilt patterns.

I was mostly working on a cross-stitch bookmark kit from a magazine in the evenings. After we got back, I finished the binding on my One Block Wonder quilt that I made a few years ago by cutting up beach panels.

Visiting the Handiquilter stall at Festival of Quilts last week has re-ignited my hunger for a long-arm machine. So I have once again been prowling around the attic room with a tape-measure and graphing out frame sizes to see if I can squeeze one in.  Their budget machine and frame combo (Moxie on a Loft frame) is slightly smaller so I was hopeful, but it's only a few inches smaller.  I could shoehorn it into the room but would probably be hitting my head on the slanted ceiling quite regularly.   Also the Moxie only has a 15 inch throat so would not be a giant leap forward over my current Pfaff 11-inch machine apart from it has stitch regulation which would be wonderful.  There are some real toe-catcher length stitches on the one-block wonder quilt where I started going too fast on some parts of the meandering.

Sewing this week has mainly been machining binding onto quilts (one more to go) or hand-sewing down the binding (currently working on the vintage quilt top that I quilted).  I have picked out a mitten pattern from my new book 'Mittens of Latvia' and sent off for some Shetland yarn in colours I don't have enough of in my stash. 

I bought a new blind for the kitchen, as the one I put up when we moved in over 9 years ago had become very faded and stained.  This one is in a William Morris pattern and looks quite pretty in the light. Luckily I could re-use the fittings from the previous blind so didn't have to balance on ladders with a drill this time.

This coming week, at some point, the scaffolders should be arriving to scaffold our house ready for the handyman to start repairing and painting our decrepit windows the following week.  It will also be a chance for us to wash our filthy windows (we gave up on hiring people as they just bring brushes on sticks which don't really do anything to the upper storey windows).  DH may have to do the topmost 4th-storey windows as I suffer from vertigo if I look down.  

Oh, and the cat is fine after her surgery, it all healed really well and the t-shirt outfit worked great the whole week.