Time is relative

 This week seems to have flown by - it feels like only a few days since I wrote last weekend's post.  I read somewhere that this phenomenon is exaggerated for retired people who have generally moved on from time-defining frameworks such as paid employment or higher education.  So there aren't so many milestones in your week to give you an anchor in time.  I go to Aquafit twice a week and that's about it for weekly appointments.  Although I did go to Specsavers to order some replacement sewing glasses (the lost ones still haven't turned up).

My knitting/lace/journalling room is finally in a useable state, although not everything has been put away yet.  I even printed off some digitals and have been cutting them out.

I fired up the 3D printer and printed four of these boxes for storing washi tape - they have an insert with shaped rows to hold the tapes, and they stack on top of each other, and I printed a lid for the top of the stack.  A big improvement over my previous jumble of tapes.

One of the retreats I am going to later in the month, issued a challenge for us to make a soft cover for an A5 booklet using a random combination - mine was 'four blue circles'.  So this week I sewed up this junk journal style cover using up some of my fabric stash.  It's mostly fusible applique with some 3D elements added.  It came out a little smaller than I had planned but still fits my A5 booklet.

I'm getting near the end of longarming the St Kitts wallhanging.  I've mostly been doing ruler work on it for practice.  There are a number of imperfections and wobbles, including one square where I need to unpick the sky because I didn't notice my tension was off and the top thread was pulling up the darker coloured bobbin thread (I could do with better lighting in my attic room).

I started weaving my grey fabric placemats, using some torn strips from some leftover quilt backing.  They look a bit dull, but we need some grey placemats to use with a particular tablecloth so they will be useful.  They could do with some pops of colour really.

I'm close to finishing another of my cross stitched Houses of Britain.  This is the 7th one of 13, I am beginning to regret starting this stitchalong as I am such a slow stitcher.  I still have the back stitching to do on this one. I've also done a bit more on my fancy French monogram but it's not finished yet.

We have a yukka plant which we attempted to murder when we moved in 12 years ago, as it was so wizened and ugly.  It proved impossible to dig up so we just cut it down right to the ground.  A few years later it started growing again, surprisingly, and has gradually turned into a small shrub.  It must have liked the very hot summer because it has amazed us by suddenly throwing up this tall flower stem for the first time ever since the attempted homicide.  I'm looking forward to seeing what it will look like.

And in other organisational news, I grew tired of the jumble of tea boxes in the kitchen cupboard, constantly falling down and out and making it hard to see what we actually had.  So I have invested in this fancy organiser which makes me feel like I'm in a hotel conference room.  Now I feel like I need to buy three more kinds of tea to fill up all the slots.

We drove over to the town of Stamford today.  We have been before but were now looking at it as a possible retirement destination for when we downsize.  It seemed nice but I don't know that we can afford anything there.  After walking around, we had a cup of tea in a nice tearoom that had these charming character dolls of c. 1:6 scale set up in their front window, really well made including the appropriate furniture.

DH asked me which of the depicted retired tea room denizens would be me, I think it would be this one with her knititng and her slippers: