Suddenly, a patio

The big news this week is that quite abruptly we have a patio at long last under the pergola that we finished at the beginning of June.  The patio guy contacted me Thursday to say that he could come Friday, so I hurriedly arranged a day off.  It was supposed to be a two day job but he turned up with three other guys so between the four of them, they completely finished it in eight hours on Friday.

We're so pleased to have it finally done.  Now we can clean up around it and start getting in some planting.  I'm going to order a rose to grow up the front of the pergola which will come as a bare root plant in November.  The side panel will have a clematis, and I would like to put a water feature in the corner in front of the bamboo.  I've ordered a couple of small outdoor sofas in the end of season sales for it.

So I spent a lot of Friday in the sewing room where I could frequently monitor the workmen and be on call for design decisions and making tea.  I finished quilting the red and white quilt (quilt number six) and ran it through the washing machine, and put it out to dry after the workmen had left.

Today I machined on the binding, and it's all done now.  I normally stitch binding on by hand as I achieve a much better result, so it felt a bit like sacrilege to be using the machine, but it was certainly faster. I used a three step zig zag and my usual single fold binding, which seemed to work better than trying to fold around double fold binding which never seems to stitch down evenly for me.

Earlier in the week I finished quilting quilt number five, which was the twisting pinwheel tablecloth I made a while back.  I used the walking foot to stitch a grid across the blocks, and then went around the edges of the border print.  It's looking very smart in our hallway now.

Quilt number four, the William Morris grid quilt, is still on the frame and I'm perhaps approaching the halfway point.  I haven't done many passes on it this week due to lack of time, and also one of my homemade rachets broke loose and I had to re-glue it.

I've done about three hours on my Bucks Point lace hexagonal edging this week, and am slowly creeping around the second corner.  So I will have to try to replicate what I did on the first corner when my teacher was helping me - I wrote it down afterwards so I can refer to my notes this time.

Evenings have been all cross-stitch, I feel guilty because I am really neglecting my knitting but I'm enjoying finally progressing on this long term stitching project.  I've also made a couple of apple pies from the apples on our tree, and there are still loads ripening on the tree.   In the garden, I've started cutting turf to clear a space for a new flower bed in the lawn.  Our garden is very shady so I'm going to relocate several plants that are suffering from lack of sun into the new bed.  They will get more light there although it will still be shaded part of the day.  Now that the trees and shrubs we moved three years ago are maturing and getting bigger, the ground underneath them is in deep shade so things that I planted back then now need to be moved.  I won't do it yet, I'll wait until the end of the month or perhaps in October.  I can't do a lot of heavy digging as I've been having problems with my left shoulder, an ultrasound scan has revealed something called calcified tendonopathy which is basically big words for yet another thing falling apart in middle age.  I've having physiotherapy for it which hopefully will help and it has also been improving on its own. Luckily it doesn't impede anything important like knitting or sewing :)