Finally, a day when it is not raining

We've just come in from a couple of hours of tidying in the garden due to finally having a bright day.  Although it is windy, it's not too cold (about 7 degrees C).  So I pruned the apple and pear tree, and gave them a good spray with fungicide.  I didn't do the spraying last winter and our apples had terrible scab this year.  I'll hopefully spray the apple tree again at bud break if I remember.  We also scooped up tons of leaves from the pear and magnolia, the latter having terrible leathery leaves which do not rot down and smother everything underneath.  More hacking back of dead geranium growth and dead iris leaves, and we gave the corkscrew hazel a strong haircut as it had become very overgrown with lots of dead growth in the middle. DH called a halt at the point because we had run out of containers for all the debris he was going to take to the dump. Our last task was to attach the squirrel silhouette we bought last weekend. We've put it on the pergola in the first instance, we'll live with that for a while and we can always move it somewhere different if we change our minds.

I've continued to chip away at the Christmas decoration mountain this week and most things are now put up. There's a small pile of textiles in the living room still awaiting a home: quilted wall hangings and quilted decorations that I've either made or been given by friends.  The tree is up, it's not as tall as some years but it looks nice now that it's decorated.

I brought out a few old miniature Christmas scenes I made a long time ago and put them on display as well.

I also dug out the snowman quilt I finished last year, and hung it in the hall.  It's a bit large for the location, but eyecatching and easy for spotting all the details that I'd forgotten I'd added.

Over the years I have accumulated a small collection of blue and white Wedgewood baubles as I quite like them. I wait and get them half price in the sales.  Last year I thought it would be nice to have a single tree to hang them on and I bought a small white artificial tree in the post-xmas sales.  So I got the white tree out this year and assembled it, it turned out to be dreadful and completely flimsy, a real Charlie Brown tree when it came to trying to hang the relatively heavy Wedgewood baubles on.  So I had a look around on the interweb and came across this tutorial for making a simple wooden tree.  I was able to buy the dowels and 2x2 at our local DIY store and I had a base already.  I couldn't find a suitable finial so my tree doesn't have one yet.  It wasn't hard to build apart from none of the holes I drilled are very vertical.  If I win the lottery one of the things I would buy would be a drill press!  Consequently my branches are not very horizontal.  DH kindly said it made the tree look more natural.  Although he's a bit suspicious that there is room for so many more ornaments to be added to the collection. So this is what it looked like after the tutorial.

I thought it looked too bare and too wonky.  I still had the rubbish white tree so I experimented with taking that apart with wire cutters (I had to get DH to help, it needed some muscle ) and attaching some of the white branches to the wooden armature.  It probably looks a little odd but I think it looks better. It definitely needs a finial for the top of the three.  Wedgewood do a cute squirrel ornament now, if I can get that in the sales then perhaps it would look nice as a finial.

I finished knitting the Cumbria mini-skein fingerless mitts this week and darned in the ends.  They've turned out well but I think look fairly masculine, so I am going to give them to my f-i-l for Christmas to see if he likes them.  So when I washed them, I stretched them out quite a lot to make them looser for his bigger hands.  That's the great thing about pure wool, it's so flexible.

This week I sewed some spoon blocks for the Let's Bake quilt and then sewed together the blocks for  three of the four main panels. It's so cute!  I've only got four apron blocks left to make for the final section.

As it turns out, I am going to have two weeks off at Christmas because the trains are suspended for rail improvement work. I was supposed to go in for a couple of days before New Year, but I don't fancy having to get a rail replacement bus so I asked for, and was grudgingly granted, more leave. So hopefully I can get lots of crafting done and perhaps finish up this quilt top completely. I also hope to do the big clean up in the dollshouse room.  Only five more days to work, woo hoo!

I went to my monthly lace group meeting yesterday and started a new small project. Do you remember this lace bauble wrap I made last year?

I'm going to try a different pattern from the same book of patterns which is the Lace Guild's Take A Box Of Baubles... compiled by Rosemary Green. When I unpacked the bauble this year to put on the tree, it was nicer than I remembered and made me want to make another one.  Obviously I won't finish it for this Christmas but hopefully in plenty of time for next year.

Are you looking forward to the holiday?