Lockdown week 5 - Groundhog Day and unboxing the Sew Darn Sweet subscription box

It's starting to feel a bit like my favourite film 'Groundhog Day', where Bill Murray re-lives the same day over and over again.  Every day I wake up and it is blue skies and sunny, every day I do the same things, with the same people.  The only difference is how much food there remains in the kitchen (we've run out of veg and fruit so I might venture out today to a corner shop). I have to admit it's starting to get me down a bit now, especially since it's beginning to look like it could go on for months.  Even my company, which normally resists change and proceeds at the slowest pace possible, is talking about the 'new normal' and keeping offices closed in the long term and getting all of us working from home.  And as much as I love crafting, I'm not used to doing it every single day for hours.  It's still a treat to have to the opportunity but at the same time I'm starting to crave the normality of, say, a walk around the mall or a commute to work.

One brighter note this week was the arrival of my first subscription box from Sew Darn Sweet.  I had signed up a while ago for three months (£34) for a quarantine treat and then kind of forgotten about it so it was a nice surprise when it arrived.

What's in the box???

Oooo, shiny....

Cheerful spring flowers and bees from the Makower Sunny Bee collection

And a pattern for  quilt as you go placemats, plus batting to make one mat.

This cheered me up and it was so nicely presented as well.   It feels like good value for £11.33 a month (including postage) as well. I don't think I will use these fabrics for the  placemat so I will save them for a future project (perhaps another bag?). I used the wadding for the padding in my Japanese zip pouch (see below).


I had one more finish last week that I forgot to blog:  a cushion that I made from the same panel that the first 'houses' totebag was made from.  This cushion uses the wording from the top of the panel and the faux-patchwork border from the middle section.

This is a picture of the original panel (taken from the internet as I've cut mine up) and you can see where the totebag and the cushion have come from.  I still have the bit in the middle to make something from.  The book suggests a tea cosy but I don't really need another tea cosy.



From the same Japanese book by  Masako Wakayama I've been working on one of the little bag projects. As seems typical for Japanese projects, it is almost entirely sewn by hand and consequently every step takes a very long time.  The instructions are in Japanese, and I can only read a few of the words as I can't read kanji, but the pictures are fairly self explanatory with a little study.  So far I have appliqued and embroidered the outer body and turned that into a bag with a zipper and a lining (I had to sew the lining in twice because the first time I stitched too close to the zipper and it was preventing the zipper from operating smoothly).  And now I am working on the little zipped pouch that snaps inside, also appliqued and embroidered.   It's definitely not a quick project and yet it is quite satisfying to see all the little details emerging. The buttoned cord inside is for holding spools of thread, and the rectangular narrow pocket is for holding the Apliquik tools.

This project was the first time I had tried using the Apliquik tools that I got for my birthday.  They are like two metal chopsticks with shaped ends that you use for smoothing down the seam allowances of applique shapes into a line of fabric glue on the wrong side.  I think there must definitely be a knack to using them.  I found them useful on curves but I had less success in achieving a smooth straight line without wobbles.  Practice will make improvement hopefully.

I'm doing bobbin lace once a week in a WhatsApp session with my lace friends while we are locked down.  Facebook pimped me a handpainted bobbin by Dee Carver this week, which looked so much like the Japanese cherry blossom we saw that I had to get it.  Isn't it pretty?

My cross stitch is slowly coming along.  I have switched to a different frame which lets me bring the stitching closer to my aging eyes so that I can make out the linen threads more clearly, improving my chances of accurately stitching over two threads of linen. I recently read a tip by Betsy Morgan that when using hand-dyed threads, you should complete each cross stitch individually rather than stitching in rows.  This is is so that the colour graduations are revealed and not lost in a 'tweedy' effect.  This made sense, so for the tree on the right I was doing that, and I think you can see a subtle difference in colour compared to the rest of the stitching.

The garden is looking nice, it always looks better in the spring when everything is green and growing than it does in the summer when things tend to struggle because our sandy soil dries out so much.  At the moment, the Spiraea nipponica ‘Snowmound’ is looking spectacular, a mounded shrub taller than me all covered in clouds of white.  I brought some inside to enjoy in the hallway.

Our bearded iris are just coming out now, and my pots of tulips are still going.  The various clematis are growing strongly and starting to bud, and I've been training them onto supports with bits of string while looking forward to (hopefully) lots of blooms. The Cornflower, centaurea montana, is blooming, as are some self seeded aquilegias, and the Bleeding Hearts are a twinkle of pink under the pear tree.  The weather has been so consistently sunny that I've been running the drip hoses every few days.  One of the highlights of the past week (besides the arrival of the subscription box) was collecting our order from B&Q (all contact free, they've organised it really well), so exciting to go out somewhere and get stuff for the garden!  We got a bunch more bird food, some rose food, two packs of assorted bedding plants (should have got more as those have disappeared into the gaps), some lawn seed to re-seed our several bare patches and some paint to disguise an ugly drain pipe.  It's a struggle to keep the lawn seed moist, it dries out in the sun every day so I don't know if it will sprout or not, at least the birds haven't eaten it so far.

How's it going for you?  Is it the 'new normal'?