Sending away my guilt

 Taking advantage of a £1 max fees on ebay offer, I listed a few items a while ago including a big length of wool crepe fabric that I bought (extravagantly as it was very expensive) at least 20 years ago from Liberty's of London.  I was going to sew a suit for work using a pattern from Prima magazine. The fabric and accompanying (also high quality and expensive) lining fabric and interfacing has been on my 'to do' and guilt lists ever since, never getting done.  As I got older, the vibrant colour no longer suited me, but the fabric had cost so much money that I couldn't just give it away.  Two houses later, it was still kicking around my sewing room and making me feel bad whenever I came across it.  And now I have sold it, and posted it out of my life.  Off the guilt list!  Hurrah!  Now for the other 2,999 similar items....   Seriously though, I am going to have to spend at least two years of my retirement divesting the house of the decades of accumulated acquisitions before we can downsize.  At the moment, I am going through a stack of letters six inches high from the 1980s, from my attic museum archive.  Letters I wrote (my parents saved a lot and gave them back to me later), letters I received, old birthday cards, postcards from friends.  Why did I keep all this stuff?

The big news this week is that I finally finished quilting the diagonal lines on the 25 block applique quilt and the quilt frame is out of the living room - hurrah! 

It looks better than I feared it would.  While the spacing of the lines does vary, it isn't as obvious on the bed. What was quite obvious was a half a dozen places where I had stitched a wobbly line by accident. So I marked all those and put the quilt back on the frame, and pulled out the section of wobbly stitching and replaced it with straighter stitching.  There is one huge mistake where three lines go into a leaf, and only two lines carry on (with wider spacing) but there wasn't any good way to fix that so I've just left it.  Nobody's perfect.  So now I have switched to a hand frame for the next couple of years while I stitch around the individual applique motifs.  I can only stitch in one direction so the hand frame lets me keep turning the quilt as I go around the motifs.

I've started knitting a shawl out of pink cotton aran yarn, more of a shoulder warmer really.  One of these ones where you cast on over 300 stitches then decrease upwards.  As usual I had a lot of trouble getting the first couple of rows correct to set up the pattern, not being able to count accurately, but I am away now.

I've decided to make one final project out of the Japanese book before I dismantle the fabric collection I pulled from stash.  It's another zip pouch with cute applique houses.  I've traced the patterns onto the Appliquik interfacing and will be attempting to use my Appliquik tools although the pieces are quite small.

The clock in my sewing room bit the dust a while ago after I accidentally dropped it (well, juggled it frantically and then dashed it on the ground by accident) trying to reach it down to change the battery. I ordered a new one on Amazon and it has finally turned up.  Nice to know what the time is again down there and a very handsome picture.

Another mild day and the sun is out, so I'm off for my daily lockdown exercise walk.  It's so mild that our magnolia tree is budding early, hope that isn't going to be a problem later if it turns colder.  We gave the garden a good tidy up yesterday, uncovering the plants from the layer of pear tree leaves covering them (which had to be done by hand so as not to damage the plants with a rake) and hacking back a lot of dead growth.  Our fuschias are still blooming away, the pergola roses are just finishing after one final brilliant display, the lipstick salvia is still cheerfully blooming, and the autum flowering sedum are a rosy glow in the undergrowth. I'm going to try leaving my Chinese Elm bonsai out this winter, although I've placed it in a protected spot along with other pot plants. It only barely survived indoors last winter so I reckon it has a better chance out there. How's your garden doing (if you have one)?