Now you see it, now you don't

 Our garden has been looking splendidly lush with all the roses out, the delphiniums, last of the irises, the salvias etc.

And then it started raining.  Cue showers of rose petals and a lot of bedraggled blooms:

Oh well, the garden certainly needs the rain after so many hot days.

I finished the knitted lace doiley which looked pretty sorry for itself after casting off.

I wet-blocked it with a bit of cornstarch mixture as recommended by the book, and a magic transformation has taken place!  It's now about 12cm (5 inches) wide.

Not perfect as I struggled to pin all the crochet cast-off chains out evenly, and not symmetrical as there are a few dodgy decreases in the final rows, but it looks like a doiley.  Now that I understand the pattern better, I may try again.

This week I took over the living room for a few days and laid out all the pieces for my strip-pieced star quilt, which took quite a while particularly as I found I had not cut sufficient background hexagon pieces somehow.

I'm quite pleased with it, it looks very cottagey and Brambly-Hedge-like.  As it stands, I don't think it is going to be very big, I might consider adding borders.  Then I had to think what to do next.  With no time considerations, I would have been tempted to set up a sewing machine in the living room and piece the rows right off the floor.  But DS's girlfriend is coming next week so instead I had to think of how to transport the layout down to my sewing room.  In the end I stacked up the 36 individual rows and pinned them with numbered slips of paper.  Hopefully it will make sense at the sewing machine and I won't get too many pieces in the wrong place.

Here's the photo I forgot to put in last week of the Australian BOM 1st instalment kit in progress, with the very romantic soft colours.

And this is some random stash acquisition - there was an alert on Facebook that the American fabric company Connecting Threads was not only having a sale, they were also discounting international shipping.  I had a trawl through what was on offer, and chose a wool felt teapot mat kit, a redwork panel, and some half-yards of neutrals, and three cheerful coordinating fabrics. The package turned up this week. No particular plans, but even with shipping they were still quite reasonably priced compared to UK fabric prices.  I'll probably take the wool felt kit away in the caravan.

And a treat for myself as a happy portent of the future:  a painted lace bobbin with the inscription "Happy Retirement".  I'm keeping it on my work PC unit.

In light of the most recent announcements, DS's London office has said that in about a month they would like to have employees back in the office for at least two days a week, and that they will review that decision later in the summer (the implication being that people will have to go back more than two days).  At least DS has had his first jab, and there's a chance he might get his second one before he has to get back on the train.  It will be strange not to have him as a work colleague down the hall working on the dining table, and hearing him take part in online meetings etc. But at his age, being relatively new in the workforce, I think it is likely better for him to have some office time with real people and learn those  in-person skills. My workplace is planning to implement hybrid working and as far as I know, for the majority of us there are no plans to make us come in unless we want to.  I definitely won't be going in as I belong to a virtual team anyway.  I suppose I'll have to make one last trip to clean out my little locker and perhaps hand in my ID etc. but that won't be until the autumn.

My online Japanese conversation lessons have come to an end as my lovely teacher is now on maternity leave and expecting her first child.  I have been speaking to her once a week for several months now which has really helped my confidence. I'm still talking like a toddler, but I'm much more confident about doing that and filling in the gaps with pantomime etc. I suppose I should find a new online teacher but I'm not incredibly optimistic, it's rare to find someone you can chat with easily. I've tried several other teachers in the past and have had some incredibly stilted and awkward exchanges.  We'll see, I don't want to lose too much ground so I suppose I should make the effort.

It was still really light at 10pm last night, but not long now until the longest day of the year. That day always seems to come too soon, before summer has properly started, especially this year.