Things are moving on

 I gave my notice at work this week.  My manager looked tired and envious and said she would go if she could.  I'm not telling very many people yet but I did tell my friend on the team, who is very jealous and accused me of abandoning her - she is desperate to go as well but is hanging on to pay for some home improvements and to help her adult kids out.  I have to use up all my leave and flexi before I go as they won't buy it out, so I will actually be leaving a little earlier than I thought. I think I now have 18 working days left.  

I interviewed four financial advisors and have chosen one, an apparently sensible woman whom I hit it off with.  So I've started to feed her the information she needs like scanned pension statements and currently I'm trying to work out what our daily expenses add up to.  This is not the woman who needed to be nagged - that one turned out to be a tired looking mother who talked about her kids but really had no questions or information for me, and when I asked about her fees she didn't even know as her company has recently been absorbed by another.  The fourth interview, a man, was a total disaster: I didn't even get to finish my first few sentences before he jumped in because he knew exactly what I needed and told me so in a 10-minute monologue that was so boring I actually started looking at Facebook while waiting for him to run down. In the end I had to literally wave my hand to get his attention so that I could ask a few questions, I only got one out before he started talking over me and launched into another lengthy monologue. Having had enough of that, I made 'I'm leaving now, thank you so much' remarks at various points but he was completely oblivious.  In the end, I literally had to pretend that someone was at the door and bid him a hasty farewell.  oh my god.  And he had lots of good reviews.  Perhaps he writes them himself.

DH surprised me this week with a cross-stitch picture of our caravan that I had no idea he was even working on. He bought a little kit of a caravan xmas card on impulse, and then realised he could redesign it to look like our caravan.  He borrowed some threads from my stash and worked on it in secret.  I've added some fabric borders and stretched it onto card, and turned it into a fridge magnet.  It will be a nice memory of the holidays once we are into winter.

I finished sewing the Clothkits blouse this week.  It's turned out alright.  My old overlocker has made the seam allowances look like a dog was chewing on them - I am thinking of treating myself to a new one as a retirement present.  The sleeves are a bit too long and the back neck a bit too high, but otherwise it fits me fine  To me it looks very 1980s but I like the print details on the neck and cuff frills. I didn't know I could sew a button-up blouse so I feel a sense of achievement.  I kind of wish I had traced the pattern off before I cut it out now. But on the other hand, I am unlikely to be wearing a fancy blouse these days since I don't go to an office any more.

I found I was kind of missing the embroidery this week so I dug out a felt kit I bought on sale a few years ago.  It contains wool felt and embroidery thread to make a little bird house and two birds.  I wasn't keen on the birds but I thought the house was cute. 

The wool felt turned out to be somewhat flimsy and some of it didn't feel great quality.  I was sceptical that the house was going to turn out as nicely defined as the picture.  I went to look at their website which has a lot of cute things but I was amused to see their sample of the birdhouse kit (pic below) is indeed quite bulgy. It also costs more than I paid for mine.

I tried my best with the embroidery. The pattern doesn't include any actual embroidery design so you have to free-style it based on the single picture on the front of the kit. I ignored the instructions to cut out the pieces first because I found it much easier to embroider the felt while it was all one big sheet. I used some of the stitches I've learned with the BOM, like colonial knots.

To compensate for the flimsy felt, I backed the embroidered felt with fusible woven interfacing before cutting out the pieces.  Once I had the house mostly assembled, I put a piece of card in the base to help with stability, and added some aquarium gravel for a bit of weight before firmly stuffing the remainder. I'm fairly pleased with it, it's colourful and cute.  It could be a hanging ornament, or a pincushion.

Sumo has started again so I did a lot of the stitching on the birdhouse while watching the highlights each evening recorded from NHK Japan.  I've also done a bit of cross-stitch on the Little Houses sampler and even a bit of hand quilting on the applique quilt.

A big time suck this week has been a new-to-me video game called Ashen, which is quite similar to Dark Souls.  As usual it took me a while to get into it, I always go through a period at the beginning of a new game where I hate everything that's different and of course my character is weak and feeble so my rubbish fighting skills leave me totally exposed.  But now that my character is levelling up and I have some decent weapons, I'm enjoying running around and exploring.  Due to my age no doubt, I find after an hour or so of gaming that my right hand is seizing up so I'm having to limit my gameplay which DS thinks is hilarious after a childhood of being told that he is doing too much gaming.  Just wait, karma will get you one day when you're older too...