Progress Report :)

My apologies for anyone waiting to hear about either Poland or Cornwall… I simply haven’t had enough opportunity to put together words and pictures for posts about these trips! I do find this kind of writing much more difficult, and therefore I need more uninterrupted time in order to do it, and this is something I have not had for some time now.

(My further apologies for the quality of writing in this post. I’m tired right now, but I wanted to post something as I have a feeling that it will be tricky to get time for writing over the next few days!)

Things here have been pretty busy lately: with helping out my in-laws, not only has there been the hay work, but also other jobs around the livestock and the land, such as weed control and putting up electric fencing etc. All very time consuming, and not conducive to getting stuck into writing…

Also, with our own stuff, the storage company we’re using finally got its act together and got our crates in one place, so that we could shift it into accessible storage instead. This is what we had wanted right from the start, as we knew we would be adding stuff to the store as we went along, plus we had stuff sorted ready to take out at whatever point we had time to do a car boot sale. So finally we can access our stuff as we need to!

This is particularly important right now as we also recently found out that we need to make an inventory of all of the stuff we will be shipping to Australia, and without having it all together that would have been impossible!! It was a full day’s work for my husband and me to move and list everything, but it felt like a huge weight off our shoulders to get it done. We still have more stuff to sort and add to the store, but now that we have accessible storage we can do this much more easily.

I’m also trying to use the gym more effectively. I went to a couple of tough exercise classes last week (like Insanity!), and I’m feeling much more enthusiastic about going now that I can see some progress. I’m hoping I can keep it up and get back to my previous level of fitness, as I feel much happier when I’m fitter :)

And still, all of this is not conducive to writing!!  

Another big step is happening tomorrow: my husband finishes his job here, as part of the conditions for taking his job in Australia. We are heading up to York for him to finalise his employment and hand back all of the kit he has issued for work. I say ‘we’ are heading up, as York is lovely so we are making the most out of this necessary trip by staying overnight so we can enjoy a visit to the city. The other implication of this, is that we can finally live together again!! So far we have only lived together for about a year and a half out of the 5 years we have been a couple!

So finally, I might not have any tales to share from my recent trips, but I do have blanket progress…

I have now finished 2 thirds of the blanket panels for the Walled Garden Blanket for my mum. So that’s 10 panels done, 5 to go…

I find the centre flower – the one I came up with the design for (it was meant to be a rose, although I now know it looks a lot like Jan Eaton’s water lily flower) – the most fiddly and annoying to make. I have therefore been making them in small batches so that once they’re done, I don’t have to worry about them for a little while…   So I made the final 5 of them:

That really did make the end of the blanket panels seem very near, and I can’t wait to get them all crocheted together to see how they look!

Then I made 2 of the daisy squares that go around the centre square – 8 of them for each panel:

And at that point I ran out of the light pink ‘Clover’ yarn! Nooooooooo!!!!! This happened on Sunday, at around 5.30pm, so it was far too late to get to the shop and buy another ball of yarn. Noooooooo!!!! I had to satisfy myself with making just the centres of the next few daisies, until it was time to help with some other jobs:

Then, just to make matters worse, the nylon eye of my yarn needle got a bit of a nick in it somehow. This meant that it was snagging fibres of my yarn as I was darning in ends of my crochet and pulling them badly, so I had to stop with the darning-in-of-ends. Another Nooooooo!!!!   

At least I have a really good book on the go, so the rest of the evening was spent happily reading.

Today, after getting a few bits and pieces done (mostly yet more forms for the Australia move…) I was able to head out and pick up more yarn (yay!!) and also borrow from my mother-in-law a replacement yarn needle (yay again!!)

I have therefore spent the evening trying to fit in odds bits of crochet around other odd jobs, and am now well on the way to having panel 11 finished (Yaaaaayyyy!!!)

But right now it is definitely time for bed, as we need to be up early in the morning for a trip to the store before we hit the road to get up to York. So good night, sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite ;)