Not Halloween, Halloween

This year, in their infinite wisdom, the school decreed that we must respect all religions so the kids could not have the usual Halloween parade in their costumes today.  I don't have a problem with respecting all religions, or with not carting costumes in on the bus but I'm not sure that any of the kids know that it has anything to do with Christianity anyway.  Actually, I looked it up and it seems that it is probably a borrowed pagan/Celtic, living dead/harvest festival called Samhain.

I digress, so the school had a black and orange day instead and I've had to dig up (buy) black and orange for the kids to wear for school as well as preparing trick or Treat costumes.  Thus they managed to double the work for us parents and have managed to ignore all religions instead of respecting them.

So here are the kids in their first outfits of today.  Jacob is very cross because I bought him the orange striped top but wouldn't let him wear a pair of black track pants that are too short and flap about round his ankles.

Not sure about the stompeez

WIP Wednesday

Wow, on Wednesday again, surely this can't last.

Lots has been achieved over the past week, I shall start with a none quilted item.  This morning I finished Rose's Smurfette dress, I hope she approves, there is nobody fussier that a particular small child and I am still smarting from the spider fiasco last year.  We should be ok because her new teacher (who is the be all and end all right now) says she will make the cutest Smurfette ever.  Here's the dress with no one in it.

I also knocked up a couple of black and orange things for tomorrow but you can wait for those.

This was also a week of 2 finishes!  I went to quilt club on Monday where we finished the binding and labels for 33 wheelchair quilts that are off to the old folks home in Forest tomorrow.  I forgot to photograph mine which was a bit daft.

And finally, the very last picture of Homespun Skies, quilted, bound and ready to be used.  Hurray, bet you're glad to see the back of that one (ha ha).

Time Lapse Time Again

Last weekend was a bit of a blur.  Rose had gymnastics on Saturday morning (this week she learned head stands but don't ask her to do one on her own yet) and Lillian came round for a belated birthday Princess play date in the afternoon.  Here is Rose wearing her lovely gift which came with a Rapunzel tea set.

Obviously the tiara didn't go with the Stompees

Sunday was first curling of the season, no photos as Jacob is honing his avoiding my camera skills.  His best friend Jacob has also joined this year so he is especially keen.

You may have noticed from the above that I have managed to completely mess up all our weekends until about next April.  I have one child in Exeter on Saturday at 11.30 am and the other in Forest at 12.30 pm on Sunday, won't be making that mistake again.

So time lapse.  I'm not sure whether to bother with these anymore, there are hardly any leaves left now (most seem to be floating in the water) and we didn't really get a great show did we.  I don't think the right kind of trees grow by the river.  Anyway, here we are.

Surprise Parcel

Today the kids got a surprise parcel all the way from Mississauga.  Thank you very much it has been well received, especially the bracelet making equipment which didn't stay in the box very long.

You may notice the Halloween spoiler in this photo

On Wednesday I made my Christmas cake, hopefully this is organised enough for it to be well and truly fed (with my cheap cooking whiskey) in time to ice and eat it.  I wasn't going to blog it but it looked so cute wrapped up in parchment waiting for a drink that I couldn't resist.

Last year I made cake, pudding and mince pies for Christmas and nobody but me ate them so to avoid weight gain and waste I am resolved to leave it at cake this time.  My strategy for getting rid of it is as follows:

• Have a cake tasting party for Canadian neighbours uninitiated in the way of the English Christmas Fruit Cake (and mulled wine and hope to get invited to an eggnog party in return)
• Present it as nibbles at the January quilt club meeting
• Palm some off on my English born hairdresser
• Give the rest to Gary
• Failing all that get married again and use it as wedding cake, but then again maybe not, better the devil you know eh

WIP Wednesday, ON WEDNESDAY

Will wonders never cease?  I'm even blogging work that was done before today, I'm afraid it's still the same old quilt as I'm very slow.

Since last Wednesday/Friday I've finished all the quilting, made a label, machined on the binding and begun the rather laborious task of hand sewing the binding onto the back.  I've completed about 10% of this final job and estimate that it will take roughly another 12 hours to finish, that's a proper estimate, not another feeble attempt at humour.  Here are the kids modelling it.

This is my rather amateurish label.

And this is the finished binding from the front.

I promise to do something else over the weekend, this is getting boring even for me.

This morning we woke up to our first snowy type precipitation.  I'm not sure what it is to be honest, part hail and part manky, wet slushy stuff I think.  It was so dull outside that the camera flash kept going off and this is the best photo I could manage.

Time lapse Tom

Or is that Tom lapse Tuesday?  Here he is lapsing quietly to himself, at least his leaves aren't falling off yet.  I'm going to be in trouble for this and I only really took the picture for that bright yellow maple in the background.

And so to the river, right isn't looking desperately exciting, in fact hardly any different at all.

But left is improving.

At the weekend Rose had her first gymnastics lesson.  She balanced on the beam, jumped on and off the horse, did forward rolls down ramps and over giant balls and jumped up and down on crash mats.  Then she poured cranberry juice all over the car, had a tantrum and slept all the way home.  This is the outfit she chose to wear.

Jacob finished some programming for his bone collecting video game.  It now has a level 1 background and a dog that whizzes back and forth across it.  Here he is at work.

So there we are, the weekend was late but Time lapse Tuesday was posted on time.  What's the odds that will happen again?

Time lapse in Progress Friday?

Oh Dear, at least I'm not a week behind yet.

Here are this weeks photos of the river, taken on Wednesday.  I have many, many excuses for my tardiness but won't bore you with them.

And so to work in progress.  The wheelchair quilt from my new quilt club has stalled as I've run out of bobbin thread so I've started quilting the thrift quilt that I finished the back of last week.  I have plenty of thread for this one as I invested in a large cone and crazy contraption to join it to my machine.

I've taken the plunge and committed to free motion quilting the entire thing with the meandering, stippled pattern I used on Jacob's Wacom case.  There are some not very artful spikey bits if you look up close but on the whole the overall effect is not bad.  Here's a sample of the front.

and the back.

I might have it fully quilted next week then I've just got to sew on a mile of binding to have it completely finished.

And finally, here's Rose in a home made hairclip theoretically looking cute.  Over the next couple of days I shall endeavour to take a photo of Jacob doing something other than moaning or using some sort of digital technology.

PA Day

Today was a PA day, in England that's an inset day when the teachers go to school but not the kids, and what a busy day we've had.  It's been so busy that I think I shall avoid needless waffle by bullet pointing it.

• This morning Jacob dared me to cut his hair, he now has a layered bowl cut in the style of Luke Skywalker, not quite the cool surf-boy I was going for.  I would have made a fine hair stylist in the 1970s, yet another irrelevant skill for the 2010s.
  
• Rose and I got into the make your own pink butterfly hair accessories kit she got for her birthday and made a big mess with a glue gun.  Photos another day.
• We took a picnic to Rock Glen and I discovered that walnuts grow on very, very tall trees disguised as limes (the walnuts, not the trees).  The kids spent ages collecting hundreds of them and putting them in a pile at the top of the slide.  Action shot coming up, note the flying walnut to the right of Rose's head.
  
• Then they spent 10 seconds shooting all the walnuts down the slide at once.
  
• We went for a walk and found a fabulous maple tree.
  
• Then we went fossil hunting.  Apparently Rock Glen 'features some of the very best Devonian-Era fossils in North America' (I'm quoting their brochure here) so we thought we'd have a look.  Frankly I held out little hope of finding anything the kids would recognise as a fossil so imagine my surprise when we found a crinoid, hundreds of brachiopods (of which we kept 4) and a couple of corals.  The kids spent ages mucking about round the river looking for them and even Jacob was impressed that they are about 350 million years old.
  
  
  
  
• We needed a rest after that.
  
• On the way home we called in at Twin Pines to buy pumpkins for a festive stoop.
  
• And finally we popped into Best's for homemade ice creams.

I'm well and truly tired out, hope the kids are too.

Almost an Almost Finish

I'm really not sure I'm doing this properly, I think work in progress is supposed to be reported on Wednesday not hastily knocked up on Wednesday for posting on Thursday.  It's reminiscent of doing my homework on the school bus and is making me nervous.  Will have to try harder next/this week.

Yesterday when it occurred to me that I'd done exactly nothing since last Wednesday I got going with the final bits of my homespun thrift quilt blogged here.  A long time ago I foolishly decided to do something with scraps for the back, I was really excited about it for about 5 minutes then it began to drive me mad and I couldn't bring myself to finish it.  With desperate need to look diligent as motivation I got it together, spread it out and realized that I've sewn the top panel on backwards - arghh - so next week's WIP will be ripping it off and replacing it.  Oh well, here it is.

And here's the mile and a half of binding ready for when the quilting's done.

kind of looks like a caterpillar

Happy Birthday Rose

Or Time Elapsed Tuesday, 5 years of it to be precise.

Today marks 5 years since the arrival of Rose on Planet Earth, and a much brighter place it has become, the less generous of you might say it has become positively garish.  She had an enormous pile of gifts including many clothes and accessories.  Here she is modeling some of them.

Jacob very kindly gave her one of his books, this provided a rare display of sibling unity that Tom managed to capture on camera.

bit blurry, obviously he'd not had enough coffee yet

It's a school night so we didn't have a party, just a Skype with the UK and Grandpa came round for dinner and to help sing and eat the cake which Rose decorated herself.

And so to a quick time lapse.  Nothing much to say about these except that the sun always shines on Tuesdays.

No Time Lapse Yet

I think it's clear from this that deadlines do not help me get things done, I think they used to, perhaps it's because these are self imposed and I have no marks or jobs to lose.

What a manic weekend we've had.  Saturday was Jacob,s birthday party, I know it was 6 weeks late but he wanted to go the the cinema to see 'Cloudy with a chance of meatballs 2' which only came out last weekend.  The film was quite good as kids films go, I thought it was pretty funny but the boys sat there in their 3D glasses completely dead pan for the whole thing, I think they enjoyed it.  It made me realize that it's 8 years since I went out to see a grown up film and that was Star Wars Episode 3 so I'm not sure it even counts.

On Sunday we went on mass to buy Rose a birthday bike.  She chose a corker, surprisingly it is not pink but makes up for its 'boyish' blue with many great features including ribbons on the handle bars, midnight clocks on the chain guards, heart shaped pedals and the crowning glory, a sparkly pumpkin shaped carriage for dogs/fairies/rabbits to ride in on the front.  A good choice I think!

First Quilt Club

On Monday I went to my first quilt club meeting, I think this is probably equivalent to joining the WI and I am a little young but I had a good time and got some top tips.  Monday was a 'Quilting with Care' day where one of the organisers puts together quilt kits for charity and the rest of us sew them up, this time was wheel chair quilts for 3 local old people's homes.

I tell you I'm sold on working from a kit, I didn't even have to do any cutting, just sewing lots of straight seams.  Look what I made in a morning.

I started quilting it yesterday as I foolishly promised to have it back quilted and bound by the last Monday in October, mmm.  I've gone for straight line quilting but tried to add interest by doing it on the diagonal.

I was going to take a pic of the kids with it but I forgot.  Wednesday night is swimming (Rose 6-6.30 and Jacob from 7-7.45) which is a complete write off as I've got to cook 2 dinners, ferry everyone about and do lots of nagging.

It's T L T time again

Another fabulous day over here.  I went for a nice long walk on the beach this afternoon (retirement is so great, can't wait til I do it for real), it was deserted but for a young couple swimming in their underwear!

Anyway, back to trees.  Eyes left

And right

There's a bit of yellow and red coming in now, good job because a bunch of 'thugs' came and mended the fence yesterday and cut down all the Goldenrod, hmf.