A post of many things

 Another busy day spent in the garden making the most of the lovely weather.  All is nice and tidy now so tomorrow I plan on having a day off.

While I've been off work like many people I've taken the opportunity to have a good sort out.  I do have a clear out on a regular basis but the small bedroom where I keep all my crafting things had become a bit of a dumping ground.  I have a tall cupboard behind the door which holds mostly stitching related things, and a chest of drawers which is home to all my knitting/ crochet, yarn, needles and what not.  Those weren't too bad but my threads and charts were in a bit of a muddle.  I had two baskets of threads from finished projects that hadn't been put away and charts I'd stitched mixed in with new charts.  

I spent a whole day the first week I was off and sorted it all out, now I can find things and I'm forcing myself to put away threads when I've done with them!

All my threads, those in boxes are in floss bags and on a ring.

I don't have a big stash of stitching fabric so that fits in quite neatly.

The bottom two boxes have ribbon and trims and a mixture of different craft items

Buttons and needles, the tartan tin is full of buttons too 

These two boxes are charts, one for the ones I've stitched and the other is mainly free charts

The little suitcases are ribbon and trim

I have a small shelf above the chest of drawers, the two file boxes are charts to stitch

I sorted all my mini skeins into baskets.

I worked on my mitred square blanket quite a lot the first couple of weeks I was at home, these first two baskets are what i'm choosing from

  

Once I've knitted one square I'm putting the remaining yarn into this basket.

Some of the skeins were larger so I will probably use those colours more than once.

I love this blanket SO MUCH!  It's so addictive too, once you have knitted one square it's so hard to put it away.

So that was all a few weeks ago now, this week we had another birthday.  My daughter, Stevie-Leigh turned 26.  I have no idea how that came to be, in my mind she is still 16  :-)

Of course, you still have to have a cake made, even when you're 26 and can't have people round to share it with. 

I made my usual plain sponge and made the icing with biscoff spread.

Baking has been another lock down pastime for a lot of people, me included.  I found a recipe card this weekend for a marmalade and fruit loaf.  I had everything I needed so made one of those too.

It's more like a light fruit cake than what I would call a fruit loaf, but it's nice.  If anyone would like the recipe you will find it on the 'recipe tab' on the top of the page.  If you try it let me know what you think.

I received a lovely card in the post yesterday from Jo.  Thank you Jo.  

I haven't had a letter though the post for a long time, so yes, it was lovely to receive a hand written note and a cute card saying hello.  It made my day :-)

Well, that's another week done, I wonder how much longer we will have to wait until more shops are allowed to open?  I don't know about you but I hope that the first places to open are hairdressers.  I think if you have long hair it wouldn't matter so much but when you have short hair things can change pretty quickly, especially if you have hair like mine which grows out as well as down!  And we won't mention the root problem, (and no, i'm not ready to go grey yet thank you very much, lol)

I hope you are all staying safe and well and trying to find the positives of staying at home, it's for a good reason, we have to beat this horrible virus so that we can eventually lead our normal lives again.

Take care

-X-