This week

As promised, a picture of the quilt I made the middle boy.  It is called "Small Plates" and it's from Elizabeth Hartman's beautiful book, "The Practical Guide to Patchwork".  I've looked at so many quilt patterns and I always come back to squares, there's something so balanced about them.

The fabric includes plenty of Lotta Jansdotter's Echo, which is lovely.  Also a few owls and other birds as the boys quite like them.  As I mentioned before, the top was done by hand, but the quilting was machined.  I'm hard at work on a similar one for the oldest.  Not sure if it will be done in time for his birthday in October; there are quite a few hours needed for hand sewing!

The picture was taken at the allotments as there's a lovely tall stone wall there which is just right for draping quilts over.  This is the view facing the other way.

Our allotment is in the far left-hand corner.  You can just see our green shed behind a brown one.  It's a nice long distance from the road, but it does mean that if there's something heavy to carry back up I reach the top pink and panting.  There's a lovely stream running along the boundary just beyond our allotment, and in fact back in the summer we found our very own toad living on our plot.  Very handy for slug control.

It was just a flying visit to the allotment as it was still ridiculously cold.  I don't remember ever spending so much time at parks feeling so frozen as I have in the past month.  I think the trick is to join in the football or the chasing or the tree climbing.  The boys love it so much I don't have the heart to drag them home, but honestly, this morning my hands were so cold I could have cried.

I found out earlier today that I didn't get a much-needed job that I interviewed for, and it's left me a little gloomy.  One thing that usually cheers me up is reading my favourite blogs, so I'm going to spend the next hour doing just that.  And one day, if I'm lucky, this might be a blog that cheers someone else up, and really, that would make me so happy.