House-Elf Doings 

 Oh wow has it been a week already. I’d better tell you what’s happening here. The flag iris are out.

 “Rhapsody in Blue” rose.

 “Roserie de l’hay” rose.

 A modern red rose which came with the garden.

 Plums are growing.

 Foxglove.

 “Souvenir du Dr Jamain” rose.

 Violas

 Sage in the herb patch.

 Red currants.

 Peony.

 Another red rose but this one is a climber on the wall.

 “La Reine Victoria” rose

 This inherited rose covers the front of the shed- about 15ft tall.

 Golden Philadelphus (mock orange) with it’s wonderful scent.

 After having success with a nest box we bought another so that maybe this years blue tit chicks might want to return next year. I’ve seen the parents eating aphids so I want to attract more of them into the garden.

 Bee box- I also want to attract more bees into the back garden, so this is near a couple of lavender bushes.

 I’d like to introduce you to a friend’s 11 year old collie Merlin. A husky foster dog of hers attacked him on Wednesday, so he needed an operation to stitch him back up.

 The poor lad has been in and out of the vets since. Yesterday he had the drain taken out so it’s not so gorey to look at now. We’ll drive our friend to the vets again on Saturday when hopefully he will have the stitches removed.

 His owner gave me some scraps of fleece she didn’t know what to do with, so I cut them into triangles so she can just add borders and make it a more useful size. I spent yesterday in the craft room ticking things like “new zip in fish skirt” off a long overdue list.

 Bungle’s new bed now has a hardwearing loose cover with a zip at one end to make it easy to wash.

 I made a bag cover from a scrap piece I already had. Rivets to the top with a toggle fastening to keep it shut.

 It is for this new bag- my 2nd proper leather grown up bag- the other one has toadstools on for Autumn. Black shows the dust so much so a cover makes sense for it when it isn’t in use.

 I also made the 2nd reversable bucket bag from Lisa Lam’s book. This time it was in navy dot rather than the red dot I had made before as part of the Bag Club’s quarterly makings.

 A matching cover button. Good that is another tick on my list. I’ve been wearing a lot of cream with red accents or navy accents so I think it will get a lot of use like my red dot one.

 These 12 blocks are cut in Aster Manor fabrics by Moda in a design called Hearts and Dragonflys. I’ve applied the appliques and traced the stitcheries, so I will share each block properly as I finish them.

 Another tick was to paint the canoe red. It took a while to get the right paint as no shop here on the coast sold marine paint! The shed needs a huge sort out! It’s on my list. 🙂

Now this is an area of the house we rarely see. It is the old pantry down 3 steps then turn to go under the stairs. This was shoulder high in “stuff” we weren’t ready to get rid of but didn’t use. We had a letter from the electricity company strongly worded that the meter was out of date and needed to be replaced. You can see the old meter on the right. So a huge load went to the rubbish dump- mainly cardboard which our council don’t recycle from the house, and 3 bin bags were filled for the charity shops. That felt good. 🙂 In an age before fridges this was the fridge. It is cold even in Summer as it is partly underground. I wouldn’t have fancied going up and down the steps carrying anything though.