Visiting Mum

Last week’s Square One focus was on Oof. Not a favourite, as I tend to try to make it symmetrical and I can’t. Finally managed to relax into it and found myself with something I quite like.

Last week was my mother’s birthday – she would have been 98 had she still been with us. My Dad predeceased her by about fifteen years and when he died, she and I decided that he would be cremated and his ashes scattered in one of his favourite places, up on the moors in Derbyshire. At the time, she told me that she would like to do the same when her time came and we did exactly that, in a spot on the edge of the moor, overlooking a beautiful valley, near a stile. ( We did wait until she had passed away, I hasten to add!)

The weather wasn’t all that clear today but it’s still a lovely, if slightly moody place/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And when the heather, which my Mum loved, is in bloom, the colours are amazing.

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All sorts of stuff this week,

 

The Square One focus pattern was Bunzo, which I’ve always chickened out of before. Generally speaking, if I try to fill in a black area, the white around it gets smaller and smaller.

My Stitch and Bitch girls started as two – Sandra and me. It was just an excuse to keep making the effort and not lose touch after Sandra stopped working at the College. As other people we were fond of left work, we absorbed them into the group and it became us two and Jan and Pat and Shirley and my mum. When I finished working at the College, another good friend finished at the same time and joined us, Janet.  Then Alison, Ann, Jenny, Ann and Lorna joined us over time. We meet about once a month at the house of one of the group, different each time,  for an afternoon and sometimes we actually stitch.

Block v Overload

When we got back from Majorca, having had a slightly disappointing time because of the weather, I expected to be diving back into the Tangle pool with relief. I had a couple of cards I wanted to do and had started at least three things while we were away that I expected to finish pretty quickly. (I do that, starting half a dozen things all at once and, if I lose the impetus, never finishing them.) But no. Didn’t get back into it, didn’t finish anything, didn’t feel like it. Dammit!

The Diva Challenge didn’t help because I couldn’t get to grips with the pattern involved. I did a birthday card for a friend – it was on my last post – but it wasn’t exactly imaginative. Pretty? well, yes, but nothing to get excited about.  

New friends and old

I’d better start right now by saying that the “old” friends obviously aren’t “old” at  all in terms of age or they  will never speak to me again.

Last time, I mentioned I was looking forward to meeting up with a blog friend from America, who I met via the Diva Challenge and I met up with her the following day. One of the founder members of my Stitch and Bitch group, and one of my oldest friends, came with me and I suspect that she and I talked so much that Lynnell and her friend Fran didn’t get the chance to say much at all. We had arranged to meet at Leeds station and, rather than carrying a rose between my teeth or a placard saying “Hi, I’m Maggibee, fly me…” I’d described us as “tall in a camel coat with small and dumpy in a red coat” and, in spite of the station concourse being significantly bigger than I remembered, we found each other within moments of arrival.