I finally finished my July wordplay to go with the Anthea Calender SAL this evening. The Anthea Calendar is a monthly stitch-a-long by Faby Reilly with a seasonal flower design for each month, I’m going to make mine into a textile book so I’m doing a wordplay to go on the facing page about what I’ve been doing or my memories of the month. I’m trying to keep it positive and covid-free, but it’s not always easy, especially this month, hence I dilly-dallied a bit, I think I needed to distance myself from the month a bit in order to remember the positives!!

July’s design is very pretty with bunches of lavender and butterflies, Lavender is one of those plants I’ve never had any success with in the garden, I always blamed my clay soil, but plants didn’t fare any better in pots, and our neighbours have a lovely lavender hedge! I think I’ll stick to embroidering it…

As soon as I saw the lavender design I knew what verse I would be embroidering. I used to sing Lavender’s blue dilly dilly as a lullaby to my kids when they were babies (and bigger!) I liked the gentle rhythmic tune.

My friend and I finally got some days walking together, we’re concentrating on local walks which we just haven’t quite got round to before, so Almscliffe crags and Thruscross reservoir provided good 6-7 mile walks.

July was also the month I finally got my haircut, I was lucky in having had it cut early just before lockdown started, so it was only four months and not six!

We used to have a woodpecker visiting our feeders a few years ago, he was very shy, staying on the side of the feeder away from the house. When we moved the feeders to nearer the house we didn’t see him again…until this year. My OH saw him a couple of times first, but I always just missed him. In July I finally saw him on the sunflower heart feeder.

The geraniums in the garden have been flowering their socks off, especially the big magenta one called Ann Folkard. It needs cutting back hard really as it’s getting a bit rampant- my chicken wire goose has all but disappeared!

In mid July we sadly lost my dear mother in law, Ann, very suddenly and unexpectedly really, though we could take solace from the fact that she was still able to live in her own home right up to the end. However to add to our grief soon after we had to make the awful decision that Rosie, our golden retriever, was struggling too much, whilst we didn’t take her to the vets til the beginning of August, the two events did cast a big black cloud over the end of the month.

So, here’s my wordplay for July. I added the butterfly and some of the extra stitches from the SAL to tie it all in. I’m pretty pleased with it, hopefully August won’t be quite so hard! It’s stitched on a soft grey green linen called French Lace.