Yesterday I finished the wordplay for my Anthea Calendar fabric book for August – just in time as the new design for September is due to be released tomorrow! This is the SAL by Faby Reilly, each month there is a seasonal flower design and then I’m doing a wordplay about that month to go with it. It was meant to be a record of the things I’ve done and events of the year – what a year to choose!

Augusts design is very pretty, it’s lisianthus and hydrangea…

The first half of August wasn’t good, but things settled and this is the wordplay I’ve just stitched…

1st August is Yorkshire Day when we celebrate all things Yorkshire! I often think Yorkshire is one of the most patriotic counties in England, though patriotic may not be quite the right word – we are very proud of our county and of being from Yorkshire.

Sadly 1st August was also when we lost our beautiful golden retriever, Rosie. She was 13 years old and we felt life had become too much of a struggle for her.

It hit us particularly hard as it came just a couple of weeks after losing my mother in law. The quote at the top is from a poem by Elizabeth Frye called ‘Do not stand at my grave and weep’. It’s a beautiful poem which was read at my mother-in-law’s funeral.

Having got the sad bit’s over, the month improved!!!

It was my birthday on the 28th, I had a lovely day – I had my hair done, and did some sewing, my daughter was up for the weekend and my son popped in too. I got some lovely presents, including an A2 olfa cutting mat for my sewing room and a special pair of scissors which are hopefully on their way, some dress-making scissors hand-made in Sheffield here in Yorkshire. On the 31st my children took me to Betty’s for breakfast. Betty’s is a group of very nice cafe’s here in Yorkshire which are well known for their cakes and pastries – especially their Fat Rascals! We’ve got one in Ilkley, my daughter used to work there for a Saturday job so she know what to order! Birthday breakfast’s at Betty’s has become a bit of a tradition!

Lisianthus is the pretty pink flower in the design, I’ve got a cream hydrangea which has been flowering beautifully and a soft blue one which resolutely refuses to flower!!

Petrichor, I love that word! Petrichor is the wonderful smell of rain on a hot day, it’s such an evocative smell. Apparently it isn’t the cool rain on the hot earth (as I always thought), it’s actually the oils the earth gives off in anticipation of the rain. MY OH says it’s one smell that takes him straight back to his childhood in Australia – the other being the smell of mosquito coils!!!

We often see red kites circling around, they’re stunning birds with 5′ wing spans. They were heading for extinction when a breeding program was set up in Harewood, just down the road from here. It was so successful they have gradually spread up the dale. They’re fairly common round here now but we still say ‘Ooh look, there’s a red kite’ every time we see one, a bit like seeing rainbows!

In August it was the Yorkshire Festival of Story, it’s usually a live event up in the pretty town of Settle in North Yorkshire. Due to the pandemic they went on line instead. I really enjoyed it, I listened to several talks, each was an hour long. I listened to talks about trees, about Anne Bronte, Tracy Chevalier talked about her book on the people who embroidered kneelers for Winchester cathedral, I listened to the Yorkshire Shepherdess…there was all sorts to listen to. I thought it was particularly good that they offered them free but asked for a donation, so you could give what you could afford. I’m hoping next year they will have an on line presence again as Settle is too far to travel for a one hour talk.

When I showed you ‘August’ a couple of weeks ago I was trying to decide how to make it up into a book, really I just didn’t fancy a small back-stitch edge round every page. Well, I gave myself a bit of a talking to and started edging them. I’ve made it a little easier for myself as I’m stitch the back-stitch over four threads instead of two, it made it a lot quicker and I’m hoping it will still give that nice crisp finish I got with my stitch sample book a couple of years ago. The back-stitch is used to whip-stitch the pages together. I’ve cracked on nicely with just three pages left to do before I’m up to date.

I did discover a bit of a bloop with August – though the way my brain was I’m amazed it came out at all!! When I came to stitch round it wasn’t measuring up right, I realised it’s stitched on 28 count instead of 32, so it’s a little bigger, probably not noticeably as the months aren’t going to be seen next to each other. However, it will cause a bit of an issue when I come to stitch the pages together as there’s one less stitch on each side. They may sound insignificant, but when I’m planning to line up the stitches for whip-stitching…well put it this way, there will be a lot of fudging!!