We’ve had a busy couple of weeks here, hence very few posts! Our house sale has fallen through as our buyers pulled out, luckily before we had incurred costs for purchasing the one we wanted! Other countries seem to have much better systems for house purchase than our protracted method here in the UK which only seems to benefit the solicitors! Up to the point at which contracts are exchanged any side can back out or try and negociate further, this can be the day before the house move is arranged!!…and people wonder why it is so stressful!

Anyway, we have decided to take it off the market for the time being, do some jobs on it over the winter and relaunch it in the spring. It does frustrate me that these days people won’t see beyond the current decor, they want it show room perfect for them too move in, then they wonder why prices are ever rising. As an example, when we sold my mothers bungalow, we had it valued but then painted it all magnolia, put some new carpets down, spent a total of £2000 and the value was increased by £20,000!!!

My daughter finally had a graduation ceremony, two and a half years late due to covid. Definitely a proud mum moment, even more so as we both had me-made dresses on, Helen probably makes more clothes than me at the moment!…

We came home from the graduation weekend to welcome my stepson home for a week, he lives in Sydney so we hadn’t seen him since pre-covid. We didn’t do much, it was just lovely to chill out together, even if his corny jokes haven’t improved with age!!

All in all, a busy couple of weeks! I did manage to squeeze a little sewing in though…

I’m working on two on-line courses at the moment, the cartography embroidery with Zara Day and Stitch a garden with Nicki from The Stitchery. I found a way of combining the two courses. I’d already decided my Stitch-a-garden piece was going to be a textile book of our garden, this was decided before we decided to move but has become a bit more special even with the delay until the spring.

The latest piece of work with the cartography course was to combine patchwork and machine embroidery to make a map. One difficulty everyone has found with this course is finding a map to use as a basis for the stitching. It needs the scale and detail to be right and ideally be somewhere that means something. So far I’ve done maps of West Witton where my mum had a cottage, the Yorkshire Dales, Catbells (of course)…

Our next piece was more of a street map, I decided to do a map of our street which I can then include in my garden book. I needed a patchwork type background so I had a rummage through my stash and found four fabrics which I felt worked well together. They also seemed fairly apt, the purple/grey one has deer on which we occasionally see on the back lane or in the field behind, the green one is leafy, the blue one has flowers and birds and the brown one has beech masts on, all fitting in with the garden theme.

I traced a map of our estate with standard tracing paper. I included the houses but not the garages as that got too complicated. I was originally planning to trace it onto the fabric the traditional way, but I decided it would be difficult to get the tracing to show up. Instead I pinned the tracing over the fabric and stitched through it, just following the lines with my sewing machine. As it was mainly straight lines, albeit short ones, I used a walking foot rather than a free motion machine foot. I was a little concerned how easy or not it would be to remove the paper after I’d stitched it but actually it came away more easily than tissue paper. It was fiddly to stitch but I’m pretty pleased with how it’s come out. I added the flower button to mark our house.

For my final piece I’m planning to stitch a map of the garden, I am currently stitching the patio area for my book, planning to do an embroidery for each main area. I thought a map would bring the areas together, give it a bit of context. I’m too late for the ‘final exhibition’ of the course but I’ll send Zara a photo once it’s complete.