Thriving, sorting and reading.

Some beautiful flowers that M bought me recently. I've cut out the pollen stems as I'm not keen with QT about. He doesn't tend to go on the dining room table but... cats, they're a law unto themselves.

My orchid plants, I'm both amazed and pleased that they're both alive and well a year later. More impressively they've both flowered again. Usually the only safe plants for me to care for are Christmas cactus, see here for more photos of orchids.

I've been having a good sort out of my wool and other craft storage. Unfortunately I can't keep everything altogether all in one room, there just isn't the space. There's some in the lounge that I'm currently working on, some stored in the bedroom and some colouring in the front porch. Then there's craft books on the landing bookcase and magazines in the dining room. The new storage unit has cotton yarn in the top lift-up flap, then below 4 pull-out drawers for other yarns here. There's more yarn in the storage box on the shelf and an ottoman in both the lounge and the bedroom, both are full of craft stuff too.

As my crochet blanket is getting too big to carry about with me to craft circle, I've started crocheting a few other smaller projects. This beautiful One-Skein Chevron scarf I saw when browsing Thistlebear's blog and instantly loved it, the lacy wavy lines are easy to do, here is the link to her blog. Jennifer crochets her beautiful scarves for teacher's end of year gifts, which I think is a lovely idea. The pattern is by Dena Stelly and can be found here and the yarn I've used is Stylecraft special aran, in pale rose, seen here.

I will definitely be making this scarf again but will take Jennifer's advice and use a larger hook size next time. I started off using a UK 5mm but in future will use a 5.5mm hook. I did crochet a few rows in the bigger hook size to compare and it looks much better. I will of course unpick those few rows and continue to the end. If you look closely at the photograph, you can see the wider part. It's an inch wider too.

I've finished the book for the book club early this month and am feeling quite pleased with myself. I finished it at the weekend and have seen on Fantastic fiction that it's part of a set, though I'm not sure if the characters appear in all or whether it's just the titles that link together conveniently. The series is called Four Series and the titles can be seen here. I will need to put some questions together for the newsletter.

I booked a table in our usual pub in the village for the family and teen 1 & 2 friend who stayed with us over the weekend. The meal was their Friday night fish n chip special and as usual it tasted really good. My family pull my leg about always being in there but 10 times a year and another for the WI Christmas meal along with any family meals is hardly 'always'.

As I'm not behind on the book club read (for once), I've been able to catch up on my own books. Could this new leaf turning over be a regular occurrence, oh I hope so. A full list of Katie Fforde's books are here.

Thank you for reading, do leave a comment.
Cx