Friday Smiles 2025 # Week 27

This week I am starting with the best news, we have found a house in Oswestry and our offer has been accepted. Of course there is a long way to go but we have engaged a solicitor for the conveyancing and booked a survey for later this month. So this week has involved a lot of time spent on the telephone, plus quite a bit of time sitting indoors or under the gazeebo feeling just too hot to do anything more energetic. I am sure most of you have shared at least part of the heat-wave. Here in London it has been stifling. But I am glad I am not still in Spain where they have temperatures soaring into the 40's.

But back to the house. Our choice may surprise some of you as it is a mid-terrace Victorian house with three floors plus a cellar!. However the stairs are fairly gentle with a good strong hand rail, and it won't do us any harm to go up and down them a few times each day. The sitting room and main bedroom are lovely and both have views over the back of the beautiful town park. The third room will probably be my craft room and I can see me shutting myself away up there some days. We are going to change the bath for a walk-in shower, and have a new kitchen installed, so plenty to keep us busy. And I will have  a garden. At present it is rockery styled with paving slabs and gravel beds, and the plants are very overgrown, so it need a bit of TLC, but that is something we can take our time over. It is all very exciting, but we will just have to patient while the legal wheels tick over at their own pace.

I shall enjoy watching the colours change with the seasons in all those trees.

Here is a picture I took on our travels last weekend. This is Ozzy the bull and he lives in Birmingham New Street station. Every half hour or so he starts to swish his tail, his head turns from side to side and his eyes light up purple and slowly blink. Almost menacing but I thought he was rather magnificent.

As I haven't got much news or pictures I thought I would give you a quick catch-up on my crafts. I have three projects on the go but the cross-stitch hedgehog is making slow progress as I don't work on it when it is so hot because I don't want to dirty it with sticky hands.

While I was still in Spain, I asked my son to buy a kit for a wall hanging before they ran out of stock. I was happy when I opened the box and saw all these lovely coloured yarns. I quickly labelled them for easy identification. 

The first bit of the project was to make 60 of these little triangles. Each one uses two different colours and there is a chart to tell you which two to use. When made you have to fix a small numbered tag to it to help place it on the final layout. 

I have completed all 60 of the triangles so the next part is to make 24 of these squares.

And my third project is to make a thick winter jacket. This one is done with a mixed yarn that changes colours randomly as you work. I needed to make 66m of these tiny squares which were quite quick to do. You can see the variety of colours that these have worked up as. They are actually darker green than they appear here.

Next I need thirty bigger squares and I have done the first two.

I am not good at sitting waiting patiently, so these are keeping me busy.

And now it is time to link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and publish this in the morning. I apologise if I missed anyone last week or was very late visiting. It was another very busy weekend!

 

Friday Smiles 2025 #Week 26

Hi all. A very quick one today. We had a very busy weekend. On Saturday our second son, Mike, and his two oldest children, my first grandchildren, came down on the train to visit us. It was a day of happy chatter, food and sunshine.

The next day we were up early on a train to Bognor Regis on the South coast. We had a reunion with some of Chris' family. His brother was over from America with his wife and one of our neices arranged a get together. Again the sun shone for us and it was lovely for Chris to meet up with his brother. We last saw him when we went to Arizona to visit them some twenty plus years ago.

It was also good to catch up with these three, our nieces and nephew who are the children of Chris' sister. My boys grew up with them but again it is many years since we saw them last.

On Wednesday I went to Borough Market with my son Jim. We both love it there. Lots of interesting food stalls and take away meals to choose from. We both had to be careful. It is easy to get carried away there! I took a photo of a girl preparing jack fruit. We saw these when we were in Thailand, but they seem to be gaining popularity here now as meat alternative in vegetarian food.

And that is all I have time for today. We came to Oswestry yesterday and are staying with Mike until Saturday, and we have five house viewings to get to.

So I will leave it there for now and quickly get over to link with Annie's Friday Smiles. I will get to everyone to visit but I am not sure when.