Rocking Your World 2021: Week 28

Here we go again. I am rather disenchanted with Blogger these days. It changes my font size for some paragraphs, and alters the formatting between the post edit and publishing, and now it won't let me publish comments to some people. So I am really sorry if you don't hear from me. I can promise you that I do visit everyone, and I do try to comment. After several attempts I think I managed to comment on most people's blog but Angela, I simply couldn't get one to 'stick' for you. Maybe I'll do better this week.

I am starting this week with a photo that just about sums this week up. Yes, it has been hot, hot, hot! This picture was taken one morning on our thermometer that is never in direct sunlight, and it continued to rise a few degrees through the day. Next Monday they are forecasting 47º in parts of Andalucía, which is unprecedented even for here, and is in fact quite dangerous to go out in, so I guess we will have a stay indoors day with the aircon on, and the animals inside to protect them too. We rarely use the aircon during the day. It is tends to dry you out. But there is a time when it is essential.

To make matters worse, on Monday we had a six hour power cut so we couldn't even have a fan on! I think everyone had the same idea and overloaded the supply. Thankfully we could dip in and out of the pool, but with the water at almost 30º it is more like a warm bath! But we survived, and no doubt we will again.

This photo made me smile. It is a very disgruntled Tango, because I wouldn't let him lie across my lap like he usually does throughout the evening. He had to make do with the little table next to me. The last thing I need right now is a fur blanket across my knees.

I had some good post at the start of the week. These arrived. They are a set of blocking boards for my crochet, and lots of pins. The boards are like the interlocking coloured foam boards that fit together to make a child's play mat, but they are a bit tougher and much thicker. The pins are a bit lethal, but there are plenty of them so I am able to pin my squares out securely.

Because I mostly work with acrylic yarn, I don't often bother to block my squares, but my multi-coloured ones I have been making for 'Sophie's Dream' blanket are made with yarn that  is a little acrylic and a high percentage of cotton. They have come out a variety of sizes, and not very square, so I knew blocking them would be an improvement.

I started by laying them all out on our bed, and swapping them around until I was happy with the arrangement. Then I took this photo so I could reproduce it when I join them up. 

Then I took four of them and dipped them in just warm water with a dash of hand detergent to rid them of any grease from my hot hands. I squeezed them out gently and stretched each one out to a 14inch square.  When I join all the boards together, I can get four squares stretched out at a time. They are pinned securely and left to dry completely. Then they are removed and the next four are stretched. I have twenty squares to do so I have five sets of stretching to do, but there is no hurry. I will probably leave the joining up until it is a bit cooler, and I can handle doing a border on a full size blanket. By then I will have twenty squares, all a nice neat shape and all the same size - I hope.

Here are two side by side. The yellow one has been blocked and the darker one hasn't. I am sure you can see what a difference it makes.

Of course, I am not one for sitting doing nothing so this week I have started a new project. I sit out on the porch in the evenings, with my floor fan pointing at my hands, and I find like that I can still work on squares, even if it is a bit more slowly.

The new blanket is called Tropical Shores and it is a Crochet A Long (CAL) so one bit of the pattern is released each week. It started this Monday, and rather surprisingly she gave us the most complicated square to make first. It depicts the palm trees on a tropical shore. You need four of them, so I made one so I could get my head around the pattern, and now I am doing the other three one row on each, so here is the finished one and the other three so far. 

I am not attempting to keep up with the pattern releases as for me it is something to do in the evenings, and not a race to finish it in no time, as then I'd have to find another pattern to do! But I can download each section as it is released, and then work on them in my own time.

Rather than buying all the wool the designer suggested, I decided to use what I have in my stash, and I ended up only needing to buy two balls of one of the blues, and two of white. So that saved me a lot of money. In her description of the pattern the designer has linked each design to the item that inspired it. So this is her picture board for the first square.

I am not sure I will be able to do any tonight. I woke up in the middle of the night with a flare-up of arthritis in my right hand. The doctor calls it false gout, but there is nothing very false about it as far as I am concerned.  It is incredibly painful. My fourth finger is swollen up like a little fat sausage and I can't bend it at all. In fact I may never be able to bend it properly again, as I had a similar attack in my left hand a couple of years ago, and that is the reason that I can no longer hold a knitting needle in that hand. I hope I get enough movement back in this one to still be able to crochet! I have taken some anti-inflammatory drugs today and it has settled down a bit, but throbs if I hang it downwards. Fortunately I have still been able to use the computer because it can lay gently across the mouse without having any pressure on it.

There hasn't been a lot to see in the garden. I think it is even too hot for most of the insects to be about during the day. We don't get many butterflies here anyway, so I was pleased to see this little one flitting around the lavender. In UK these were known as 'cabbage whites' and are not popular because their caterpillars can strip cabbage leaves bare in a day. But we don't grown much greens around here apart from lettuce, and this was so pretty.

But this is one bug that we only see when the temperature reaches at least 30º. It is the grub of the cicada. As soon as they hatch from their eggs they drop to the ground and burrow under the earth where they stay for up to seventeen years!  When the time is finally right, they emerge and dry out, and out climbs a cicada leaving this shell behind. I haven't seen a cicada yet this year - we usually get a few resting on our fly nets in the evenings, but I have heard them chirruping in the green zone. When they all 'sing' together it is an incredible noise, and is almost frightening until you know what it is. I used to think it was  loud electrical buzz in the overhead cables!

And finally here is my other finished project that I have been working on in the afternoons. I am so glad I got it finished before this really hot spell set in. I thought it was such a lovely design. It is a very long time since  I did any cross stitch, though I have got several very large pictures on my hall walls that I sewed some years ago. I wasn't sure whether my fingers are nimble enough now or my eyesight good enough, but I worked outside in bright day light, and managed much better than I had expected.

I was able to cut some mountboard and once it was washed and dried, (and pressed from the back into a dry towel to make the stitches stand out), I was able to stretch it and lace it on. A friend who does a lot of quilting gave me a very thin layer of padding to go between the sewing and the board, which really improves the look. Then I took it down to Mojacar and had it professionally framed. They did a nice job and I was pleased with it. So I wrapped it up in layers of bubble wrap and tucked it into a box which was a perfect fit, and posted it off to my son and his wife. They were thrilled to bits with it, so it was all worth while.

And here is little Aisling Rose in a photo taken at a professional photo shoot which she was just not very cooperative about. They couldn't coax a smile out of her and then she fell asleep for the rest of the shoot! 

They did get some very cute photos of her with and without her parents, but just to prove she does have a lovely smile, here is a less posed one that they took at home. (I bet you smiled back).

So now it is link up time with Rocking Your World and Annie's Friday Smiles, and I'll see you all again next week if I haven't melted into a little puddle by then!