Never knowingly blogready

Emma made a whistle-stop visit. She wandered around the house, pointing at things.

"Have you blogged this? Have you blogged this? Have you blogged this?" She exposed me as a blogging fraudster. A layabout. A woman surrounded by perfectly bloggable items, who spends her time chasing her tail ironing school uniforms and watching episodes of Castle on Lovefilm.

I have blogged nothing. Not this quilt, made from a pattern in the Liberty Book of Home Sewing. (Just to note, I did not buy this book. I got it out of the library. It's pretty and all, but the projects are flimsy. There's a free Amy Butler brick quilt pattern which would probably have done much the same thing.)

Still. Here it is. One of the reasons (excuse alert!!) that I didn't get round to blogging it before was because it was constantly wrapped around somebody's shoulders or knees. It is cold, here, people.

As you can see, it is made entirely out of scraps of Liberty tana lawn. I can only apologise for being able to buy this stuff so reasonably. In my defence, if it wasn't dirt cheap I would have found another hobby. We all know how much I like watching TV and drinking fake Aldi Baileys.

I've used some of the same fabrics that the pattern suggested, but only coincidentally. I went with what I had. I find myself secretly liking the back best. I made a stripe of the bits of brick I cut off the edges to square it up, and then used some larger pieces I'd bought by the metre. The pinky blue fabric that makes up most of the back was bought for a song, because of the watermark throughout the roll. You want to know my magic way of removing a watermark? Scissors. 

Now we come to the mandolin strap I made from yet another Liberty scrap, and an outgrown denim skirt donated by Littlest. Mr Coffee had gone to a music shop to buy a strap for me as a gift. On being offered this, he returned home empty-handed. "Ten quid!" he fumed. "Ten quid for a bootlace! You could make one tons better than that!"

They give me their clothes. They refuse to buy things in shops. They believe in me.

The next one isn't mine. It was made for me by a talented friend. About a year ago, I was stripping scrap paper out of notebooks (is it just my children who write on 15 pages of a full notebook and then abandon it?) when I suddenly found a message. Littlest had had a burst of joy whilst learning to write, which had hidden away for goodness knows how long in a half-empty pad.

I kept the note on the kitchen wall, but it began to fade. So I took it to Ursula, and asked her to help me keep it safe.

I am all Show and Tell today. Normal service will be - no, I'd better not say that. Normal service will possibly never be resumed. Because in less than three weeks' time I will be starting a new job, and god only knows what will pass for normal by then.

See? I told you I was all Show and Tell.