A whole month has gone past since my last post, how slack!  I do like to post interesting photos of my progress on various projects, and there just isn't any progress happening,  so nothing to blog about.  Except work and work and work.

DD Seonaid made a quick trip home, which was lovely, but I failed to get even a single photo while she was here.  We were too busy taking the dogs for walks, shopping, visiting and watching movies late into each night.  Good times anyway, even without photographic evidence.

I've also spent a lot of time in the garden, planting and repotting and making shade structures to protect the plants from the summer sun.  It's hard work now, but it will pay off later when I don't have to water everything so frequently.

I made two wicking beds, which are working brilliantly, and I have plans for two more. One is full of jalpenos, and the other has dwarf beans and tomatoes, silverbeet, spring onions and peppers.  I have a few more poly pipe shade structures to build, And then it will be summer and too hot to work outside so I will have to start sewing again.

Yesterday I made myself sew most of the remaining blocks of the Honeycomb quilt, and it's nearing completion.

My attention span is waning, sewing the same block 300 times.  I still like it, but I'm ready to move onto something else.  With any luck, there are only a few more hours of work ahead, and then I can sew all the rows together and call it done.  I will have to have a major clean up of all the stacks of fabric in the sewing room, and cut all the scraps down into useable pieces.  It will be therapeutic to restore order to my workspace.
What will I work on next?  Something with a bit of variety, but not anything difficult.  Maybe it's time to start something plaid, like JulieK; her quilt is massive, very spectacular. I think she's the Queen of Plaid.  If I made something like that it would certainly whittle my plaids down to manageable proportions.

I'm wondering if  I should do Bonnie's Orca Bay mystery; I might make a few units of each step, so I can have fun sewing along with everyone else, but not commit to a big quilt that I might not have time to finish.

I love these cheerful little Johnny-Jump-Ups, they have been flowering for months.  They self seed, so they'll be back next year too. It's wonderful when plants come up all by themselves, and don't need to be looked after. 

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It was my birthday yesterday, and I had a lovely day, lots of email and texts from friends and family, friends popping in and then dinner at the brother and sister-in-law's place; birthday pizza!  It's Mereth's birthday today, and you can read about why we were born 36 hours apart here, and here.  Happy birthday Sis!!!

I seem to have completed most of the urgent things on my work list, so it will be a weekend spent in the garden and the sewing room I hope. 

This is the herb garden I planted last week, in foam boxes to help insulate the root area from our extreme temperatures.  I arranged them to leave a space in the middle and filled it with earth, which made an even bigger garden bed.  The ground here is century old builder's rubble, not the best growing medium.

We've had some lovely rain, which is a reprieve from the hot days during the week.  I figure it's a little window of opportunity to get some of the larger plants settled into the garden before the really hot days of summer, so that's what I'll focus on first.  Then I will get all the pots into positions where I can cover them with shade cloth on the worst days, and mulch all the areas that normally grow weeds with vicious seedpods that cause the dogs a lot of misery.  In my spare time, I'll clean up my sewing room.

I've already cut a heap of pieces for the elongated hexagon quilt, which had stalled for lack of little triangles; there are plenty now. 

I aim to sew all the blocks into sets of four, then rearrange those on the design wall. 
It should make it a bit easier to manage than the individual blocks.  I'm getting impatient to see it in one piece, and get all the fabrics for it put back in the drawers; I don't want to start anything new until I'm done with this quilt.

We have only 2 and a half months left in this year, and I don't think I've completed nearly enough quilts.  I want to have a mad dash to the end of the year, and get some tops quilted as well as UFOs finished. 

 How long ago did I make these blocks?  I'd completely forgotten them?

All these were on my design wall at some time, I must get back to them, especially the 16 patches.  I could clean out a lot of scraps just by making that simple block.

My first list will be projects that need to be sorted and completed; after that I'll list the tops in the order that I would like them quilted.  The other goal I have is to exceed my 2010 total of 57 posts for the year.  That was pathetic, I know I can do better in the remainder of 2011. Onward!!

Bold Seduction blooming against

 the old stone of my Hall

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I can't take the Shoofly quilt down from my design wall yet, I just love looking at it throughout the day.  I fall asleep looking at it, full of satisfaction at the colour combination and the beautiful geometrics of the block.  The border pleases me greatly too, I love the triangles marching around the centre.  It's wonderful to finish a project and be thoroughly satisfied with the result.  I have to thank that long ago quilter for inspiration, the vendor for selling it and Bonnie for posting that photo that sent me hurrying to make my own version.

Of course I have leftovers, but I will add them to the spare parts pile; something tells me I haven't got this colour combination out of my system yet. (Check out the cute aluminium cannisters from the second hand shop; I just love vintage aluminium.)

Friday was a mental health day.  It was a stormy start, I was racing around on my bike with lightning and thunder overhead, and rain bucketing down at intervals.  When I stopped to deliver things people sympathised with me for the awful conditions, but I loved it.  If I was at home working I would be inside and not aware of the fantastic clouds, the alternating hot and cold air, the strange gusts of wind from the east.  It was amazing, and I got paid to be out there witnessing it.  Good stuff.

When I got home Mereth had been working at her machine for seeral hours, finishing a customer quilt, and was ready to run away with me to Jamestown.  We dropped the dogs off at Matt's, then were off on our little adventure.  We always go to the op-shop there, where I fell in love with this vase;

it's signed by Henning Rathjen (1903 - 1968), a Melbourne potter, and his work is collectible.  I really like those daisies around the rim.  I  love being able to Google things and find out more info. 

We stopped in at the patchwork shop of course, to find a few essential pieces.

Over a long period I've bought three half-metres of the bottom cream fabric,and used all of it; I decided that I need to buy the rest of the bolt, or I'd regret it ever afterwards.  I feel safe now, knowing I have that in the stash.

I couldn't resist getting a half metre of this fabric, just because.  It will go in with all my other Pretties, and one day I'll know what to do with it.

We went to a couple of hardware stores for plants and bits & bobs, and the supermarket, then splashed out on excellent coffee for the trip home.

On the way we got thoroughly sidetracked by the clouds and the extraordinary light on the fields.  We kept exclaiming, and pointing things out to each other, and stopping the car to take photos.  We pulled off the road at one spot, and saw a tiny track over the hills that we had never noticed before. 

It only took a moment to decide that we didn't have to go straight home, and that we could go and get 'lost' for an hour or two.

It was a great day to be driving on country tracks, not knowing where we were exactly and not really caring. 

There were lots of other roads to explore, but we had to leave them for another day. 

We stopped at a farm to ask for directions back to main road, and admired this mare and foal. 

The owner told us he was a pretty blue when he was born, and keeps changing colour as he gets older.  He's destined for racing, and he's got the legs for it.

The clouds got darker, and the light stranger, so we hightailed it home ahead of this cloud.

It looked like something from Lord of the Rings, threatening and portenteous, and coming in fast.  We outran it though, and by the time we'd picked up the dogs and arrived home there was just a few minutes of rain left in it.  We had a splendid day out, very refreshing, and now I'm ready to do some hard work in the garden.  Thank heavens for weekends.

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I had every intention of finishing the Flyfoot top yesterday, but my day was hi-jacked by Dolly.  She got a grass seed in her ear around 11am, and the earliest vet appoinment I could get was 4.15.  She was in a lot of discomfort,  so with Mereth's help I put some olive oil in her ear, which coats the awns of the grass seed and stops it working it's way further in.  But she was still a miserable puppy, and wanted to sit on my lap all the time.  I was working, so she had to be on the floor, and contented herself with sitting between my feet, head on one side and looking woeful.  Every time I moved she scuttled after me for reassurance, right under my feet;I felt like I was wading through a sea of dogs.

At the vets he anaethsetised her and dug the offending grass seed out, and micro-chipped her as well.  If she had to have a great big needle stuck in her neck at least she didn't know anything about it. I'm glad she doesn't weigh a few kilos more, she's on the edge of what I can safely carry; I sit her up over my shoulder like a baby, but Pippi is too big for that.

Home we went with the patient, who was recovering rapidly, and spent the next few hours frantically trying to lick my face, while staggering into the furniture and losing her balance.  She acts like a happy drunk, leering at me as if to say 'I LOVE you!  I reeeaally do!' and bumping into everything on her wobbly legs.

So the top didn't get finished yesterday.  But today I was determined to get it all in one piece.  About 7 hours later, it's done.

I don't know why on earth I thought I had enough of the yellow fabric to do the whole border; it didn't come close.  I had to hunt down every last scrap to make the side borders long enough, and then I needed something to fill up the corners.  I had heaps of HSTs left, and the Shoofly block was the easiest way to make  a block that was 6" finished to match the border.  It's cute, it's done, but it took way longer than I thought it would.  Will I ever learn to plan my quilts out properly?

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I've had a reasonably productive weekend, but it seems to have gone by far too quickly.  I still haven't finished any of my projects, and that is starting to irritate me.  Must Try Harder....

I cut up a pile of fabric yesterday to make this stack of pieces for the border of my Flyfoot quilt.

Today I switched on the sewing machine and iron, then put on the DVDs of the appendices of Lord of the Rings, and watched close to 9 hours of documentary footage about how they made the movies.  It's all excellent stuff, but as I've seen it all before I didn't have to watch every minute.  I could follow along with a glance, and stop to watch the interesting bits, and it really helped me stay at the machine longer than I normally could.
 
I buckled down and finished the blocks, then cut out the setting squares, and the borders, using evey last skerrick of fabric from my stash and Mereth's.  It took 3 and a half metres, and all I had left afterwards was two 8.5" squares.  Talk about cutting it close!


I turned the pile of pieces into 156 HST units

and pressed them neatly.

I was busy sewing them into the border strips when I thought that I should really sew the blocks together first, and complete the borders last.  Fine, I switched tack and in short order I had the blocks sewn into 4 sections.

Then I decided to give one yellow square with a stubborn crease a spray from the water bottle before ironing it.  For some reason the brown from my ancient ironing board cover, which has been perfectly fine for three years, instantly bled onto the block and left a big dark stain.  At this stage I was getting tired of the whole process, and I decided I'd keep going, and wash the top later to get the mark out.  Then, as I was ironing the last strip, the iron touched a piece of plastic shelf matting and before I knew it I'd swiped pink melted goop all over another yellow square.

So it's all been put aside for now, and tomorrow I will unpick those two blocks, and replace then with the two spare ones, the only fabric left over, and I will be ever so careful when it comes time to iron them.

It's looking good though;I just hope there are no more incidents before it becomes a finished quilt.

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We have a shed!

All that's left to do is a bit of finish work, ridge-capping and downpipes etc, and I have no idea when that will get done. We're having wild and windy and wet weather here, which is messing the work crew around. Never mind, the end is in sight.  Next up is connecting power and water, which could take weeks, and then I will need to have the place insulated and lined.  I don't think it will be done before Christmas, so it will be another exercise in patience.

I can't wait to start landscaping the rest of the block, and moving stuff into the shed, and establishing a veggie garden and water tanks and....  But there's all my regular work to deal with too, so it's going to be slow progress.  It's still exciting.

Mereth is in New South Wales, visiting DD2 and family, so I have Pippi while she's away.  Pips keeps looking for Mereth, it's quite touching.  When we go for a walk both dogs will run up to me to tell me what they've been up to, and then Pip will look all around for her mum.  When we go to Mereth's house Pip races to the door and scrabbles at it impatiently, ready to burst inside and look in every room.  But still no mum.... Mereth will get such a welcome when she gets back!

Not much sewing is being done; DD Seonaid dropped in at the start of the week, on her way to a friend's wedding. I even cooked a real meal for her; I don't spend much time on cooking these days, too much else to do.  We rushed around on Tuesday finding last minute things, then she was off on the bus to stay the night with cousin John, before flying to Brisbane the next day.  It's been years since I travelled out of state, I'm quite envious of all these other people getting to see a bit more of the wide world.  I shall have to plan something for next year I think. I'll be driving down to Adelaide to pick her up tomorrow, so there won't be any spare time for quilting for a while.  I have 23 of the Flyfoot blocks done, (only need 5 more) and some of the setting squares cut out, I just need a few hours so I can make some headway.

At least with all the rain I don't need to water either of our gardens; there's always a silver lining!

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We have a slab! 

They did indeed use a lttle front-end loader to bring in the concrete.

I'm glad I didn't have to paddle around in that stuff, I've done my share of concreting.  It was such a warm day it went off really quickly, so no chance for puppy pawprints.

Now we wait for the next step, which is the shed itself.  If I was the impatient sort I would be climbing the walls about now.  Luckily I'm quite philosophical about the protracted waiting time.  In a month's time all this waiting will be immaterial, because the shed will be there.  (Please please please let the shed be up in a month's time....)

I worked diligently on my Flyfoot blocks over the weekend, and I'm up to 19 now.  They are flying together, it's amazing.  Cutting them with the Go cutter really helps, the pieces just seem to spring into existence with no effort on my part.  It's going to look very much like the original, but I will have to combine yellow fabric, as I don't have a piece large enough to do the whole thing.  I can deal with scrappy.

And there may be a pieced border in there somewhere to, haven't decided on that yet.

My garden is taking up a fair bit of time now, and the weather is heating up alarmingly.  I'm watering thoroughly, and repotting and taking cuttings so that when I get garden beds established I will have enough plants to fill them.  Most of my plants are cadged from friends, or dug up from the side of the road, or rescued cheaply from nurseries where they are quietly expiring.  The other day I saw a simple daisy in one garden centre that had a pricetag of $21.  Gak!  Who could afford that.  So I will con tinue asking friends for pieces from their garden, and then whenever I see that plant it reminds me of the person who gave it to me.  My garden will be a collection of friends as well as plants.

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There are always a few ideas waiting in the wings, ready to take over from my main project at a moment's notice.  Sometimes, when I keep shoving them aside and working dutifully on what I should be doing, they get more and more demanding.  After a while, I can't resist any longer.
As soon as I saw the picture of this quilt on one of Bonnie's posts I wanted to make it.

Then Mereth found it on Ebay as well .  I'd buy it if I had the funds.....
So once I made the decision to use my elongated hexagons as leader-enders these blocks just jumped into existence in a matter of minutes ( or it seemed that way).  I tried a couple of other blocks to see if I liked them, and they will fit in, but I like the Flyfoot block so much I will make the rest of the blocks in that pattern.

I've never made a Flyfoot block, never made anything with yellow setting fabric, and I had a pile of those strange greyed out browns that I would like to use up.  That's three reasons to make it, and I only need one usually...

Unfortunately, my brown fabrics aren't nearly enough to do all the blocks, so I will have to use browns that have a more yellowish cast, but I don't mind.  It's an unexpected colour combination, brown and yellow, but I'm loving it so far.

On the shed front, the formwork for the slab was finished on Tuesday, and they  are supposed to be here today for the pour.  Given how hard it is to access my block, I think they are going to trundle the concrete in using the bucket of a front-end loader.  That's going to be fun.  I'll take photos.

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All the comments on the previous post have been helpful.  I particularly like the idea of post-it notes, and multiple lists, and blackboards or whiteboards.  I'm determined to build a system that works for me, and that I can stick to.  The problem I've been facing lately is that I finish the things I HAVE to get done, but not the things I want to do.  I need to list 7 things a week that I'd like to do, and cross off one a day, in any order.

Today I wanted to work in the garden, so I sat down with a cup of coffee and started a list. First I wrote 'Plant seedlings in bigger pots'. Then I realised that I would have to make up some potting mix first, so I wrote that above the first item.  And then thought that I should mix a bucket of liquid fertiliser to soak the seedlings in too, so I had to squeeze that in as well.  It struck me that I usually write one thing on my list, and that thing involves a ton of other work before I even get to it.  Then when I've worked for hours I get to cross one measly item off the list, and I feel cheated.  So from now on I intend to write down every step, and cross them all off at the end of the day.

Further down the list I found myself writing 'Build fence at the side of the hall' and 'Pergola'.  Today?  I really need to keep my to-do lists achievable, and not include things that belong on a Long Term Goals list. And if I think of  a job to do, but I don't have all the equipment or tools or supplies, I need to write it on a shopping list straight away, so I don't forget.  When I've assembled everything I need, then I write it on the To-Do list.

I'm pleased to report that I did four things on my list today, and I will transfer the other two things to tomorrow's list.  I'll get the hang of this yet....

I am two blocks over the half way point with this quilt. 

I'm a little bit weary of sewing the same thing again and again, so I'm going to move onto another quick project and use this as a leader-ender for a while.  It's getting a bit too dark, so I need to cut out a lot of medium value fabrics to make sure it stays cheerful.

One thing that has become a habit is taking the dogs for a walk each night.  Our reward is the scenery, fresh air, exercise and magnificent sunsets.  It's such a beautiful time of year.

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Two quilters that I really admire are Bonnie, of Quiltville, and Judy of Patchwork Times. They are both dynamo quilters; I have no idea how they achieve so much in the same 24 hours that I get each day.  They are great role models for me; neither of them think 'Oh that's too hard, I won't bother, I haven't got enough time, it'll never work...'  They just get in and do stuff, and then they blog about it.  I want to be like them when I grow up.

One thing that Judy does is make lists and spreadsheets, and I've never been much of a list person.  If I make them, I lose them, or forget them until days later; I get distracted, tired, my life gets hijacked by some emergency.  Or when I sit down to make the list, everything flies right out of my head, and I'm staring at a blank page wondering what on earth needs to be done.  It's really pathetic.

Lately my life has been a shambles of one 'urgent' job after another.  I barely have time to package up one thing as done and dusted before I have to get right into the next one.  I hate having to work like that, it wears me out, and then I find it very hard to recover my momentum.  I'm not a dynamo person.  Not now.

The way I worked when I was younger was in big cycles of manic effort, weeks at a time of non-stop energy and enthusiasm, then even longer weeks of nothing much.  The manic part was great!  I got so much done.  In one 6-week manic phase I wrote my book on QAYG, and quilted all the quilts on my Janome, at the same time as running my family and household.  I probably got 5 hours sleep a night, but I felt wonderful.  There was a slow period after that, while I just pootled in my cottage garden and did the necessary chores around the house, but it was a recovery time after all that effort.

I'm quite a few years older now, and I can't muster that manic energy anymore.  I have to pace myself so I don't run out of energy entirely, and it's been hard learning to do that.  I prefer the boom and bust cycle, oddly enough.  But now life is more even, without the huge highs and, more importantly, without huge lows.  I'm grateful I'm still quilting and still enthusiastic about it all.

I run a pattern club for my digital designs that comes out each month, and I design between 20 and 30 patterns for that.  I also have a website for those digitised patterns that keeps me busy with orders and enquiries.  I help Mereth quilt the customer quilts that are problematic, or need complicated computerised quilting that she's not confident to tackle herself.  I fill wholesale orders for my printed patterns, and printed pantographs.  And what I haven't told the blog is that for the last 14 months Mereth and I have also done the mail run for our little town, which takes between 20 and 25 hours each out of our week.  Small wonder I have no time!  and maybe that's why I have no energy .......

I've done all this extra work to help pay for my shed, which I hope  is going to be the start of the next interesting period of my life.  Once it's up (next Wednesday they say they'll be here, fingers crossed) all sorts of options will be possible, and I don't even know which one will be the right one.  It's going to be exciting and tiring and exhilarating and exhausting all at once.  I really hope I have the energy to blog about it.

Which gets me back to the original premise of this long and rambling post; I need to learn how to make lists!   There has to be a way to keep all these balls and dinner plates and bowling pins juggling in the air over the next few months.  I'm sure Bonnie and Judy could do it, and so can I.

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The last two weeks have gone by in a flash, full of work and travel and family stuff.  I've hardly had time to sew more blocks, so there's not much progress to report.  I have 1/4 of the blocks needed on the design wall, and I am aiming to finish 20 a day for the rest of this week.  That will see me to the halfway mark, and I'll be happy with that.

 This is today's 20 blocks, waiting to be completed.  It's not much, but every little bit counts.

It's a great help being able to cut 216 triangles, enough for 54 blocks in about 5 minutes.  That leaves more time for actual sewing.

Sometimes quilts go together so quickly that I can hardly remember making them;  I don't mind this one being a leisurely affair.  I find myself studying the blocks on the design wall throughout the day, remembering fabrics that I'd like to include, making decisions about what works and what doesn't.  The more pieces I put up, the more enchanted I am with those tiny triangles. 

The photo in the book shows that those little hourglass blocks were made of two fabrics; the maker may have made those first, and used them to join the hexagons, rather than making a rectangular block as I'm doing.  It would take too much planning for me to do that, but I do like the look of it.

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I had a cutting marathon on Sunday, stockpiling pieces so that I will be able to sew in any spare time this week. 

I cut more than 130 of the elongated hexagons, using the ruler and rotary cutter. The triangles I cut with  the Go cutter, and it made life so much easier.  I stood for hours, cutting the hexagons, and the triangles were done in minutes.  I'm rapt!
I've cut between a third and a half of the pieces needed, and I'll sew all those into blocks before I cut any more.  I will need to see how the colours look, and whether I need to add in specific colours or fabrics when I cut the rest of the blocks. They are so easy to piece, I usually do 10 at a time, and they mount up quickly.  I really like the way this looks so far.

Of course I can't stop fiddling with the different dies, and whipped up these two blocks just to test how accurate they were. 

I seem to have started a pink and brown set of blocks now; my subconcious is telling me to use up some of the three drawers of pink fabric.  I don't have any plan for these blocks, they are just experiments.  Whenever I want to try something out I'll keep using pink and brown , eventually I'll have enough blocks for a quilt.

Spring arrived last Thursday.  On Wednesday I was looking at the gardens around town and thinking 'Not long till Spring gets here..." and the next day everything seemed to have happened over night; daisies blooming, roses budding, butterflies dancing.  That's Spring all right.  I'm not ready to say goodbye to winter, but then I never am.  I just hope it's a nice mild summer like last year.

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The dies for the Go cutter arrived last Monday, but I had such a busy week that I couldn't even  unpack them.  It made me work all the harder, knowing that when I finished my projects I would be able to play with my new toys.  So I hurried to fill a really big pattern order, and slaved away at a custom quilt, and by Friday afternoon I could afford some time off to unpack the box, cut up some fabric and put the cutter through it's paces.

This is the die that I really wanted.

It was an experimental die, and they took it off the website the day after I ordered it, so I was really lucky to get it.  I have to say that this HST die was the reason I decided to actually buy the cutter in the first place.　I don't like the dies that cut the triangles in a long strip; there is too much waste that way.  But this group of triangles is very economical because they share sides with each other.  I'm really pleased with this, and it's going to be very useful.  If they get enough interest in this die it will be added to their catalogue, so I will leave  a message on their site telling them how much I approve of this design.  If you would like to buy one too, you could go tell them so that they know people want it.

The other die that I was waiting for was this one;

again, it's economical because the triangles are grouped together to minimise waste fabric.  It makes a triangle that works with the 2" finished HST die to make Flying Geese units.  I've made some FG units that turned out the correct size, and some Hourglass units that worked perfectly too.  I'm going to put this die to work cutting pieces for a Flying Geese scrap quilt.  I'll also be able to make Sawtooth Star blocks,
either cutting the squares with a rotary cutter, or with the die that came with the Go.

Even Mereth is happily cutting pieces with the cutter and planning how she can use them.  It's not as accurate as she likes, so she will only use the units for things where that doesn't matter so much.  I'm not such a stickler for accuracy, I just fudge and fiddle, so I don't really mind if the odd piece is a smidgeon too small.  I make inaccurate cuts with the rotary cutter too, so it's all par for the course.

I have triangles everywhere, and none of them required any thought or effort to cut.  I'm really enjoying myself with my new toy.

The tree guys were having fun with their toys too, including a chainsaw on a 12' pole. 

I would hate to think how much trouble I could get into with things like that.  Good thing they did it all.  The bobcat guy showed up on Friday to do his bit, and now I have a site prepared. 

With any luck I should have my shed within a fortnight, fingers crossed.....

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My elongated hexagon quilt is coming along slowly.  I've had a couple of major cutting sessions, so there are pieces to sew when I have time.  I fine-tuned the cutting of the hexagons, so that they would all come out the same size, and I worked out the best way to press all those seam allowances.  I've sewn a couple of trial rows together, to make sure that it all fitted. 

Now I will have to get busy and cut up a mountain of more fabric, because I need 324 of these blocks if I want to reproduce the size of the antique one (90" x 82"). 

I ended up making the units 3" x 7.5" finished, so I won't need as many as the original (390 !), I would rather have the units a little larger to show off some of the prints that I'm including.  The photo in the book shows a lot of plaids and homespuns and stripes, and while I'll include some of those, I don't want it to read like a farm quilt.  I want mine to look a bit more like a town quilt than a country quilt.

This would be a lovely quilt to handpiece, the only thing stopping me is the thought of having to trace all those shapes onto fabric; I just don't have enough time in the day to add that little extra step.  Maybe one day I will have some more free time to spend on simple little chores like that.

I spent yesterday in the garden, potting and repotting flowers that are just itching for spring to get here so they can grow out of their pots all over again.  I've been longing for years to have a garden on my own land, and this year I will finally be able to do that. Last week a team of guys came and shifted the fence on the side block back to the true boundary, giving me another 4m of land that my neighbour was borrowing. 

Next week a guy is coming to take out three or four trees, clearing the way for another guy to prepare the site for a shed.  Then yet another set of guys will construct a 7m x 6m shed for me.  Once all that is done, I can survey what's left of the block and decide where to put garden beds and replacement trees.  It's all very exciting, but it doesn't seem real, especially as it's taken 8 months to get this far.

And the shed?  I haven't decided what is going in there yet.  I could set it up as a little flat, with a kitchen and laundry and bathroom, leaving the front room of the hall free to become a classroom and shop again.  I could invest in another quilting machine, and maybe have the shop back there, but no room to teach.  I may even be able to rent a house, so I could have the new machine and the classroom and shop.  But it's all undecided as yet.  Still, it's nice to have some options and new directions to go in.

Dolly and Pippi really love having a larger yard to explore, and more gound to dig into enormous holes and mountains.  I can't wait to get all this cleaned up and sorted out.  My word for this year was Onward!  And that's where we're going now.

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