16 January 2015

House for sale...sold!

Photos borrowed from http://www.thebluffs.co.za/prop.id?5884
My parents had this house built  in 1975-76. I lived there with them, my three sisters and various dogs until I was married in 1980 right in that sitting room (middle left), under the arch in the upper centre picture.  My sister C was also married in this house and my youngest sister J had her wedding reception here (I hosted my other sister J!).  On Monday this week we reluctantly (but with necessity) handed it to an agent to sell, thinking that this process would take some time and then expecting the transfer process to take at least three months after that.  (I wrote, "no rush to sell").  Oh, oh, oh, yesterday, three days later, we accepted a fabulous offer from a young growing family and the transfer is planned for 27 March - we hope they will love it as much as we did.

All the ten grandchildren will miss it, as they all loved to visit Granny and Grandfather here, from casual drop-ins to long Christmas Day eating and games.  The house even had a name (although not really used), "Casnewydd", Welsh for Newport, where my mother was born.

Now we have a deadline to sell or store the contents.  We know that some of the bigger items will not be needed, but will keep much of the smaller things as we hope my mother will be able to have her own smaller place when her on-going recovery from the stroke allows her to move from the frail care facility.

13 January 2015

Black and white leftovers...

Back at work yesterday, bleahh!  My mother's house is now on the market, signed with the agent yesterday, another bleah - and we are asking a crazily over-optimistic price for it, but there is no rush to sell...yet.

As promised in the last post, here are the results of using up the extra black and white strips - seven 3.5" nine-patches, one 9" double nine-patch and four oddly-pieced Seminole type strips.  I am not sure if I've ever stitched Seminole strips before, and the inaccuracy shows, but I like wonky! 



02 January 2015

Old Year Sewing

Here are the 9" blocks for the January Block Lotto.  For those that are reading this I challenge you to make a block or two, whether in black and white prints or whatever fabrics you choose.  It's a great exercise in accurate piecing, and colour value.  The instructions can be found here (well, until the end of Jan 2015!).  Next time I'll show all the extras that I ended up with because I started with strips cut from the width of fabric and some fat quarters.  It was interesting to note that I had to reject quite a few of my black and white prints as the colour distributions were equal, that is neither black nor white were dominant.