House gone, and a beach visit.

I couldn't bring myself to take photos of an emptying and empty house.  Although it was really hard work to get everything sorted out, packed up, sold off, given away or dumped, I am so glad that the process has ended, and the responsibility of my Mum's house is no more.  My sisters and various family members all helped in different ways.  The keys were passed to the estate agent last Thursday, and the legal transfer went without a hitch.

My mother continues to recover, and was even went on an all-day outing to Soetwater Reserve last Tuesday with a few of the more able frail-care residents.  Almost no-one else there except us.  But it was very windy!   I thought that there was a general invitation to family members, but I was the only one besides the staff!  But happy to have gone with Mum, and to assist a little.  The staff were magnificent.

Still no sewing...

... but Creative Quilters and Cape Quilters did have a weekend exhibition in the middle of March.  I took some pictures but many were even more blurry than these!  Will have to consider a better camera than my mobile phone, sometime?  The weather was glorious, and the attendance was good.

Three made.....

Made three blocks for Feb lotto, but if you don't pay attention you only get one good one!

--

Karen

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.

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! 

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.

Looking forward to the New Year

Can't show the sewing I've done until Thursday - for the first time I managed to make the Block Lotto blocks from the preview instructions!  But here are some other photos....

Twenty-five bow-tie blocks made by Creative Quilters - will make a fun quilt - congratulations to Marianne who got to take them all home.  This was a successful exercise in colour value.

 Views from the top floor of our local shopping centre (Cavendish Square) on Christmas Eve (not last-minute shopping - the only shopping!).  The first one facing south, and wondering what they are going to build in the excavated plot - there was a low-rise building there a month ago.  The second is a north-facing view of the back of Table Mountain - one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World - I can never get enough of looking at it!

My plan for 2015 are to sew more and blog more.  My Mum is improving, and physiotherapist thinks she may even be successful in getting her to walk a few steps with a walker - I do hope so!  Saw all the therapists today and all three were pleased with her progress - just got to get the staff at the Care Facility to understand that she needs to sometimes be in her room to practice her homework and not to just sit in their communal lounge mindlessly watching sport on TV (yes, that's what it seems they think the residents want to do and watch).  My sisters and I face selling her house, and either selling or storing her furniture -  more than 40 years of love in the house my parents built - a difficult thing to do.

Early Christmas Lunch

A delightful lunch held yesterday for the residents and families of the care centre where Mum is staying for now.
--

Karen

More pieced blocks...

...so last night...I'll just look for some fabrics for these....ok, I'll just cut them out.....ok, I'll just sew one....and magically, all six were done !    On my sewing table I have been keeping a growing pile of fabric pieces that were too small to put back in the drawers, and yet I couldn't bring myself to cut them into usable squares or rectangles or strips - and it was great to use these fabrics for the Block Lotto blocks where various sizes and shapes of one fabric are needed - without having an overwhelming fabric choice!

My mother is improving steadily, but it will be a long road to a reasonable recovery.  Our first choice of a care facility was a mistake and after three (sleepless for all) nights we moved her to a good place.  The new therapists have all been to assess her and are planning the continuing therapies she'll need.

Piecing - balm for the soul

Managed to find time to make these nine bowtie blocks, shown here in different layouts, and six Block Lotto blocks.

---

Karen

Denise Recovering

Yesterday was six weeks since Denise's stroke.  It has been a whirlwind of almost daily hospital visits, finding new-for-her accommodation inspections (oh my giddy aunt, some were atrocious, some beyond our means, some just right, all with seemingly caring staff), trying to keep up with work.  Thank goodness for my fabulous sisters to share this process (ok, so we bicker, and annoy each other, mostly inadvertently), but we all have our mother's welfare at heart, and all are scared of the future for her.

Denise is having daily speech, physio and occupational therapies.  She is starting to speak, and although we know that her mind is sound, she is struggling to verbalize the words.  There is still no movement in her arm and leg, but she is able to stand with aid, allowing her to move from bed to wheelchair to therapy bed without being shoved and pushed.  We constantly remind her of her good progress but understandably she still gets frustrated at times.  I was told today by at least three staff that her doctor was astounded when she returned his "good morning" greeting, not having heard her speak at all!

She will move out of the Rehab Unit next Friday, and continue with the therapies at her new (and still unconfirmed) temporary home.

In this crisis I abandoned my Teacher Accreditation Course, will pick it up in 2016 when it is scheduled to be run again.  My fellow students have had mixed results with the final module, but we all have learned an amazing amount.  My sister-in-law has been with us for two weeks from Johannesburg, sorting out and getting ready to (maybe in Dec) move into a house in Noordhoek (25 mins away)

Virtually no new or old sewing done but I do go and visit my sewing room every couple of days, and reassure it that I'll be back!  The first evening I didn't visit my mum I laid out all my hexagon flowers on the lounge coffee table (watching tv catchup) and decided on a layout for the quilt.  I needed to have some handwork to keep me sane out of the house and didn't have anything else portable and suitable.  (Was cursing that I can't get my phone to sync photos to laptop, but went back to basics, and just copied the darn things!).....

A rough layout to get the values and colours in general position (these colours are close to actual):

 

And a blurry and oddly-coloured picture of the almost final layout (I had to shuffle a bunch when I was one short in a row!)

 And here is Gorgeous George fast asleep on a bed - never known a cat to sleep on her back quite like this one!

Denise

Two weeks ago my fiercely independent beautiful Mam suffered a debilitating stroke.  She is unable to move her right arm and leg and cannot speak.  Yesterday we were finally able to move her to a rehabilitation unit and we have hope that she will recover some of the loss.

Denise

Denise's Table Mountain in progress

Denise's own quilt in progress

Denise's Scrappy Trip

Denise's scrap blocks!

Saturday Night Sewing

After spending the afternoon with my mother working working on adding fabric to square up some of her beautiful scrap blocks I came home keen to sew something.

Looked on my really untidy sewing desk, and picked on the pieces cut out for the asterisk blocks that

I didn't make for the July Lotto.  Stitched the first one but forgot I had cut the strips wider with the intention to trim, oh well, looks sort of ok.  Decided to just make the others with only half the strips, and I like them.  Six in-between Split-9-Patch blocks were completed, now have 56 done.

These are the before and after washing pictures of the Inktense scribblings. Yes there was some fading in the wash (60 deg C in a laundry bag in with the towels). And some shrinking of the fabric - it is from a pile of +10" squarish off-cuts from a local factory shop - given to me years ago by my sister - never washed them as I use them only for testing and cleaning my sewing machine.

The Block Lotto for September is a paper-based block.  And I remember reading somewhere long ago that to make copies of your foundation, layer up paper, staple the pattern and with an old unthreaded needle stitch along the lines.   Then you have accurate copies and are apparently easier to remove.  I have a box of wide fan-fold paper that came from the defunct clothing factory my husband had about 15 years ago.  I still have to sew the blocks!!!

Block for CQ

Made this sample block with a 5-1/2" centre square, finishing at 13".  Wrote the instructions for making it with a 4-1/4" square, so it will be a 12" block (finished).

And think it would be a fun quilt to make one day.  And I think I just learned something new - how to export a Marquee Selection from EQ7, and paste it here... so I thought!  But it didn't actual paste!!  Ended up saving it as a bitmap file, then using Picasa, exported it and it became a jpg file, and much smaller in pixels.  Have been pasting from EQ7 into Word docs but hadn't thought to try it like this.  It looks better than my cell phone photographs!

Deadline met...

On Sunday at about 6:30 pm I submitted my four written assignments for the Teachers Accreditation Course, felt quilte good about that finish, keeping fingers crossed for the results!  Have the practical assignment back, and achieved a pass mark - the lost marks were justified!  I was supposed to provide full size patterns for the 12" block and quilt, and I had only included a 50% scale version - really!, most of my quilts are produced from scribblings on 4" pieces of paper!. Have started re-reading and thinking about the final assignments, and am confident that I they will get done on time, and in fact looking forward to the end.

Took young George to the vet this morning to be spayed.  At nearly six months old it was the right time.  She was most put out not having any food.  She gets fetched this evening.  Think she will need extra-extra TLC.

Dearest P had to have a Carpal Tunnel problem in his wrist fixed on Thursday, and is happy so far at the results.  Stitches out in a week.  Then he has to plan the other wrist.


No pictures, sorry!