My friend Gill and I agreed yesterday that it has been raining here for six months. The Trail is too muddy to ride a bike on, you need wellies to walk over the fields, the garden is too waterlogged to dig, and I am getting fed up with indoor occupations that I love, such as painting.
Actually I think the rain has driven me a little bit bonkers. Otherwise why would I be unpicking a double bed patchwork quilt with the intention of remaking it? The quilt in question is my sunset quilt:
Actually, it was always a failure as a quilt, though as a wall hanging it might have passed muster.
But it doesn’t look like this any more because some of the colours are so faded, and also, of course, because I am unpicking it.
Here is an example of the fade. This is the binding: it started as dark blue and is now a weird faded pinky orange:
I could have given it away to a pet shelter, I suppose, but there are some tasty bits of fabric in it that haven’t faded. And if I remake it in a new design and with new fresh pieces added, I can re-use the wadding and the back. Actually, the more I think about it the more mad the project seems. It will probably take me all summer to unpick it, if we actually have a summer. Who knows if the climate has changed for good?
Dave meanwhile is also behaving strangely. You know I said he made me some hot cross buns for Easter as a treat? Well they were so delicious I asked him if he’d make me some more.
Dave makes our bread and our oatcakes, even though he hates baking. And he doesn’t eat hot cross buns, but he is making me another batch. I said it was the taste that mattered and he really didn’t need to bother about the cross on the top or the glaze, but he’s just come upstairs and asked if we have a metal nozzle because the hole in the plastic bag approach made the cross too wide last time.
“What’s going on?” I said. “I said I don’t care about the crosses.”
“I care about the crosses.”
“But why? You’re an atheist, you’re not going to eat them, and you hate baking, so why make it more of a faff than you need to?”
He then admitted that when our children were still at home and I was baker-in-chief, he was always disappointed by my hot cross buns (which in those days he ate) because I just made the cross with the knife, which meant they weren’t like the ones he had as a child.
We don’t have a metal nozzle (a casualty of the fire that I never restocked) so I suggested he wash out the nozzle on a washing up liquid bottle, but he thought he'd never get rid of the taste of the detergent.
What do you know…he has just come upstairs to show me this:
It’s the unused nozzle from a silicon sealant dispenser tied on with a plastic tie. Let’s hope he likes the crosses this time.
And let us also hope the rain stops soon. We have a Refugee Hospitality Day in a couple of weeks and we really really need some sunshine for that.
No, I haven’t forgotten about Gaza.
My latest painting is entitled Spring 2024. It’s one that came straight from the gut, like this one, The Dancers
This is Spring 2024
The link for the UNICEF Gaza appeal is here
The link for Medical Aid for Palestinians is here
No comments:
Post a Comment