Frozen!

 There can’t be many people who have never seen the Disney film, “Frozen” - my children are too old to have watched it on repeat as youngsters. It is one of the activities that Nella and I did whilst snowed in this week. Admittedly, I fell asleep halfway through as I am not used to getting up just after 6.00am every day. We also struggled through a 1000 piece jigsaw, went for sub-Arctic dog walks, binge-watched a couple of teen-dramas on Netflix and I kept up with my German language learning apps. 

Nella was due to have returned to hospital last Sunday evening and we did set out but soon realised that the driving conditions were dangerous. Even the main road was white, there were blizzards and I turned back before I reached Stonehaven. Snow kept falling during the week and travel remained a foolish idea. It was decided that Nella could stay on at home for the time being. Our days are rigidly timetabled around meals and those meagre meals are slow going. I have to prompt her to pick up her fork for every mouthful. She simply does not want to eat at all but knows she has to comply if she is to be allowed to stay on.

I had a Zoom lesson on designing lettering with the computerised Qmatic longarm system. It is something I really want to experiment with but since I have no CAD expertise, I find it tricky. The idea is to get the words to stitch out with as few stops and jump stitches as possible. After a two hour lesson I was not much more proficient! It would still be quicker for me to freehand a monogram than to work out how to do it by computer;)

We had one of the coldest nights for years this week, probably around -12C here. My workshop is not heated overnight as it only has free-standing electric heaters. I had a bit of a panic when the quilt computer would not open up. The manual stated that it should not be used below +5C. Fortunately, after some scanning and chuntering, it did come back to life and I was able to get started on a gargantuan hexie quilt. The customer wanted to keep the outer hexagons complete but had not appliquéd them onto a border so I basted them down onto an additional sheet on top of the usual wadding and backing and intend to sew them down with invisible thread. I would like to sew around them all by blanket stitch on my domestic machine but it will be a mammoth task. The quilt is 101” wide and the backing is only 104” so it is all rather close for comfort. The customer has opted to get me to do the binding so it will be a while before this one is ready to return. My week ahead will involve that, keeping Nella going and practising my German, so pretty much exactly the same as the one we just had, except hopefully without snow and ice.