A Painter's Temperament

I was meant to have a low-key week in preparation for my Talk and for getting the caravan ready to meet Freya and George in Perthshire at the weekend. I decided to put Fergus to work painting the kitchen and the very dodgy coat cupboard. He started off as a reasonably willing apprentice but as the week wore on and the number of coats of paint went beyond normal he became less enthusiastic. My supervisory role became more involved… 

The red walls needed 5 coats of paint and I switched to using masonry paint after finding that it was effective over the damp patches (after treating them with mould killer). It was not an easy job and the girls asked why I did not just do the back door area and re-coat the kitchen in its original dark red. The results are far from perfect and messier than the original job that I last did 23 years ago but the whole area looks bigger and fresher. 

I got a big quilt done for a friend who has just bought a new house in between coats of paint.

My Talk seemed to go down well and was reportedly quite funny but I still have to refold all of the quilts which just got shoved back into their suitcases at the end of the evening. 

I did not spend long getting the caravan ready for its first outing of the year but nothing crucial got forgotten and it was a good practice for more ambitious trips. Typically, I could not get the electricity or gas going on arrival, partly because I had forgotten how it worked but I figured it out in the end. It was rather a damp weekend and I was glad that I was not sleeping in a tent. We walked about 8 miles on Saturday and took Nessie to the pub. Not much sewing got done but I finished reading a book - The Muse by Jessie Burton - and it was super spending time with Freya;) The only drama was being waved at by other caravans on the way home because someone had opened the loo window and I did not check All the windows before I left!