Squelch!

I am going to blame the rain for scuppering my book projects this week. It seems to have been raining non-stop all year so far. I am fortunate to live on high ground and am not at any risk of flooding but there has been a lot of water draining off the surrounding fields, seeping into the walls of my workshop and leaking its way under the door. I had been soaking the puddles up using hessian sacks but after a wet Wednesday when I was in school all day, not checking my workshop, I discovered that my carpets were soggy and some boxes that were stored underneath my quilt frame were very damp indeed. The Landy smells “foosty" since it leaks dreadfully and every time I went out I had to get a cloth to dry off the terrible condensation inside the windows and the switches on the dashboard. I bought an old fashioned mop to tackle the puddles and I decided to order a VAX to try and get the rest of the water out of the carpets before I end up with a serious mould problem.

Obviously there were other distractions but I did get some useful jobs done in between. I ordered a new batch of business cards so I can scatter them at quilt shops with the intention of undertaking more customer quilting. The leather skins and a selection of beads has been ordered online so I can keep up with the next 3 totems and I decided to crack on   with piecing and quilting the seasonal stripsets. They are looking really colourful and I like the simplicity of the quilted straight lines. 

I went to Rainbow Fabrics in Inverurie to buy some fabric for a project that I hope may tempt Freya back into quilting. Even though some of it was on special offer, I was surprised at how expensive it has become to purchase fabric for an entire quilt. I am using my Go Cutter large drunkard’s path die and she has agreed to help with the layout and she will sew some of the completed squares together. We may use the computer to quilt it with specific motifs but she has already hinted that she prefers my hand-guided swirls!

My MacBook was driving me mad with unwanted popups that arrived uninvited when I downloaded my patchwork font. I called Mac Support which took forever and they did not even manage to fix the problem. In the end I figured out which app had caused the virus and uninstalled it. 

I did a really stupid thing this week when I excitedly tried out my new pasta-making attachment on my Kitchenaid mixer. For some obscure reason I decided to follow the instructions which advised me to use the beater instead of the dough hook to begin with. I then forgot to switch to the dough hook and caused the mixer to work too hard, shearing a worm gear! Faced with the prospect of spending £150 to send it for repair or over £400 for a new mixer, I ordered spare parts on Ebay and am hopeful that watching a Youtube video will enable me to fix it myself. In the meantime I will have to knead bread by hand or even resort to buying it!