Poor neglected blog

Finally - a chance to sit down and compose some thoughts, without having to race out the door for practice, or to a gig, or to chauffeur Kevin who had an eye operation last week and is doing very well thank you but couldn't drive for a couple of days, or.......or......

A couple of nights ago the last stitches were taken on the fourth large flower basket block, here are all four laid out.  Each block is 18in square finished, and each will be quilted before being joined into a quilt.

 When one is short, as one is, and one has to stand on a chair (which one never quite feels secure about doing) to be able to get far enough away to get all blocks in one photo, one just snaps a quick pic and gets down.  Which one did.  Which is why this is far from being a prize-winning shot.

Last year we fell in love with this pretty Aussie native plant and ordered two from a local nursery.  The young bloke who works there kept shaking his head and saying "you shouldn't be able to grow correas where you are......I love correas but I can't get them to grow for me, they don't grow well in this town" however they are thriving in our garden so well that they are now flowering!  When it stops raining I will sit on the ground to photograph them (because the plants aren't yet very tall, although they are growing beautifully) and you can seen their pretty pink bells.  To give an idea of scale, each flower bell is about three quarters to one inch long.

The music festival is over and the uke group has no more gigs for a while, so Euan's quilt can be layered, pinned and quilted.  The orange sashing will have a vine design, the blocks will have a variation on a continuous curve design, and the borders will have cats on two borders with dogs on the other two.  Euan's parents have a dog and his Other Grandparents have a dog, but we have a cat so he might as well learn early that dogs aren't the only animals in the whole universe.

Uke class starts again next week, and the other day I pushed the boat out and changed the strings on my uke because they were sounding muddy and didn't have the clear ring that new strings do.  It should have been done before our festival gigs but it's a bit late to think of that now, isn't it?  Now one item on tomorrow's 'to do' list is 'call in at music shop and buy new set of strings' because it's a good idea to keep a spare set.

By golly, those new strings do sound nice......

Not only has it been raining again, it has turned quite cool for this time of year.  Not that we are complaining - it makes a change from being too hot.  Our plants are very happy with the rain, because restrictions mean that we can only water them sparingly.

"Signature of ladies.
A married lady should not sign herself with the "Mrs." before her baptismal name, or a single lady with the "Miss."  In writing to strangers who do not know whether to address you as Mrs. or Miss, the address should be given in full, after signing your letter, as "Mrs John Smith," followed by the direction; or if unmarried, the "Miss" should be placed in brackets a short distance preceding the signature.
Only the letters of unmarried ladies and widows are addressed with their baptismal names.  The letters of married ladies are addressed with their husbands' names, as "Mrs John Smith."

In other words, when a woman married in the 1800s she ceased to exist as herself and became "Mrs husband's-first-and-last-name".  I wonder what the good folk of that time would have thought of the idea, now widely used, of married women retaining their maiden name - whether for business (as our daughter-in-law does) or personal purposes?

Enjoy your days!