The garden is planted!

Although not much has grown yet.

Just one little strip of green garden to go with this week's houses, a party house at night and a brick house surrounded by......barbed wire, perhaps?

That green strip will be joined to three others, and the resulting square will be cut into two triangles for two of the outer corners.  More will be made.  Eventually.  I could have used the same fabrics for all the setting triangles but this is more fun, don't you think?  The inspiration quilt by Freddy Moran was made with red squares, but I like the idea of my houses being set in a green park.

Some stitching has happened on the Canadian blocks, now there are just two to be done.

What an unpleasant day it is today.  The wind is blowing quite hard and it's a very cold wind, a nasty chilly wind, definitely a day for staying inside by the fire.  Which we are.  We keep expecting to see rain spots on the path outside, but so far none have appeared; it's so windy that, if any drops of rain were to fall, they would be blown sideways before they hit the ground.  It's definitely a day for the Big Green Jumper.

It's been another week of staying home.  Two necessary appointments meant having to go out and wear the dreaded mask, but fortunately once in the consulting rooms both practitioners said "you can take it off" much to my relief.  Nothing is on the calendar for the near future, so there will be more staying home.

Recently the front of the house received a little spark-up with new exterior lights being installed.  The previous lights were here when we came so were not our choice; they were 'coach lights', a popular style, it seems, for many years and indeed still sold, albeit with updated styling.  Both lights sported yellow globes, supposedly insect repellant, although we haven't really found them to be so; over the years they had become somewhat dim so needed replacing anyway.  We then thought......"if the globes need to be renewed, why not replace the whole thing?  They weren't our choice and we've never loved them"  So we did.  We looked online, found what we liked and made paper templates to hold up on the wall.  The small size was, like Goldilocks' porridge, just right.  Much was our glee when we found that a local shop stocked what we wanted so a phone call and a short drive later we had our new lights in hand, a visit from our friendly electrician a few days later and they were in place.

I still have plans to paint the front door teal......it's currently white.......but teal would be pretty with the light sandy-pink colour of the bricks.  Not sure what colour, if any, to paint the shutters and the fake colonial verandah columns, all of which are currently white - as was the style when the house was built in the early 1990s.  Perhaps just a fresh coat of white would be all that's needed.

"The host or hostess should not insist upon guests partaking of particular dishes; nor ask persons more than once, not put anything in their plates which they have declined.  It is ill-bred to urge a person to eat of anything after he has declined."

Indeed it is.  He - or she - may have a very good reason to decline a particular food, perhaps an intolerance or allergy, and I am sure a good host or hostess would not wish to make a guest ill.

Enjoy your days!