I shifted furniture around in the living room a bit last week and exposed the cat tree tunnels that had been hidden behind the arm chair. Maisie decided they were a perfect toy storage device and promptly filled them up.

Rob was able to pick up some boxes yesterday afternoon and I spent the evening deciphering pictograms. Here's what we ended up with:





Vital Statistics:
Hemnes Linen Cupboard from IKEA
Number of boxes: 2 (+ a duvet and pillows for the spare bed)
Hours to put together: 2.5
Days spent trying to get boxes from trucking company after they arrived in town: 8
Pencils consumed by Abby: 2 (+ the cover for my awl)
Hours spent rearranging living room to be just right: 2 (and still not completely happy with it)
Number of alan keys I now own: millions? (at least 12 anyway)


I really like our new cupboard. I love the yellow. I love the striped backing and drawer liners. I especially love that it locks with an old fashioned key (Rob gave me such a funny look when I exclaimed over the key - he thought I meant the allan key - you know - the one that comes with every IKEA thing you've ever bought). It makes the living room look so grown up. It holds our table linens and lots of our fancy dishes that don't otherwise have cupboard space. I need to get a few dividers to let me store tea cups and tumblers a little more efficiently though. It was so much fun unpacking everything into the cupboard. I rediscovered so many lovely things we were given for our wedding. Now that they're out we'll actually get to use them.


Special thanks go to Rob for playing with Abby for the whole evening (after we discovered she could snitch and eat a pencil in under three seconds even while I was keeping track of her) so that I could put the cupboard together.

An update on current projects, some are relatively new while others have been on the go for months.



The picture above is of the smaller pieces so far cut for our quilt. The orange pile of triangles make flying geese with the smaller dark blue triangles and fly toward the bright orange squares. All of the geese and squares are cut but due to shear numbers I’m cutting the little blue triangles in batches as I need them.

This is one of the projects which has been going for months ... in fact this has been on the go since last July when we first moved into our current place. My goal is to have the entire quilt top finished and ready for show-and-tell at the June Guild meeting.

... then I’ll have a basting party and get everyone to help me put the sandwich together. Yes ... there will be cookies provided :)

The pattern is from Batik Beauties by Laurie J. Shefrin and is called Mystique of Bali.


We added another row of squares to the bottom and side to make it considerably larger so that it will fit on our bed when finished) the original is a wall or lap quilt). Rob worked out a template in Photoshop so we could play with colours until we found something we liked. After that we just had to redo the math to figure out how much fabric I was going to need.


Picking the actual fabrics was a lot of fun. The batiks have such wonderfully saturated colour and there were many to choose from. I wasn’t sure how long it would take to make up this quilt so we decided to get all of the quilt top fabrics at once so that we didn’t risk not being able to match a fabric when I needed it.

These are the colours we ended up with. The blue grey is the background throughout the quilt. The textured black is the narrow border and the striped teal is the large border.


Progress so far ... I have one hundred and ninety geese finished and only sixty left to go (and they go pretty quickly when I sit down to it). The geese are the smallest pieces of the quilt so progress seems slowest while I am working on them.




I’m happy to say that my mesh triangle could now pass for a shoulder shawl and not a kerchief. I’ve still got a long way to go though - another one and a half balls of yarn before I start the top border pattern.

... and I was worried my smaller gauge wouldn’t produce a large shawl!



I worked up the swatch for my pattern last weekend and, to my great surprise, it was perfect. **This never happens.** Seventeen stitches to four inches - what a funny number.


I’ve been working on it a little each evening this week and I now have just over four inches of hat finished. I’ll be able to start the decreases for the crown soon and when I’m done that I can try it on! This is the first thing I’ve done in seed stitch and I really like the way it looks.


I love the feel of this yarn. It is Mission Falls 1824 Merino. If feels beautifully soft and squashy and is even washable!



I started renovating the coffee table on Labour Day weekend ... it’s still on the go. It turns out the paint takes longer to dry than I had anticipated and I don’t like painting in the dark - it’s to difficult to see where you’ve missed.


Once I’m finished painting (I’ve got about two coats left) I’ve got some fancy shelf brackets to secure the legs to the table top. The table is a bit rickety and I am hoping the shelf brackets will give it more stability along with looking interesting.