Happy birthday to me!

On Monday it was my birthday - I'm now 56.  Where did the years go? But I have a husband (he's two weeks older than me) of almost 34 years as we were married in December 1977 (Silver Jubilee year), three children - the eldest of which, Sarah, turned 30 this year and now 4 grandchildren - the eldest, Sophie is 5 and has been to school for some time now.  The youngest Freddie will be 2 years old in a few days and a proper little boy.

I had the lovely surprise of birthday postcards from the postcard swap that I belong to.  Being towards the end of the year with just one more birthday to make a card for at the end of December, it is nice to be on the receiving end this time (who said it was better to give than receive?) with such a varied array of postcards.  I asked for flowers, no-one else had asked for that so I thought I would.  Here they are:

From top left is from Plum who stitched through paper with real petals, next to that is Jan's Union flag with gathered flower middle.  In the middle is Avril's velvet background postcard with textured flowers, then Pascale's liberated flowers.  The bottom row is Rosemary's crazy flower patchwork and Sandra's painted and stamped card.
 

From Janet is a foundation pieced flower and next to that is Jacquie's blue paper flowers on blue leafy background.  At the bottom is Lesley's trapped flowers under orgranza and lastly from Carole is a machine embroidered bunch of flowers.  There are a couple more to come that I know are on the way.

On the subject of birthday postcards, the week before was Avril's birthday and this is that I sent her

I made this card way back in August bank holiday and her theme was sea, boats, beach and I appliqued some cottages to look like a fishing village.  The boats were cut from the same fabric and the sea was made from layered strips of blue cut with a zigzag rotary cutting blade and sewn over with wavy stitching.  I ought to have put a photo of the fabric that I used (on a few occasions) with the cottages and boats on a sew theme as its been fussy cut so much that it has holes all over the place!

Another collection of cards that I've received recently come under the heading of "Here's one I made earlier"  of cards made from earlier swap collections.  In the post here were the ones that I sent out and below is a photo of the ones I've received.

Bunting from Benta, a Penguin (from a black and white swap) from Jan, Sunbonnet Sue (windy days) from Carole and Kandinsky inspired circles from Janet.

I've taken to knitting recently but the trouble with it is the sewing together of the parts that make a garment, as it's not so easy to sew things in the artificial light, so at the weekend I finished sewing in the end to some fingerless gloves that I've knitted.

This was one ball of sock wool but it looks like different yarns, but there would have been even more ends to have sewn in!  Another knitting finish I can't show yet are a couple of scarves that I've made for Christmas.

Here's progress on another Dresden Plate block in progress.

Lastly on a flowery note is a Christmas Cactus that I bought in Ikea a couple of years ago which has been flowering brilliantly, if a bit early, for Christmas.