The End of July Already

 July seems to have gone very quickly despite it being a 31 day month and I don’t seem to have achieved much, let alone any finishes. All my makings are work in progress, so let’s gather up what I’ve been making this month and crack on.

At the beginning of this month David and I went away to Chatham for a few days and visited the Historic Dockyard followed the next day by the Royal Engineers Museum.  Fascinating places both, the dockyard (famous for the scenes from Call the Midwife but we didn’t do the walking tour as an injury to my knee meant that walking was a bit slow. We followed the break with a stop at Arundel Castle, where we met my son and family, who live in nearby Billingshurst. You can read more about our trip here.

A rather large tag hanging from the rafters at the Chatham Historic Dockyard.

A biscuit sent by a soldier to his wife at the Royal Engineers Museum

A view of Arundel Castle.

I took some sock knitting with me and I’m currently knitting The Fairground socks by Kay Jones of The Bakery Bears using Zig Zag sock yarn by King Cole in Clown colourway.  I’ve lost my way with this, perhaps I should have made plain vanilla socks instead.  I’ve undone and knitted up again.

In progress is a crochet lap blanket made with odds and ends from previous blanket kits.  It is now draping over my lap, so that may be a finish next month. It’s currently 27” long. With the warm weather it’s just a bit difficult to work on, so that will wait until the weather cools a little.

As for quilting the orange quilt is in progress with having been layered and some machine quilting done.

And my mini Patchwork of the Crosses quilt has had some hand quilting with some green perle thread (which you can see in the bottom left hand corner.

And new this week is a Project Linus kit with all the squares and strips cut ready to sew.  I like a kit at times as there’s no agonising of what fabrics go with what and do I have enough of it. It’s all there and ready to go.

I’ve started on sewing the backstitch detail on my Dad’s cross stitch. My Dad passed away over 6 years ago and he and my Mum used to sew cross stitch pictures for a time.  My Dad completed the cross stitches but not the back stitch detail and I can understand why as I can only work on this for a short time and my eyes can’t take much more, so this will be slow progress.  This is a DMC kit of the Aston Martin DB5.

I’ve done some paper crafting this month with making these button cards. One is for a birthday coming up soon.

I’ve made an ATC for August but hadn’t made one to swap this month so there’s nothing to show here.

So I’ve been quite busy this month and hope that I have some finishes to show during August.  I’m not going to Festival of Quilts that’s happening this week, but there is a local Arts and Crafts fair going on over this long weekend in Wareham.