I've been AWOL for 9 weeks....
I've thought about joining in with WOYWW (hosted by the lovely Sarah @ Sarah's Craft Shed) again for the last couple of weeks, but today I've finally made it. I feel a bit like I've been driving through fog and am just coming out the other side to clearer skies. Grief is a bizarre thing in the way it affects people in different ways, and one of the ways it affected me was with inertia. A need to just stay in one place and not move unless I had to, mentally as well as physically. There were weeks with no stitching, and weeks with lots of stitching, there was a week of mad clearing, sorting, packing, moving to get Mum's bungalow cleared. And weeks of overwhelm - at the sheer amount of stuff my mother had (nearly two dozen boxes & bags of fabric and trim gifted to a local theatre group for costume, for example) and which now needed rehoming, mostly into my house it seems. We hired a Luton to bring everything home and we filled it.... sigh. My dining room has disappeared under a dolls house. Yikes....
Ah yes, the dolls house. The first place we went to declined the offer of our donation, citing a lack of available space for display (to be fair, true), and on reflection we decided to bring the behemoth home to make repairs (turns out some are significant) before sending it to its forever home. We have our eye on a couple of National Trust venues, so fingers crossed they take it.
Crafting wise, it's mostly sorting out books and supplies Mum had. She had a Bisley drawer unit just full of trims, which I'm enjoying stroking (LOL) and coming up with ideas. There was a whole drawer of golden supplies just for Goldwork, and another with loads of silver fabrics and thread too.
I've worked on a few pieces of stitching - I won't go into great detail here at the moment about who/what and when, but will just leave pics of where I'm at with each.
Maybe in the next couple of weeks I'll be able to get to sit at my craft desk and do something creative aside from standard stitching.
Speaking of which, though, I'm a bit busy over the coming weeks. This weekend coming is Big Stitch 24, the first big stitching convention in the UK. Up until now we've had smaller retreats where the maximum attendance I think has been 60 attendees - BS24 has over 200, and from overseas as well as the UK, with a guest speaker (Jacob from Modern Folk Embroidery) and vendors from lots of locations. All very exciting and just 2 sleeps before travelling up to Rotherham... eek!
I'm also away in Brixham for a weekend in August with the girls from school. We've known each other as a group for 42 years, although a couple have been friends since the age of 5. Lots of years. Mr B is going to stay home for a weekend by himself with the fur babies.
And then in September we're off to Tenerife for a few days, followed by a visit to the final Overlander show in Stratford Upon Avon. Time to pick up some campervan conversion ideas for our new van, Gomez.
More on him in a later post.
I think that will do for now - plenty enough to be going on with!
Happy Hopping!
Morti x
