Day 1

On the first day of our holiday we left Ruby, plus her own bags and baggage, with friends who so kindly offered to look after her whilst we were away. Then we drove up to an enormous hotel near Heathrow Airport, where we stayed the night. It was so near that we had a clear view of the airport from our window. 

We had a room service dinner as the restaurant was so crowded, which I thoroughly enjoyed as we lounged about on the bed and watched television whilst we ate! What a great start to a holiday. 

I slept barely a wink, which was about par for the course, since I never sleep well in strange beds.

Holiday? Why not!

Those of you who've been sharing my ramblings for some time now may remember that I wrote about panic attacks some time ago. For many years I've suffered from panic attacks and we haven't been abroad for our holidays since hotels, restaurants, aeroplanes, boats and being away from home often brought on very serious attacks. However, about eighteen months ago I spent a year having CBT (cognitive behaviour therapy) and have improved hugely.

So, when friends told us of some of their wonderful river cruise holidays, I suggested to Christopher that we should try one. He was really surprised and our sons were pretty amazed too, but I persisted. So we booked a trip from Prague to Berlin on the Elbe.

We arrived home yesterday and I have a huge grin on my face, as I was fine, really fine. The CBT must have carried on working in my brain over the last year or so.

Tomorrow, I'll start to tell you a little bit about our cruise - once I've had a bit more time to rest. It wasn't the most relaxing of holidays but it was great fun.

Document holders

I recently found a free pattern on StudioKat Designs for a travel documents holder. So I made a couple, which will be ideal for the holiday we're planning later this year.

New Toy number 2

Sadly, the camera which I was given as a retirement present nearly five years ago has not been behaving itself for some time and I finally made the decision that I just had to get a new one. I don't use it a huge amount, but I like to have it with me always just in case, and I really didn't want to manage without one. I have an ancient mobile phone which does take photographs but they're really dreadful quality. So I gritted my teeth and went out yesterday to buy a new one.

I didn't take long to make up my mind. I knew that I wanted the least delay time from pushing the button to the photograph being taken and I had a budget, so I just went for the best I could get for my money.

The photograph's a bit fuzzy but that's because I took it with my old camera, and that's what it's been doing with every shot.

Isn't the new one dinky?

New toys

I've been very extravagant this month and will really need to pull my horns in for the next few months. The first toy that I bought myself was an iPad, something I've been wanting for a long time. I love it. I can see how brilliant and useful it's going to be as an addition to my laptop.

After my son's experience of breaking the screen on his iPad I decided to go for a really solid case, rather than making one for myself. It's brilliant as it supports the iPad in portrait orientation or landscape. I managed to get one in hot pink which I was rather pleased with.

Next time I'll tell you about my other extravagance.

City and Guilds

Here are a few things I've finished for my City and Guilds course. It's good to actually complete something as so often I end up with unfinished samples of the technique we've been learning. I'll try and show you some of those some time as I've learnt so many new techniques over the last seven months.

For most of the techniques we do a sample or two and then go on to design our own piece to make. However, for the machine appliqué class I missed out the simple samples as I've done quite a lot before and went straight on to a more complicated project. As it finishes at about A4 size there were a lot of small pieces to play with. I liked it so much that I decided to go on and finish it. My second assessment project has to be based on appliqué, and I'm just starting to think about that now.

On Thursday we were making boxes. I've made straight sided boxes before but not round, so this was fun to try and luckily everything fitted together really well. I decided to add a tassel to the top to finish it off. One of our assessment pieces has to be a box or container, which we will have to design ourselves, so I'll need to get my thinking cap on about that.

And now, my first assessment piece.

Our first assessment project had to be based around one of the different blocks we'd tried out last term. Following an episode of The Quilt Show with RaNae Merrill I was inspired to try twisted log cabin blocks to make this table centre. It took hours to design and then even more hours to make, and there were many occasions that I'd have willingly thrown it out of the window, but now that it's finished I'm delightedwith the way it's worked. The exciting thing about this sort of design is that you spend hours designing and making the segments, but it's not until you finally sew all of the segments together that you really know what it's going to look like. 

Giveaway

KerryAnne of Shabby Art Boutique is having a giveaway of her gorgeous new book Simply Shabbalicious, and has copies for Australian and overseas winners, so pop over and have a look if you haven't already discovered her pretty and inspiring blog.