Sunday 10 April 2016

Cedar of Lebanon

We had to say goodbye to an old friend at work this week. The Cedar of Lebanon that grows just outside the school across from the office had become diseased and the decision had been made to cut it down before bits started falling off.
We have a birds eye view of it from the office and by chance I had taken a photo of it last month -


You can see it just to the right of the building in the foreground. It looks particularly good in the winter as the sun rises behind it. As I'm an early starter in the office, I have photographed it many times.


But over the course of the week we watched the branches come down and then the trunk. The trunk came crashing down in 3 big sections. I've never seen a tree come down before and now understand how they can cause so much damage when they come down in a storm.



I should have taken another photo once the trunk was cut down. I'll do that next week. It's such a shame to see it go as it was a beautiful tree but I'm sure something else will be planted in it's place. And we now have a view of the hills behind it.

On the crafting front, I've been busy working on the crochet baby blanket this week and have made about three dozen squares so far. I still haven't decided on the finished size, so don't know how many I'll need to make. I'm using 14 colours, plus white - a pale and mid shade of the seven colours of the rainbow. But the mid blue and violet are very similar, as you can see in this picture - they're next to each other on the bottom row -

Tina's Allsorts, Springtime Baby Blanket

I'm pleased with how it's going so far though and it should look quite effective when joined together with white seams.

I also had another crack at the teenage sized peasant dress yesterday.
I decided to invest in a dress makers curve ruler to help me shape the armhole and neck edges. I had bought some dress makers pattern sheets a couple of weeks ago, so got down to transferring the newspaper pattern I had made onto the plastic sheet, adjusting the armhole curves slightly and adding a couple of inches to the length at the neck edge.
The first dress I'd made sat quite low on the shoulders and I felt it needed to be higher and more "modest".
So having reshaped all the pattern pieces, I got the fabric out and laid it out. And guess what?...there's not enough! If I'm very careful how I cut it out, I should be able to get the front and back from the green fabric but because I've made everything 2" longer, there's nothing left for the sleeves...
However, I do still have enough of the same fabric but in the pale pink colourway that I could use for the sleeves and it should look fine. But by that point my "sewing juices" had gone off the boil. So I folded everything up and put it away for another day. Once I've made it though - assuming it comes out ok - I'll try and made some sort of downloadable PDF pattern.

And last but not least for today, look at this gorgeous little bag I treated myself to this week -


Isn't it FAB?!! I saw it on the market on Friday. It's made of faux suede and was (supposedly) hand stitched in Thailand. It has 3 pockets on the front, plus one on the back and they are all lined with different scarps of silk. The colours were so striking I couldn't resist it. Mind you, I won't actually get much in it. As soon as you've put something in the main compartment you won't get anything in the pockets! But it will be fine for summer days out when I don't need to take much more than a wallet, camera and phone.

That's all for today - enjoy your week!

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