Walking and stitching.

Here in London the weather has turned amazing. It is dry and hot, not at all what we expect for a proper British summer. Usually it can manage 2 or 3 days of hot and dry then the rain moves in and the temperature drops. It's a shame to be working in doors, so much so that I try and go for a walk around the park at lunch time. Sitting here at our dining table on Sunday afternoon the temperature is 30 Celsius. It's starting to cloud over a little and there is a chance we may have a thunderstorm during the night but then it's back to great weather. Yesterday we went for a walk as we haven't had space for ages. We took Scamp with us and lots of water to keep us all hydrated.

Our walk took us on a circular route from Wimbledon Common which was very green. Scamp loved all the sniffs and John enjoyed trying to spot the different birds. Bird watching is so much easier in the winter when there are no leaves on the trees. Now you can hear them all sing away but spotting them is difficult.

Scamp loves being off his lead but doesn't run on too far ahead. I'm sure he's moaning because we aren't going fast enough. The path took us into Wimbledon Village itself and past the war memorial.

We turned off the road before we came to the shops which are all decked out with flowers and tennis balls ready for the Wimbledon fortnight. It looks like there will be good weather for the tennis for a change. As we turned along the footpath back to another area of the common we passed this jasmine hedge. It smelt amazing but did set me off sneezing.

Back on the common I took Scamp to have a paddle in the pond. I kept him on his lead so he couldn't go too far into the water. He doesn't really swim and panics if the water gets too deep. He got his legs nice and wet and muddy which helped keep him cool for quite a while.

From here we cut down a footpath between two golf courses. This plaque marks the site of an old iron age fort.

I didn't take a photo as there is nothing much to see so we continued down the footpath that had this yellow flower growing along its edge on both sides.

There were so many bees enjoying the flowers. At one point I closed my eyes and just listened to the hum they were creating. We crossed the Beverley Brook and Scamp had another little paddle. The water was very clear. What you see in the photo is the gravel at the bottom of the water.

From here we crossed the A3 via the footbridge into a residential area with some amazingly large houses. The road was fairly quiet for a change.

I'm sure many of the large houses had been turned into apartments but once they would have been single residencies. The walk through this area was quite boring but there was a lot of shade from the trees. We eventually crossed into Richmond Park where I was able to let Scamp off his lead again. By one of the car parks there was a kiosk selling food and drink so we enjoyed a bacon bap for lunch followed up by an ice cream. Having checked the ingredients to make sure it was OK for him to have, I got an ice lolly for Scamp which helped to cool him down and gave him a bit of a sugar boost. When Scamp was younger, on hearing that Scamp liked long walks, our vet advised me to take something such as flapjack with us to boost his blood sugar as Yorkie's can become hypoglycemic (low blood sugar). 

From here we made our way out of Park stopping to take some photos of some stumps of dead trees. They looked amazing against the blue sky.

We crossed the A3 again, this time at a  set of pedestrian and horse traffic lights to go back across Wimbledon Common to the windmill where we picked up our car and headed home. Scamp had his head out of the window on the way back enjoying the cool breeze. 

Over the last couple of weeks I've managed to finish stitching the binding on my compass quilt despite it being too hot to have a heavy large quilt across your lap. I'm so pleased it is finished and it's been washed.  Not that I'm biased at all but I think it looks amazing. Having finished that I can start the quilting on the baby quilt. 

The back is pieced and I love how the quilting looks on the back.

I particularly like the quilting on the centre panel. This quilt turned into a practice quilt for learning more free motion quilting. I used my ordinary Elna domestic machine to quilt it. At the end of 2016 I bought a new machine with a bigger aperture to accommodate a large quilt. I didn't play on it last year so decided not to use it to quilt this quilt. I'm going to be playing with it so I can use it to quilt the baby quilt later this month.

Earlier this week we celebrated Richard's birthday with a family meal. We usually wait until the weekend but we decided to celebrate on his birthday. It was loud and fun with lots of delicious food. Richard asked for a take away curry so I didn't have any cooking to do. It was delicious. All of our family birthdays fall in the first half of the year except mine. So the next birthday celebration will be mine in December.

This week I had a check up with my consultant. I see the team every three months because I'm doing the add aspirin trial. You either get a placebo, aspirin 100 mg or aspirin 300 mg daily. I'm certain I'm getting aspirin as my arthritis isn't causing me any pain since I started the trial. and normally in this heat it would be bad. I'm glad I decided to do the trial as it is very reassuring having a check up every 3 months. From next year it will be every 6 months until the end of the trial which is running for 5 years. Later this month I'm meeting with my surgeon to discuss a reconstruction and when that happens I will have to come of the trial for a couple of months.

I have been working slowly on Earlene over the month. She still isn't quite finished but I have 3 days holiday this week and I'm going away with John so Earlene will be packed as my stitching for the trip.

I have done quite a lot of work on her this month but still have a lot to finish. 

I'm linking this post with Kathy from Kathy's quilts for her Slow Sunday Stitching  Pop over and see what everyone has been working on. It's cooling down nicely for the evening and there is a slight breeze so I going to do some more hand stitching later.

I need to think through my goals for this month as I didn't complete my main one last month.  One thing I do want to try and do is blog more this month. If I don't write a blog post it's because I haven't had space to do something interesting enough to write about. The knock on affect of that is that I also tend not to read any of the blogs I follow so when I get back to posting I have a lot of reading to catch up on. Because you all write such interesting posts I find myself following up on recipes, patterns or just information that you have written about. It's amazing the things I've learnt from reading through your blogs. All that to say I must make better use of my time. So if I post more frequently I wont have so much catching up to do and will be able to spend more time sewing or trying out the recipes you've posted  Anyway I'll see if I can be more consistent rather than having long gaps in between.

Now where did I leave my stitching......?

Lyndsey