New Dining Room

This morning GM fixed the picture hooks on the wall, so we hung our pictures and the room is now complete. We are delighted with it.

We don't have a lot of pictures, just two originals and a limited edition print.

The first is by Lian Lilley Earley and is of Wisteria at Iford Manor. Lian is Warminster born but now lives in Devon, with her husband Mark, who has the somewhat flowery title of The Bard of Bath.

The second was painted by a neighbour of ours when we lived in Surrey, and is of a pub we used to frequent, the artist is Janet White.

Apologies for the odd angle, its the only one I could take without massive reflections on the glass.

The third is a limited edition print that we bought on our first visit to Bath in 2005

Now here are views of the room, one from each corner

As there are currently only three of us in residence, the table looks a bit overkill, but I look forward to many happy days when we have family and/or friends gathering and a table full of guests.

10 on 10, April 2013

6am, just awake, and still a bit bleary-eyed

7am, in the kitchen, soon after breakfast

8am, in my studio, loading photos on to Facebook

9am, in the kitchen again

10am, in the conservatory, watering my seedlings

 11am, on the road between Bradford-on-Avon and Bath heading for Bristol

12 noon, in The Anchor, Gloucester Road, Bristol

1pm just finished eating a magnificent lunch

2pm, heading back towards Bath having just left the M4

3pm, back home in Warminster

Linking up with 10 on 10 at a bit of sunshine

Painful knee and . . .

. . . a touch of cystitis means I'm feeling a bit sorry for myself at the moment.

On Sunday morning I walked out to Lidl with my shopping trolley and as I crossed the road I missed my footing and instead of stepping up onto the pavement I ended up hitting it knee first, and then fell flat, just managing to avoid hitting my face on said pavement. Talk about feeling a bit stupid :-(

It wasn't until I got back home that I discovered my knee had been bleeding and I had a bright red spot on my light grey joggers, oh, the shame of it.

GM very kindly cleaned it up for me and put a large plaster on, and it's not so painful today. Quite co-incidentally, I learned on Sunday that there is a word for suffering knee pain, gonalgia.

At the same time I have had a touch of cystitis. This wretched condition comes and goes with me, I usually manage to keep it in check by drinking loads of water, but a day out last Thursday and a long road trip meant not many loo stops so I purposely drank less water, with the inevitable consequence.

And now, although its warming up slightly, it's raining, which means I've missed the opportunity to finish preparing my second raised bed - I only need about another hour or so - and the forecast is for rain as far as the eye can see :-(

Oh well, no point feeling sorry for myself, lots of indoor jobs to be done which dont involve too much knee bending, and I can stay close to the cold water tap.

And I have lots to look forward to, my new grandchild should be putting in an appearance within the next month or so, his/her father, my second son FO (the fair one) told me they are hoping for a Star Wars baby (May the 4th {be with you}).

Place mats

Back in Autumn last year we did a bit of work in our kitchen, which you can read about here and here.

I wanted to make some placemats to use on the breakfast bar, and I spotted that my friend Tracy had some fabric that would do the job, which she very kindly gave to me. I cut them out ready for stitching then put them to one side. In the mean time we started to work on our new dining room, so I had curtains to make, chair seats to cover, and a million and one other things to do, and the kitchen placemats were forgotten - until a couple of days ago when I pulled them out and finished them off.

And here they are

The edging stitch is one of the 69 stitching options that I have on my lovely new sewing machine, this is number 30, isn't it pretty?

Many thanks to Tracy for the fabric.

I also have ten more placemats for the dining room, cut out of the leftover curtain fabric, which I'm hoping to stitch up over the next couple of days, and once GM has put up some picture hooks so we can hang a couple of pictures on the walls, I'll show the new dining room in its entirety.

Seeing double . . . .

Before

 

After

Imber

The village of Imber doesn't appear on many maps of Wiltshire, and these days is relatively unheard of outside of our local area. It's nestled in a small valley in the middle of Salisbury Plain, you can read the history of the village here.

On just a few days each year the Army allow civilians onto their training ground to visit the lost village, and being new to the area and inquisitive, we decided to take a trip.

Looking on our local area map the roads out to Imber appear as tiny country lanes, I hadn't taken into account that the military would use them to drive huge vehicles along, so they were, in fact, well made up and wide roads.

However, it was made pretty clear to us that we should stay on the roads, these signs were in evidence about every 100 yards or so:

We saw several old abandoned tanks that looked like they had seen better days

Also some cattle, not sure if these belonged to the army or are privately owned, but note that they are kept in place by just a single thread of electric fencing.

The village itself is quite small, with many abandoned buildings, all with the same danger signs as above

although these houses certainly dont look like originals, I think maybe they have been built by the army to assist in urban warfare training.

We made our way to the church, which was open, and had a wander round both inside and around the graveyard.

Meaden seems to be a very localised name, I've come across it three times so far on three different occasions - one of my local friends has a grandmother with the maiden name of Meaden, one of the local lasses who worked as a maid in the old East End House (on whose grounds our own house was built), and the current day local boiler service/repair man also have the same surname.

Some ancient graffiti in the church entrance

and, inside the church, a poster with a bit of local history

While on the plain, we took the opportunity to park up and eat our lunch in a place that we wont be able to visit again until this time next year.

Thank you to the military authorities for allowing us the opportunity to visit an area of the UK that not many people get to see.

Once a month for a whole year, month 8, April

View 1, the garden,

Not much change, the further raised bed is finished and waiting for the soil to warm up. The closer raised bed is a W.I.P. and is almost ready for use. Note the frozen pool of water in the black polythene cover! Brrrrr.

with March's view for comparison

View 2, the park

with daffodils in bloom at the bottom of the hill.

March's view for comparison

Dont the April pictures look a little bit warmer, just because the sun is shining? I'm hoping that by the beginning of May there will be more noticeable differences.