Deer Valley Quilt

Crikey, this is my fourth quilt of the year and it's still March!

Fabric is Joel Dewberry's Deer Valley in Azure. I ordered it from America a few weeks ago, cut out a load of charm squares, laid them out on the floor and absolutely hated it... put it all away for a few weeks, then used the fabric to make these cushions and in the process decided I liked it again...

So I rejigged the design and added strips made from a plain Moda jelly roll and completed it.

Now somedays I like it, somedays I don't... funny how some fabric just has that effect.

Goodbye greenery....

 These buds may look promising...

 But this is not the beginning of something...

It is the end....

It may be spring in Cyprus, but although for the rest of the world this is a season of growing and new life, on this island it marks the end of the most fertile time of the year.

In winter, with frequent rain showers and cooler temperatures, Cyprus transforms into a little oasis of green. The dusty sides of the road sprout grass and all sorts of wild flowers pop up in the garden.

But there's a ticking clock running on all this greenery. As the weather warms up and the sun grows stronger, we are going to see a return to a lot more dust.

Most years there is a hosepipe ban which makes maintaining any sort of lawn impossible. That said this year shouldn't be the driest - the weather in Cyprus runs on a 10 year cycle, with a dry spell for three to four years, a period where figures are close to the average, and three years of very wet weather. Its that latter period that we are in now, which is why we should escape the hosepipe ban this year.

So we are enjoying the grass - and the weeds - while they last, before my pots become the only source of colour in our garden...

Banana Bread to Afghanistan

Last week I made reference to Jim working on a "cooking project" - I am now able to tell you exactly what that project was...

A colleague of mine and good friend of us both, Jenny Packham, is deployed to Afghanistan at the moment. Shortly before she left Cyprus in February, Jim started making his now legendary banana bread and made her an ambitious promise that he would get some to her while she was in Afghanistan, some way, some how...

Posting it was one option, but unfortunately the military mail from Cyprus goes back to the UK to be sorted before flying back via here to the middle east, which could have meant the banana bread would have taken a week to reach her. Jim considered trying to preserve it in some way by adding alcohol, but a few experiments using sultanas soaked in rum were not entirely successful.

So in the end the solution lay with our military connections. A contact at this end, a contact at that end (which then meant two lots of banana bread had to be sent - a second for the other friend in Camp Bastion!) and the banana bread hitched a lift on a direct flight to Afghanistan from Cyprus last Friday.

Over the weekend while we waited for news it had arrived, it all went ominously quiet, and whilst temperatures in Camp Bastion rose into the 30s, I had visions of the banana bread sitting in a hanger expiring in its cling film.

But, there is a happy ending to this story, because today the banana bread reached its destination...

...and Jenny assures me it has not suffered on its journey!

PS - Coincidentally Jenny also features in an article in the Independent today, do click through if you are interested in finding out more about what she, and the rest of the BFBS operational team do in Afghanistan.

Hello summer!

This weekend the weather in Cyprus has been significantly warmer, and although it is only the middle of March, it has suddenly felt like summer has arrived. The temperature in the middle of the day today reached 28c, so the summer clothes are back out again and we are once again eating breakfast on our little terrace at the front of the house.

Coincidentally (or not?) our first two visitors of the summer also booked their trips this weekend and I have another three friends who I'm hoping will visit in June. We still have a fairly small social circle here, so it's lovely having visitors and it also provides much needed impetus to our garden makeover.

Talking of which, we had an extremely productive shopping trip on Saturday, where we bought a barbecue and some garden furniture. We missed out on a second hand barbecue and some furniture last week, but brilliantly our purchases yesterday actually cost us less than we would have paid for the second hand stuff and I prefer it. The furniture will be delivered tomorrow, whilst Jim is on a course at the other end of the island, so I may attempt to assemble it myself...

This weekend also involved the usual things. Cushions...

(This pair are for a BARC raffle next week. The fabric is Joel Dewberry's Deer Valley in Azure)

(This one is my husband's special request made from fabric he brought back from a detachment to Kenya in 2008)

Lunch at the mess in the sunshine...

With the first Brandy Sours of the summer...

And taking excitable dogs to the beach...

Hope you also had a good weekend wherever you are...

Sources of inspiration

This week I have learned that inspiration comes from strange places.

The plate in the photo above has been languishing in our work kitchen unloved for several years, possibly decades, until I picked it out of the stack for my cheese sandwich last week... and then stole it.

Although, I'm not entirely sure if it can really be classed as stealing as my boss was watching at the time, and I announced quite loudly that I was "stealing this plate because I love it."

Nonetheless, it will soon be taking up a spot on the wall in our kitchen and I found that when I needed inspiration for an applique cushion cover this week it was just the thing....

AND to make the whole thing even better, I have now discovered envelope backs for cushions! Seriously, why did no one tell me?

I'm also going to try an exact replication of the design after I've bought some fabric paints, which are on the shopping list for our Easter trip to the UK....

Plotting...

Not very much of a crafting nature has been happening in this house this week, but a lot of plotting has been going on...

● I have taken on board the comments about the garden and we are going to spend some money on it. Some furniture and pots will be bought and I have a gardener coming over to blitz the weeds and maybe take on some projects for us... I feel very positive about this.

● Husband has been working on a cooking project of his own, which I'm hoping I can tell you about later in the week...

● I have been working on a course plan for a patchwork quilting class I hope to run in the autumn term at the learning centre in Akrotiri. A few friends have already said they will sign up, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed they decide to take it on to the schedule.

● The organisers of an art week on the base have asked me to exhibit one of my quilts, I'm very flattered and nervous at the same time - I hope it comes back in one piece!

● And I have been savouring my latest read... Husband found this one and bought it as a Valentines present, it's the fictional story of an Army Officer and his wife living in Episkopi during the 1950s. When I finish it I'm going to try and get an interview with the author for the radio - A real life Episkopi wife interviewing an author about her fictional one, I'm looking forward to it...

The dog with a special gift...

This is Oscar. He's a rescue pointer cross who is staying with us this week while his owners are away.  He looks pretty innocent doesn't he? But we found out today that Oscar has a dark secret. He can open doors...

This is Bella, she can't open doors, but she likes to steal things and take them into the garden... 

....Alone they are harmless, together they are carnage.

Now before I start this story, I should say that there is a curse that stalks this blog. If I write a post about anything I particularly love, by the end of the week something awful will have happened to it. See here and here for the quilt story as evidence.

So anyway, we left for work this morning and as we normally do we shut the dogs in the kitchen with access to the outside. Any mischief they can get up to there is confined to painting works of art on the tiled floor with their muddy feet.

It was a quiet, non-eventful day at work. Then shortly after 2pm, I had a call from my neighbour Laura, who started the conversation with that slightly unnerving phrase "Don't panic, but..."

It transpired that shortly before she called, she had looked out of her kitchen window and seen Oscar & Bella making off down the street. As she told me this I was desperately racking my brain trying to think of a way in which the dogs might have climbed a 6 foot wall or unlocked a padlocked steel gate, but there was it turns out a simpler explanation...

At some point today Oscar had impressed his new buddies by opening every single door in the downstairs of the house, allowing the three of them free access to the sitting room, sewing room and eventually front hallway.

From there he opened the front door and the two dogs (note Macy stayed in the house!) trotted off down the street.

They were eventually captured by Laura who returned them to the house which was, to quote her "covered in pieces of fabric and your camera is out in the garden".

You can only begin to imagine what went on in my mind at this point... The beautifully stacked piles of fabric I had for my current quilting project, or (God forbid!) my stash of Amy Butler Full Moon, which is so lovely I can only look at it.

I drove home imaging all sorts of chaos. Jim fortunately beat me to the house and cleared a lot of it up and as with many things it could have been a lot worse.... It turns out the fabric that was all over the house was the contents of the rather tempting brown paper bag I keep on the table. The bag contains all the tiny scraps of fabric I have left over, which to be honest most people would bin.

The camera fared a little worse. Bella loves taking things into the garden for her little stash (apparently this is a rescue dog thing!?) and she particularly likes taking anything of mine. So our little beagle heaved a rather large SLR camera, with an even larger flash attached to it into the garden and plonked it down rather heavily on the patio.... which is why that wonderful lens I was raving about yesterday is no more...

(Oscar's "just been told off" face)

I confess, I have cried a little at the sheer waste of its destruction, but I have also been productive and ordered another immediately, it wasn't particularly expensive (in camera equipment terms!) and there is an outside chance the house insurance may cough up.... So onwards and upwards...

PS - Oscar has learned nothing from his experience and has already opened the front door again this afternoon. It is now locked!