Why am I making a patchwork quilt?

Buried somewhere in the side bar All About Me, that I so blithely wrote last October, is a passing reference to an intention to join a patchwork/quilting group  that was starting up in the village in the winter. And indeed I did join it, albeit a bit after most other people. It didn't get going until after Christmas by which time, as regular readers will know, I was laid up with a broken ankle, and it's once a month, so I think it was Session 3 before I got there. And discovered we were all making ourselves quilts.

 

This where I need one of those little emoticon things, showing a dropped jaw.

 

Now when I related this to one of my friends she said what else were you expecting, and I can sort of see where she's coming from, given that it's called a quilting group. Although as I didn't say to her, you can quilt things without them being quilts, if you see what I mean. I did say I thought that we would be starting with something smaller. Like a cushion cover. A  table centre. Napkins and table mats. Almost anything in fact smaller than the top of double bed.

 

Well I have put in quite a lot of effort, and even more money and I'm machining up a lot of fabric strips. I'm not even the furthest behind of the group. But I don't feel that patchwork and quilting are destined to become one of my passions. Or even that I will ever, ever do any patchwork or quilting again. I will finish this quilt though. And post a picture to prove it.

 

 Just one word of caution. Don't hold your collective breaths!

Emergency Dash to Vet

This story has a happy ending but if you're squeamish in a way that makes you not like reading about cats being sick I suggest you give it a miss!

 

 

We have three cats, which is at least one too many for one household, but is at least an advance of sorts on last year when we had four. There are good historical reasons for us having more cats in the house than humans, but I doubt they're of great interest to anyone but us. Or even us, really. So I shan't bother rehearsing them here.

What I will say is that OH has been twitchy about the cats ever since we had to have poor little Flossie put to sleep last December. He is forever worrying that they are too sleepy/not sleepy enough/drinking too much/ not drinking enough etc etc.

Recently his anxieties have focussed on Domingo, so christened by us when he took up residence* because we had never seen a gentler, less fussy cat in our lives. He was really placid, hence [Placido] Domingo. Since coming to Orkney though good old Mr Placid has a) taken to spending a lot of time outdoors b) defending his territory against all comers [not quite so placid as all that in the event then] and c) catching and eating a lot of rodents, some of which he can digest and some of which he can't.

 

*all of our cats, bar the one we got from the Orkney Cats Protection branch, have just appeared and taken up residence. We do not go round looking for cats, although I suspect that some cats go round looking for suckers, and find us.

 

This morning he started making a lot of noise. Loud single yowls of pain and distress. Not like him. Of course I then had to listen to OH re-hashing all the stuff about how Domingo hadn't been out much the week before last, and hadn't been eating much last week, which I largely ignored, not because I am in the habit of ignoring OH that much, but simply because, as I say,  he does stress about them overly much these days.

 

I did however have a look and a listen and was sufficiently concerned myself to let him ring up the vet and ask them to squeeze us in this morning. About half way to Kirkwall there were some very loud and distressing noises from the back seat coupled with an overwhelming smell of cat vomit, and I was quite pleased to be dropped off in town to go to the bank. By the time I  got out of there - Friday morning queue with two cashiers busy with customers who had apparently insoluble problems - and into the vets, all was well. The cat had indeed sicked up what the vet confidently asserted was the cause of the trouble. It was apparently unidentifiable but 'had had an awful lot of fur'. She had given him an  anti emetic and steroid which should stop him being sick and make him feel much better, and the old jumper that had been lining the cat carrier was now safely deposited in her hazardous waste bin.

 

He seems fine now, just a bit sleepy. He'd probably have got over whatever it was at home in time which would have saved us a Vets Bill. On the other hand he would probably have been sick on our light coloured living room carpet which wouldn't have been funny. Or indeed, cheaper to have cleaned than paying the vet was.

En Passant....

 

 

I just wanted to say that I enjoyed the BBC version of Shetland that was finally broadcast this week. I've no intention of writing at length because to be honest I'm a bit fed up with hearing/reading about it. Half the people who comment are moaning because the accents weren't authentically Shetland, and half were moaning about how they couldn't understand what was being said because the actors mumbled and used Scottish accents. And then there are the purists who whine about how it wasn't exactly like the book.

Shetland doesn't really have an accent. It has a dialect. I know that people argue about which it is until the cows come home and fall asleep in the barn, but to me it's a dialect. It's full of words that are particular to Shetland or which bear only a passing resemblance to their English equivalent. Cleeves very sensibly didn't use dialect in her Shetland Quartet books and it was a wise decision not to use it on the television either.

As for plot changes, I learned long ago that you go with the flow or you just don't watch. As an avid reader of Jane Austen, the low point came when I saw a version of Persuasion in which Anne Elliott not only went out into the streets of Bath on her own, but  ran through the pouring rain and ended up kissing Wentworth in the street. Obviously this would never have happened. Gently bred late Georgian girls didn't do that. That one thing destroyed a whole ethos of storytelling and gave the lie to what the book is really about. For me a bit of plot tinkering with a detective novel isn't really on a par. Would I have liked to see the inclusion of the sub plot about the Heritage Centre and the fraudulent claiming of grant money? Definitely yes. Would I actually have preferred the killer to be the same in the book and the TV version of it? Not quite so definitely but probably yes. Did either of these changes actually affect my enjoyment of the program? No.

You pays your money, as the old saying goes, and takes your choice.

 

What is wrong with this picture?

 

 

 

This is a map that was published in the TV Times, a television listing magazine here in the UK. The intention was to show readers the location of the BBC's new crime drama Shetland.

 

Sadly the islands circled are not Shetland but Orkney. Even more sadly Shetland does not actually appear on this map at all.

 

Red faces all round in the TV Times offices I hope.

Needle Felting

I've made one or two mentions of Needle Felting recently because rather to my surprise I find myself in a group that does it once a fortnight.

Now you might think that you can't really find yourself in a regular group and be surprised,  but you can because what happened was this -

Some people in the village go to a U3A craft group, elsewhere in Orkney, and they had had a go at Needle felting one week. R quite fancied trying it  and I said I wouldn't  mind being shown how to do it, so she arranged that the two of us  should go to J's house one afternoon for a bit of a go. Come the day, and all of a sudden there are 8 of us going and it's too many for J's house so the Village Hall has been booked and  they've decided to book it on a fortnightly basis.

 

Of course I wouldn't have to keep going if I didn't want to, but in fact I'm quite enjoying it so far. I suspect that at the end of the day there may be limits to what you can do with it, but I'm happy to carry on exploring it for a bit longer. Pictures forthcoming, if anything is worth taking a picture of.

Spontaneous Outing

I'd been planning to take things fairly easy this week, as far as I could. Last week was busy by my standards and my constitution isn't built for it. I was proud of myself though because of the ten things on the calendar  I managed nine, dropping out only of one of the two things pencilled in for Wednesday.

I thought that this coming week would be a lot easier before I remembered that we are scheduled to go to two parties [two! and I can't remember the last time we went to one], but that's at the end of the week, so I'm not even thinking about it yet.

 

Meanwhile today was the first day in ages when there wasn't anywhere I was supposed to be and the plan was to settle down with BBC catch up [Mayday] and wrestle with my sister's birthday socks.  But I was finding Mayday incredibly slow and the pattern on the socks fairly intransigent so I was only too pleased to break off and  talk to my friend R when she rang. Turned out she was after the phone number for The Woolshed as she was planning to go and buy some fleece for needlefelting, if they would open up for her. And they would so I invited myself along.

 

The Woolshed is in Evie and it's a beautiful drive from Burray, especially when it's a sunny day like it was today [don't get jealous, it was freezing cold as well!] We had a good look around when we got there, were shown a peg loom, and got a brief description of the difference between Shetland and North Ronaldsay fleeces. And we both bought a couple of bags of fleece of different colours so that we could do some mix and match.

 

So although I was looking forward to a slouch on the couch I went out instead and thoroughly enjoyed myself, probably because it was a totally spontaneous thing that I didn't have to think about too much beforehand.

 

Now of course I need to think about what to do with the fleece, although I have some ideas...

In the interest of fairness

I must point out that since late last week I have been an officially enrolled Ph D student at UHI. Since I have moaned at great length both here and elsewhere about how long the whole process has taken, it's only right I should record the fact that we have at last got that far.

Also in the interests of fairness I should probably point out that this is only as the result of hassling someone in Oban, who then pointed me in the direction of the on-line enrolment form which I proceeded to complete. Sadly she was unable to give me an update on the whereabouts of my ID card, but One Thing at a Time as the old song almost says.

 

And here's a thing about that self same enrolment form. Apart from the nuts and bolts stuff, there are acres and acres of socio-economic data questions to complete. One of them concerns your last completed academic qualification. Now my last one of those was an MA at UHI itself in 2008. But when I tried to enter that fact I got a little message saying 'data invalid'. Several times. So I put in my Leeds MA instead. I hope no-one is making any important decisions based on the data they collect from these forms!