Home Sweet Home

Just to briefly finish up the Cognac trip, we had a lovely farewell with the Taylor family and then left Cognac at 10:45 on Wednesday 11th October. The coach took us back to the Bordeaux Airport for a reverse-order journey: Bordeaux, Gatwick, Edinburgh, and another coach back to Perthshire. We arrived back at our own wee house at 10:30 that night. It had been a marvelous week, packed full of new and wonderful experiences. We were tired and glad to be home, even if our suitcases were full of dirty laundry, the dryer was broken, and lo and behold, a recent water main break in the village meant we didn't even have full water power!

In the two weeks since we returned, the water main break was repaired, the dryer fixed, the clothes washed, and our house guest duly collected from the train at Dunblane and delivered back there 3 days later. It was a short but very sweet visit with Kathryn Hansman-Spice on her way to England to teach a week-long massage therapy training.

Here at home the drapes have been hung and the studio cupboards have been painted. Don and I put all new door/drawer pulls on the wardrobe furniture in that room, including the new cupboards. That's the house finished except for the joiners coming back to put the insulation in the attic, obtaining the one remaining missing window vent, and having the carpets throughout the house steam-cleaned.

Tomorrow I will teach a quilting workshop all day in St. Fillans. It is on making raw-edge applique flower arrangement wallquilts. I will have 18 students who, I hope, will leave at the end of the day with a nearly finished project that they are enthusiastic about and pleased with. Yesterday instead of a So and Sews meeting, we took a field trip to a quilt shop that is operated on a farm in the village of Westmuir. It was a gorgeous autumn day for the run through the countryside. We were shopping for fabrics to use at the workshop as well as to finish up other projects. After the shopping, we went out to lunch in nearby Glamis. It was a nice day out but now I must gather my things for tomorrow and put the finishing touches on my lesson plan.

By Thursday I hope to be able to start reorganizing my studio, putting some items in the new cupboards and rearranging all my small fabric pieces on the wall/bookshelf unit. I've already almost filled up the new cupboards but I'm not sure everything will stay the way I have them now. It will take time to sort out.

Don has three new courses running and is quite busy with either his online teaching or trouble-shooting, or out playing golf, or doing some organization work. With all the breaks we've had lately, his golf game has been suffering, so he's been working on getting his game back.