Walking East Stoke's lanes: September 2024

With a few days away in Glasgow during the month, there was less opportunity to get out and explore the lanes local to us, especially as I seemed to have also picked up some bugs this month - but I do have some pictures from a very blue skied walk along Moor Lane - though it was cut short as I was still struggling for breath. The cold that came after Glasgow - and which MOH avoided - lasted way longer than it was welcome!

But with blue skies such as these, it was hard to resist a walk along the lanes starting right from our front door.

The walk up and over the A46 always amuses me - the view promises so much (and it delivers once you’re on the other side) but it’s a bit of disappointment to see the traffic whizzing past with no real idea of what they’re missing. Even the verges on this section of lane are full of changing flora.

The seedheads that are almost ready to explode and fling their seed far and wide, not caring perhaps that a lot of those will be onto the tarmac road, and therefore lost - unless of course they make it as far as the nearest pothole (and let’s face it that’s never as far as we think is it?!)

The rosehips reminded me of those we foraged last winter which stood in the tall glass vase in our kitchen bringing their jewel colours to our impromptu Christmas decorations - and reminded me not to leave it quite so late this year, as it looks as if I can have an extra month or two of them in the house.

The weeds in the picture below also made me smile as I crouched down to snap them - at this angle they remind me of tall, proud sunflowers - but of course they’re not!

It really was a good day for skies and taking my recovering cold-full self out, but sadly we didn’t make it anywhere near as far as we normally would. No picture from the bridge for this month’s post, I only got as far as the bend in the lane before calling it quits - thankfully though the cold was much less short lived after this trip, finally.

Thanks for joining me this month, if you enjoyed this post you may also like some previous series where I revisit the same place - there’s my year in Greenwich Park and remember that time when I followed a tree?

My garden in September

In my garden September has been all about fruition - finally the sunflowers flowered, and the tomatoes started to show the briefest hint of ripening, then suddenly boom! they were ripe, and quite literally burst with the influx of rain we had suddenly!

I’m surprised to find that I have no other garden photos this month - usually you’ll find pictures from around the borders, but I think that tells its own story and just how much the sunflowers took over, and while they were late bloomers they were so good when they got going, in fact it’s the middle of October now and they’re still going, just not quite how I thought they would be.

At the start of the month the height discrepancy between the two remaining sunflowers was huge, and as the month progressed it got even larger. Both did eventually make it higher than the wall, but only just in the case of the smallest one. That wasn’t any bad thing though as it meant I could quite easily check progress, and I was surprised to see a ladybird nestled in the flower head one morning.

Gradually though the yellow petals started to appear, and unfurl. It was a slow process though, and I was particularly impatient it must be said. I was also curious about the flowers growing on the side shoots and how they would turn out.

But we had a flowering sunflower, finally - and it was the smallest one that flowered first. Clearly it knew how impatient I was and decided to put its energy into providing a flower rather than height - and I’m glad it did, as I was beginning to think it might not happen at all.

Similarly the tomatoes had been keeping me guessing, but they too finally started to show the vaguest hints of turning colour. Though not all of them.

And just with everything, once it starts it starts and then the rains came and some of my poor tomatoes burst!

But during those rains the tallest sunflower also flowered, so I wasn’t too upset for long.

Finally we had two flowering sunflowers, even though the first one did well to hang on for the largest sunflower to do its thing. And not long after that the side flowers started to flower, but the winds also came - and that brought new attention to my sunflower watch, but that’s for next month’s update, where I might also have pictures from elsewhere in the garden, who knows?!

Just in time for autumn...

I’ve finished my garden cushion covers, just as autumn arrived! But even though the weather has been changeable (to say the least) we have been able to try them out in the garden, and in the sun. I should have talked myself into doing these way before now though, as once again the task in my mind was way harder than it actually turned out to be in real life.

I’d seen the outdoor fabric l liked last year and as luck would have it, when I looked again shortly after our new garden table and chairs arrived I saw that it was on sale. So I made a way over the top guesstimate purchase on the basis that I probably wouldn’t be that lucky twice. I guesstimated enough for the four scatter cushions I wanted to make, the two I will make for the garden sofa when it finally moves outside, and some leftovers for anything else I’d potentially want to make after that.

Then I bought the cushion pads from Dunelm, and a pack of multi-coloured zips, and they all sat in our kitchen for most of the summer! It’s amazing though the motivation for filling the recycling bin, and the cardboard box of cushion inners was nagging me, so some research was needed on how exactly I was going to make these cushions.

That’s where Alanda Craft stepped in. I found their zippered cushion cover tutorial, watched the video and read the written instructions and convinced myself that it actually wasn’t that hard. And it wasn’t.

There was conflicting advice on the internet for what size to cut the material for the covers and so I decided to make a toile, which would also give me an opportunity and confidence boost (hopefully!) about putting in the zip. I know, who even am I?

And with the toile made, I really couldn’t put it off any longer…

FIRST THERE WERE TWO…

…AND THEN THERE WERE FOUR.

And the weather gods were smiling on me as we even got to test them out for real in the garden, IN THE SUN! Given that a weather warning followed for the next day we were very lucky weather wise - and the good news is they work, they act like cushions and they look great.

The zips worked out ok too. I purposefully chose bright colours - two cushions have green and two have a royal blue - so that they added a pop of colour, and looked like a design feature - which of course they are. They could be neater, of course they could but I’m happy with them and they work, and don’t look awful!

Was it worth sewing a toile?

Absolutely. I sacrificed a zip, but didn’t sacrifice any material I might actually use at some point. I remembered I’d saved some of the plain covers from some of the furniture we had delivered and that worked perfectly for this - I discovered though it doesn’t like a hot iron so needed to make a quick adjustment for that.

I realised that it would also work for tracing patterns onto, you know the ones that come with magazines, but are printed double-sided so need tracing, which on paper or even greaseproof paper seems a bit of task to avoid as not only do you have the tracing to do, you then have to stick them all together (though a tip there I’ve seen online is to sew them together using your machine, rather than using sellotape). The pieces of this cover fabric are relatively large so that would hopefully be minimal too.

As you can see I could leave myself plenty of clues along the way for repeating this on my four cushions, and it allowed me to test the size to cut the material. I started with this one cut at 45cm for a 42cm pad, but found it too large, so reduced it by 1cm for the actual covers. This was reduced by a small amount more as I overlocked all the edges - again that was definitely worth doing, as the material was quite partial to fraying, and of course it will give some longevity to these covers. I’m not planning to replace them anytime soon, in fact the seating pads we’ve used up until now I bought in 1999/2000, so it isn’t something I change that often!

Now of course I wish I’d started much sooner, but at least they are done!