This April...

As predicted April has indeed been busy, and it’s brought a few surprises with it too - not all of them necessarily wanted, but such as it is we’ve needed to embrace those and roll with it. It’s not my story, though clearly I’m affected but everyone is ok and it’s why my blog has been unexpectedly quieter than I’d planned these past few days. At some point I may share more, but not just yet.

The fields around us have turned a gorgeous shade of yellow, which I love, but which MOH quite literally sneezes at. Though he has discovered a major trigger for his hayfever, so there is that. It’s the first year we’ve seen so much rapeseed growing locally, it could be just the cycle of rotation though, at some point we’ll find out - it makes for a great picture though, doesn’t it?

The month started with a trip to Wales for my youngest niece’s wedding, and somehow the celebrations coincided with those two warm - actually quite hot - days. I’m not sure how they managed that, and I’m not sure they know either - but we’re all very glad it happened that way. Sunglasses were definitely needed rather than the cold weather options I’d been anticipating!

While we were there we had a look around Ludlow, and stopped off at Powis Castle on our journey home. I wasn’t prepared for the size of the 300 year old yew hedges there, and so it was a great garden for me, and a pleasant surprise!

I’ll be sharing more of my photos from there, but just wow to the size of these hedges - and to the job of keeping them in trim, that’s got to be quite a task.

It’s great to see the gardens waking up as spring really comes into its own, my garden has suddenly taken off and throughout the month the blossom on the crab apple tree has formed, blossomed and gone for another year - hopefully there’ll be plenty of crab apples later in the year.

Closer to home we enjoyed the Bluebell walk at local Flintham Hall. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many bluebells before, but I’m more than happy to do so again. I was pleased to learn that the gardens will also open in May as part of the National Gardens Scheme, so I’m looking forward to another visit to see a different part of the grounds.

It’s also the time of year for the Newark Garden Show and we went along on the first day of the show, this year armed with a ‘possible plant list’ - we did buy some of those, but we also bought off list, including a lilac rhododendron, which has been on a longer term wish list. Though for some reason my camera roll is of random shots like the one below, which I guess means it’s more inspiration and future shopping based, than just a day out.

We’ve been holiday planning and looking at returning to the Loire region of France, this time travelling all the way by train. If we’re lucky we may add some cycling to this, or we may just stick with some walking, but our plans include staying at a chateau or two, some wine tasting and return visit to the Chateau and gardens of Villandry.

We’ve had our first barbecue of the year - amazing for April - and tried a new to us restaurant in Nottingham, thoroughly enjoying our meal at Skein, so I’m pretty sure we’ll be back. There’s been a Portuguese wine tasting in Newark, but I found most of the wines more ‘challenging’ than previously but the evening was designed to showcase the diversity in the region, and it certainly did that.

I also discovered that my gold trainers cause my achilles pain, so I’ll be giving those a very wide berth for the foreseeable future; and when in Nottingham last week I seemed to have randomly hurt the top of my foot, the same one obviously, so I’ve been icing and elevating it as much as I can, which seems to have done the trick. I know that for the RICE approach there’s supposed to be the ‘rest’ element too - but with the Newark Garden Show and a quilt show at Uttoxeter almost immediately after the random swelling, that was always going to be tricky.

I went along to the Quilt & Stitch Village show with friends from my sewing group. It’s a show that wouldn’t have even been on my radar before I moved here, but it was a great little show which is held at the racecourse, and as it’s just an hour and a half away by train, so that’s what we did. The station is right next to the racecourse, so as walking goes it was relatively lighter than expected, which was definitely good for me.

Though I never thought I’d be buying material with beetroots and onions on, but I did - and I love them. I’ve no plans yet, but I’d not seen anything like this before and knew instantly that they’d be coming home with me. It was great to see some new to me suppliers at the show, along with some familiar favourites, and of course there was also a quilt or two on display!

Over the past however long I’ve been crocheting larger granny squares at my crochet in the pub group, and this month I reached the eight squares I’d been aiming for. My plan is to use them to embellish a tote bag, but first I had plenty of ends to sew in. It’s not my most favourite job, but remarkably they were sewn in within a couple of days - look out for the finished project which I’m hoping to share soon.

I also realised that I probably had enough scrappy houses now to make my first ‘village quilt’, and so today I’ve finished my first charity quilt of the year. I’d hoped to have finished it and shared it before now, but that life surprise got in the way of this too, so that quilt update will also follow soon, I hope.

I signed myself up for the online taster weekend for the Thread Academy as I’d seen Jo Avery’s delightful ‘Dream Birds Coin Purse’ and thought I’d have a go at making my own. I mean, a bird shaped pouch - what’s not to like.

This is as far as I’ve got at the moment, and clearly the taster weekend has been and gone now, but I have enough information and hopefully wherewithal to finish it and to do it justice. Isn’t it super cute already though?

So that was April, both brilliant and at times uplanned and unexpected. I’m hoping that May, my birthday month, goes a little more to plan!

This April...

Well April’s weather is certainly ending the month with a bang, and a steamy hot sizzling one at that. All of sudden we’re experiencing prolonged temperatures in the mid twenties, and while we’ve been lucky enough to have the odd lovely sunny day throughout the month they haven’t been quite as warm as this. Of course though with a bank holiday on the horizon it won’t be long before things are back to normal. It is what it is.

Our family weekends have continued this month. I’ve shared a separate post about the joy the blossom brought after lunch out in West Sussex with MOH’s side of the family. Then the following weekend we hosted a barbecue for my side of the family - and we were lucky with the weather that day too; we’d said a few weeks before that if it looked like it would be nice enough to sit in the garden then to bring garden chairs - and it was, and they did. It was a lovely and relaxed afternoon with all the usual, and a visit to see the lambs too. My great niece, who’s four, was impressed with our house and stated she could live here - she’s so much like her mum it’s scary, though her mum was probably twice that age when she had a similar if not bolder request!

Cute lambs and cats

I’ve had plenty of opportunity to keep my eye on the lambs - and them me - this month as I’ve had a week of cat feeding duties for one of our neighbours, which of course I was more than happy to do. Every time though that I walked past the lamb field they all stopped to look - probably for food - before bleating a bit and going back to whatever they were doing. They really are rather cute.

Feeding the cats was ok too, though one of them did a bit of a disappearing trick from late one evening to late afternoon the following day causing a bit of concern. But she came back - phew, and was unscathed by her big adventure - double phew! Though both of us were happy that she was milking the attention and fussing when she returned, and of course the other one didn’t want to miss out either - but mostly it was a ‘no see just leave the food’ kind of arrangement!

The Barbican and The Workhouse

The month started with a solo trip to London for me, strangely the first where I’ve travelled both ways on my own. I was in London to celebrate a friend’s retirement - and it was great to see everyone - but was there early enough to visit the Citra Sasmita exhibition at the Barbican, and also to stumble across the Moor Lane Community Garden, which was a fascinating place and had plenty of quotes, like this one, hung in the space.

I’m planning to share more about both of these, but they haven’t quite made it here yet - but will do soon, hopefully.

Over Easter with family visiting we headed out to our nearest National Trust property - the Workhouse and Infirmary at Southwell. It was our first visit there and we weren’t quite sure what to expect, but it probably wasn’t what we experienced. It was a really insightful glimpse into life at a workhouse, and there was a lot to take in - it covered the life of those in the workhouse and their daily tasks, but also the history since the workhouse closed, and was brought to life by volunteers in costume.

It really was very well done and incredibly educational - we also discovered that the cellars were lovely and cool, worth noting for future hot spells!

And last weekend we popped along to the Newark Garden Show again - we loved it last year, and so went back again. This time though we left with a few more purchases including a large garden sculpture (wrapped in black plastic in the photo below), which we just about got in the car, and a new large plastic pot which I plan to move the peach tree into at some point. And plants, more plants than last year too!

Lights, wands and customer service

There’s been some other new additions to our home this month too; the replacement light I mentioned at the end of last month’s post turned into a bit of a drama. After receiving the returned item we were told that the replacement wouldn’t be in stock until June at the earliest. June! So I was straight on the phone and email to cancel our order and request a full refund, including the hefty delivery charge - thankfully they agreed to do this pretty easily, but after a week or so no refund had arrived. When I phoned again it seems they were waiting for me to provide my credit card details, but as they hadn’t asked for these or even mentioned it I’m not sure how it was ever going to progress. This is the second thing we’ve attempted to buy from this company (we had delays on the first item too), and it’s the last - we won’t use this company again, ever.

Which is a shame though as I really liked the light - but not enough to be messed around, or to have a substandard lamp - so our search continued, and while it’s not the same a new light was ordered. That has arrived and even though that took longer to arrive than first indicated, it’s a keeper.

I’ve also had a replacement wand for my Shark - and I’m still impressed with it, probably more so as their customer service is fantastic. It’s a shame they don’t sell lights tbh! With family visiting we were cleaning, as you do. We even cleaned the cobwebs off the highest skylight, which involved the garden ladder at it’s full extension and a rigged up cobweb buster boosted with our extended skylight pole. Clearly MOH was up the ladder and I was directing from the ground!

But cleaning at ground level also gave us an issue as the pivot joint on the Shark sheared and so it wouldn’t open to full height. It was still usable but to use it we had to bend double, so it wasn’t ideal. I thought I’d give them a call even though it was a Saturday morning to try to source a replacement, and sure enough they sorted it there and then and the replacement part arrived on the Tuesday. Given my other customer services experiences this month, this was the total other end of the scale and quite frankly all customer service should be like this.

We’ve welcomed new neighbours in the last barn to be completed on our development, and enjoyed their hospitality along with our other close neighbours one evening. A productive evening too it would seem as remember last month I said there was more traffic coming through the village (at speed) following the roadworks, well it seems having a car parked in the main thoroughfare slows things down, though it does at time encourage more beeping, but hey ho!

My sewing group held a stash sale, and while I could have easily hosted a table I didn’t - I went along with a small amount of cash to spend and left with more than I expected, including some fat quarters and some large pieces which I’ll be able to use in future charity quilts, some fabulous vintage Vogue pattern catalogue pages which I’ll share more of later in the week and a random selection of old haberdashery items, including threads ‘for darning all kinds of hosiery etc’ - clearly I won’t be using them for that!

And finally, in house news our main thermostat for our heating system is working again - yay! The issue (which didn’t affect how the heating system worked) was a wiring one, which thankfully was easy for the right engineer to fix. I’m glad it’s sorted though.

We’ve a busy month ahead of us in May, and it could finally be the month where we get at least some more of the garage sorted out - mostly because from the end of next month it’s likely that I’ll be restricting what’s allowed in my very new car, which I test drove and ordered last week. And yes, for those of you that know me in real life - it’s another Renault, I’m nothing if not a creature of habit where my cars are concerned!

If you want to read my previous monthly updates in my ‘This is’ series you’re very welcome.