Grab your sunglasses...

And no, it's not just for the fabulous weather we've been having, it's because I reverted to my favourite colour scheme for my latest quilt top...

I love this style of quilting - it's so much simpler than it looks and I did most of this one the day of the class, I just had to finish putting the strips together at home. I'm going to double the width of the quilt so the dimensions balance better, typically me I had to do it 20 colours deep when the rest of the class did 10 - 12 colours but I'm not really into quilts as wall hangings so I want this as a snuggle quilt for the house (to add to the ever growing pile!)

I've only got one more quilting class booked - the Mariner's compass block at the beginning of September. I've tentatively said I'd like to do another in Feb but that will have to wait until we see what the money situation is. I'm going to miss the classes, mostly because it's a whole day quilting with no distractions, but I am confident in my skills now and have so many projects to be getting on with that I'm sure having a break from learning anything new will be good for me.

I'm planning on taking some pics of my stitching at the weekend along with my monthly review so I'll do a proper catch up then. What I do have are some progress pics of the garden.

We've been working to clear things and it's going to take a long, long time to get it done, especially when you are working in the prime growing time - it seems as quickly as we cut things back they grow again at the moment. Still, we're starting to see a difference which keeps us positive.

This is the fence that runs down the left hand side of the garden. It's kinda knackered and not that pleasant to look at but at the moment it's holding back a lot of the overgrowth from next door (we have an elderly lady next door whose garden is just completely wild) so what we decided to do is take off the top half and use the better boards from that to replace the worst boards from the lower half. We figure if we give it a coat of paint it'll look better and we can think about what we'll replace it with later.

You can see from the pic that we've got about half way down removing the boards but you can also see the overgrowth we have to cut back. Yes, I know it's next door but she can't do it so if we don't it will just engulf our garden. At least she doesn't mind what we do so I'm getting on with serious pruning...

Here's the most horrible bit of the fence which is just next to the house (so just before the bit of the fence in the above pic.)

It's totally overgrown with ivy that is stuck to the fence so well that it's difficult to tell where one stops and the other starts. We're battling with it slowly but I think we might give in and remove the whole lot.

We have, however, managed to clear all the junk from the patio and surrounding areas so we at least have a pleasant place to sit and yes, those are tomato plants on the left, we even have four mini tomatoes (although they will be lucky to survive Lia's obsession with them).

We've also done a lot of clearing out of the beds at the end of the patio and started painting the garage which has made it look a lot nicer (it's blue because that's the colour of paint we had LOL)

That last bit of garage (the hideous wooden bit) is a badly built extension and we're going to pull it down as the first part of our garage conversion programme. Probably not till next spring though so we'll have to live with looking at it for a while longer.

So you have an idea of exactly how much things have changed here's the pics of what we inherited last august...

Looking at those I'm a lot less depressed by how long it's taking LOL.

And finally, as usual, Lia was happy to pose for a picture given the camera was out