A Million Little Things: Towards April

Towards April...and just as soon as you like. I'll be very happy to see March over and done with here at High In The Sky. More Spring, please!

As soon as it gets lighter in the evenings I feel in a mood for finding some sewing.

I hope that's more than just a commentary on the state of my ageing eyesight. No: it has to be about crsip cottons and gathered skirts and remembering the Liberty print smock I once made in needlework class. Or maybe a few alterations would do?

There's a little story behind this one. I did a bad thing. I made a rookie mum mistake, though I maintain it was an accident (see eyesight ref above). I got an email a while back from Uniqlo, about Ines de la Fressange's latest capsule collection. I like her style, so much that I have in my list of books I'd buy if I had a book token The New Garconne by Navaz Batliwalla. So I followed the link and I looked and I knew some of that navy, a little of that chic, had to be mine. I bought a shirt and I bought a tunic and then I added a dress for The (Not So) Small One, who is planning a summer of festival wear, due to a boy and a band. My parcel arrived..

...and I discovered that in my excitement I had hit the wrong button. My tunic and her dress are in the same print.I'll say that again. The same print. Gah! I'm taking the hem up, up high for her in the hope that she'll like it again. But that might only happen if I promise to save mine for Old Folks Outings only.

Other signs of optimism chez Fair?

A new cast on. Is there any better way of looking forward than sliding those first stitches onto the needle? I still have to piece together the man sweater I've been working on - it's nearly done - but I couldn't resist the call of the yoke: a new one for me, more of the little croft houses I knitted before, because the blue one I finished at the beginning of the year has been lifting my spirits every time I've put it on ever since.

This week if I haven't had needles in my hands I've been flipping through a book of some sort. I have

Little E and his school project to thank for the resurfacing of this old photo album. It's usually kept high up on a shelf at Granny's house: a record of her husband's, my Dad's, life before they met. That beautiful lady in that faded picture, that's not my Mum. She's called Betty, it says so on the back with love. I wonder, did she marry? have a family? Is there somebody out there, maybe roughly my age, looking at an album and puzzling over the identity of the little man with the Welsh name? I'll never know. And maybe that's right.

Not just looking, but reading: I've finished several paperbacks. A Farewell To Arms I hunted out after watching

the film of Testament of Youth. The other two are both new. I found  His Bloody Project  very sad. "It's only a story, or is it?" the reviews said: it's about a murder trial in nineteenth century Scotland and put together as a collection of documents. Very clever. As is Golden Hill, which takes place in eighteenth century New York. I loved it. What have you been reading?

...and that's everything I've been up to lately. More scrapbooking next time!