Back to sewing

I've been neglecting sewing of late but am feeling re-inspired after my purchases at a car boot sale in Kennet on Sunday.

The latest project of many projects that I'm neglecting involves 25 squares, the idea being that 13 will have a flower and 12 have a plain colour in a textured stitch. But this is requiring quite a bit of concentration in copying designs to graph/squared paper in addition to the effort in keeping count while I sew.

So I couldn't resist buying an unused preprinted Ehrman kit called Spring when I saw it at the car boot and got it for £4.50. It'll be ideal for when I don't feel like concentrating and should also be good practice for seeing how to do the shading of flower petals properly.



My other sewing-related purchase was a bag of 17 skeins of Anchor Tapisserie wool for just 30p including several in colours I hadn't got and seven in shades of grey for a project I've got in mind to start and then neglect at some time in the dim and distant future.

My most nostaligic purchase at the car book wasn't sewing related - it was three empty third-of-a-pint milk bottles for £1, bringing back memories of infant school break times. I remember that I used to hate it if I ended up with a warm one that had been standing by the radiator!



Kennet is a really excellent car boot, if a little difficult to find as:
a) we muddle Kennet and nearby Kentford and generally head for the wrong one
b) the signposting is confusing so we take a convoluted route
c) it's only once a fortnight therefore we generally try to go on the wrong Sunday.
It's a year or so since we'd been there and was just as good as we remembered - last year's star bargain was a new DAB radio for £3. I also came back this week with half a dozen lovely strong perennials, all favourites of mine, as well as some bamboo to help keep my tomatoes upright and a couple of stocking fillers for my Mum's birthday so it was a good haul.

Disposing of the final things from the back of the pantry

The Mouse Incident led to us unearthing all sorts of jars and packets lurking at the back of the pantry - mostly unappealing soups and sauces, odd ounces left in the bottom of bags of pasta and a surprising number of packets of brown rice. (I periodically fancy brown rice salad, hoping to recreate one I used to buy from a health food shop. I never get round to making it, continue eating Basmati or easy cook white for normal purposes, forget I've got the brown and buy some more next time the fancy takes me.)

A crate of things has been sitting on the worksurface for weeks (months in fact) pending use or binning and yesterday we finally got round to throwing out the things we no longer fancy, such as a jar of African black-eyed bean relish seven years out of date, an equally old and rather odd sauce for couscous and couple of undated jars of other people's chutney in jars that hadn't been filled quite full enough. The revolting corroded state of the lid of one of them confirmed the wisdom of our decision that the bin was a better destination than our stomachs.



But the very old things did yield some pleasant surprises, in particular something called Symington's Table Cream.



It sounds like something from a bygone era - and indeed I came across this 1950s ad online - but it was a mere three years and two months out of date, so it's certainly from this millennium...



It turned out to be rather nice. But I better not buy any more (assuming it's still made) or it'll probably sit in the pantry for another five years...