I apologise now, I’m in a sulk.  I woke up this morning with shoulders that were in agony, and during the day this has spread to my neck and upper spine.  I have ongoing RSI issues round there, but today may be a new low.  I’m sure it was a combination of a week using a laptop on a kitchen table without a proper chair setup, 6 hours of driving back from Skye yesterday, and 99 minutes on the phone with my parents last night.  Today I have tried a bath (didn’t work) and then had a ‘WTH is the ibuprofen gel’ moment, which eased it slightly, and which is, now I come to think of it, due another application.  

Now those of you who have been following our adventures in Skye on Jack’s blog  will know that I burned my thumb on Sunday.  It was a rather deep burn, which then blistered, and got knocked on a rock, and required further attention on the Monday.  Well it’s getting there in the healing, but then I reached into my toilet bag last night to get something out, and ended up shaving that same thumb at the joint.  Expletives were muttered, blood was sooked, and plaster applied – thankfully I think I’ll avoid amputation at the moment, but it hasn’t improved my humour over pain levels today.

Today I had been going to try doing round 2 with some paper piecing that I started on Friday and had a severe falling out with (although in bed last night I had a moment of clarity on how to fix it, which had entirely eluded me in the cold light of day on Friday).  With that being entirely impractical, I hand sewed in foot pads and the head gusset for my latest commission bear, Hoagy, before hitting the bath.  Now I took a pile of craft magazines into the bath anticipating a long and luxurious soak, but instead of having a nice relaxing time, about 10 minutes after I got in, the toddler through the wall one way started having a wailing tantrum, which apparently subsided when her entire family came into their kitchen to join her in a bit of a party.  Next the flatmate arrived home and put on Captain America full blast, leaving me feeling like I was bathing in the middle of the Somme.  And finally, the neighbour through the other wall decided it was time to listen to music.  I’m not sure if my irritation at being interrupted coloured my view on the magazines, or my irritation at the magazines made me rather more annoyed by the ‘noises off’, but it really wasn’t a satisfactory experience.

My first falling out was with Sewing World, over a number of ridiculous statements, like the one from the woman who was saying that buying home made from her shop meant getting items that were sewn perfectly.  Really?  Perfectly?  Whilst I may put my very best effort into sewing things, I would never claim to be perfect, and I doubt that anyone, hand on heart, could claim to make anything absolutely perfectly.  Next was the ideal gift, the laptop case, because ‘everyone has a laptop’.  Everyone?  Now I’m pretty sure that both of my grandmothers are laptop free.  At least they were the last time I checked, and with one of them that was only yesterday…  And then there were Oliver + S patterns that we must all have heard of.  Well, err, I only knew about them completely by chance from the Sew Mama Sew blog hop in May – I have no kids, why would I have heard of them otherwise?!  Now I’m not running down the lovely patterns, but really, I get infuriated by exaggerations by over-enthusiastic journalists.  

Sew Today came through pretty much unscathed, as I realised I’d read it already lol

Next up was Making.  Now I really like Making, it may be my favourite magazine, so when I started falling out with them over a patchwork table runner that had no batting in it (because why would you leave that out, meaning you can’t put hot things on it?) I decided that maybe it was time to step away from the magazines lol. 

Come to think of it, I had an equally annoying read in the bath before I went on holiday of Craftseller magazine.  I definitely won’t be buying that again, not least because the ability to do simple maths seems to have escaped them when pricing the things they provide you patterns/tutorials for.  At best I think they mistyped into the calculator, at worst, I think someone took a wild guess at a number and they printed it without checking.  Maybe I need to stop reading magazines in the bath, it seems to be making me tenser…

Anywho, here is what I did achieve on Skye, 4 blocks for the Kind Stitches Bee being organised by Karen over at Listen To The Birds Sing.  Karen and her husband are going to take quilts made from all the blocks over to Thailand with them to give to children who had gone through a horrendous life so far.  You can read more about it on Karen’s blog, but here’s what I came up with (after 4 hours of cursing the paper piecing)

Then I pulled the fabrics for my partner for the Table Runner And Wall Hanging Swap.  I hope my partner likes them, I have a tumbling hexie idea in mind, as I think she’s a pretty modern sort of a girl:

Hopefully tomorrow will find me in less pain and in a better mood, although I do have to go back to work…