Oops! Apparently I completely lost my mind and forgot today was Wednesday until, erm, lunchtime. Sorry about that! Having been down with the ick since going up the very steep hill (which might be the size of Everest by the time I finish telling this story ;o) ) I was thankful to finally be feeling human again by last Friday which mean that on Saturday I got to head up to Killearn for our monthly shenanigans, I mean sew day. In a remarkable burst of overefficiency, I got an entire set of blocks for a quilt done, plus 2 lines of sashing while I was up there, and then when I got home I complete the top, ready to send to Humboldt’s Haus Of Stitches for the #quiltsforbroncos drive. Then I went back to pottering around with that bag on Sunday, and have since been working on an emergency project for Sew Now.

Finishes This Week:

This is the top I sent to Canada. When I was a high school student in deepest, darkest Saskatchewan in the mid 90s I lived in a house with 2 members of the local Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League team, the Estevan Bruins. Hockey was a way of life there in a way that I’d never seen before in a sport back here, even youth football not generating the same level of support as these teams got. In Estevan at the time, the players, 16-21 year olds from all over the country, were billeted with local families, many went to the high school with us, and they were often to be found out and about around town. The town invested in them, local businesses sponsoring the shirts of each team member and a good 10% + of the town’s population turning up for each regular game, more for the playoffs. One might suggest that this was partly because they provided the only cheap entertainment of an evening, as it cost the princely sum of $3 for my friends and I to get in to a game, but that would be unfair, the town was proud of them and showed up to prove it. A typical Friday or Saturday night during hockey season would see my friends and I start at a game, head over the road to the Houston Pizza, where we’d share a couple of plates of mozzarella sticks or nachos between us (the last of the big spenders), then hit the cruise, stopping at Little Js, the 7-Eleven or Dairy Queen for even later night snacks.

Safe to say though, I did not imagine for a second that the SJHL would ever hit the front page of the BBC News – even as I saw the headline that a bus load of ice hockey players had been involved in an accident, I didn’t expect to have even the foggiest of ideas of the team involved when I opened that page, so to find a team that I’d seen playing several times was a bit of a shock. I instantly found myself back in the town I knew, imagining the utter devastation that such an accident would have caused, and just how many people would have been affected. Having lived in a billet family, I could picture the 3 distraught younger kids (who I often took to the games), the upset of our house parents and imagine the effect it would have had on me, who went to school with them and sat and did homework with them every night, so when I saw the drive for quilts to be issued to families of the victims, billet families and first responders, I knew I needed to do something. It took me 3 days of the ick to cut out the pieces (there’s not that many, I was just a bit zombified from the drugs!) and the lovely Killearn ladies contributed dark greens and a Mustang to make up the required colours, but I hope it brings some small comfort to the eventual recipient.

In Progress This Week:

This little bundle is a sneak peak of my Sew Now project, doesn’t it just scream summer?

To Be Worked On This Week:

• Sew Now project
• Bag for my mum to give to a friend