One of my favourite stories as a child was the Princess and the Pea, so I’ve been really excited by some of the projects I’ve seen around recently.

This embroidery is just so lovely, it looks so simple, which I find are often the hardest projects to do!

Over at Soulemama this amazing project really captured my imagination and I’ll be saving this one up for the future

Just realised how ambiguous this is and that I didn’t properly reference the embroidery – just to clarify it’s not my work! It’s by the very talented Georgia McDonald! Also after a bit of digging I’ve found the pattern for it over at etsy – very reasonable at $5!

Chickens

The flowers obviously did the trick

We accepted an offer on our flat on Thursday and there’s now a lovely Sold sign outside. Not counting chickens, touching wood and looking out for pairs of magpies! We’re also booking appointments to go and view places out in Surrey.

Knitting

After more than a couple of false starts, a bit of a strop and a lovely afternoon with a good knitting friend (that’s both good friend and a friend who’s good at knitting!), I am proud to present the half finished back of my gilet-to-be…

My initial problems stemmed from not understanding the pattern properly and having to count 82 stitches.. yep – I have a PhD and struggled counting to 82(!)

But now I’m underway so far so good! The tricky bit is not dropping the cable needle – any advice on that would be very welcome!

We’re trying to sell our flat, I don’t think I’ve mentioned that here, but where I used to spend my Saturday mornings sewing or writing blog posts, we now clear out for viewings..

We bought these beautiful lilies for the viewings this weekend, hear’s hoping that between them and the sunshine we made an impression! I love the shading on these, they’d make a lovely embroidery..

One of the other benefits is the tidiest of flats, I’m not a neat freak by nature, but now I can’t leave for work without tweaking the duvet so it’s just so. When I get a call at work saying can we bring someone to view this afternoon I then flash back to did I put that pile of laundry away? Did I leave a glass on the work top? what mess have we left out!!

There are only two of us, but as we effectively have only Saturday to Sunday evening to wash everything and get it dried it it’s a bit of a focus! Today’s a bank holiday in the UK so no work and no viewings – I’ve got washing strung up all over the flat

It hasn’t all been laundry this weekend, we went out to Surrey to the area we’re hoping to move to. When we first put the flat on the market we went out house hunting, fell in love we a great place, which sold about a month ago.. with no news on our place I just can’t go look at any more until we actually can put an offer in, but we can still go and look round and enjoy the countryside that will hopefully soon be a lot closer!

We walked section 5 of the London loop, through the North Downs. The picture is of Happy Valley – you can’t go wrong with a place name like that!