New beginnings

After some time away I now feel ready to post again. The last few months have been difficult. I won't go into details but both my OH and I each had a family bereavement over the Christmas period. The last few weeks has been taken up with funerals and dealing with wills etc. so I have not really felt like posting. The unusually bitterly cold winter weather did not help, making visiting family and friends extra difficult.

However all that is now behind me and Spring has at last started to appear. One of the latest assignments for my NCFE Beading class was to experiment with spiral rope. Spurred on by the promise of warmer weather I have been trying to incorporate flowers and leaves in the ropes. It has been great fun. Spiral rope is one of my favourite stitches.

I am particularly pleased with the spring flowers bracelet. Some time ago, at a bead fair I bought several tubes of pressed glass flowers and leaves without really having an idea of what to use them for. I dug them out of my stash and started playing. This is the result.

Last Wednesday my OH and I went up to London for the day. Recent events have made us both realise that life is short and you never know what is around the corner. We have made a promise to each other that we will try to enjoy life to the full and we have made a list of things we want to do over the next 12 months. First on the list was to go to the Victoria and Albert Museum and I wanted to go to the 'Qulits 1700 - 2010' exhibition.

We started the morning by walking the short distance from Victoria to 'Baker & Spice'. They make the most amazing bread and cakes, their chocolate brownies are a particular favourite. The cafe is in a quiet street in Belgravia and the walk from there to the V&A took us past lots of exclusive shops and boutiques which I found fascinating. My Father grew up in the East End so we would often go to London when I was a child. We very rarely visited the normal tourist haunts such as Buckingham Palace or the Tower of London, although I do remember him taking me up the Monument in Pudding Lane and telling me about the Great Fire. He was a skilled storyteller and I used to love hearing him talk about growing up in London during the Second World War and working in the East India Docks during the 1950s. Visiting London always makes me think of him, particularly as I seem to have inherited his inability to walk past a bookshop.

The exhibition at the V&A was well worth visiting. It was really great to see some of the quilts displayed as they would have been used, on beds. One of my particular favourites was the oldest quilt in the exhibition. It was made around 1700 for the Bishop's Palace in Exeter. It is made of silk and velvet and positively glowed in the subdued lighting. It is very beautiful. We also visited the new Jewellery Gallery which was absolutely stunning and made a pilgramage to look at Pink Floyd's Azimuth Co-ordinator in the Performing Arts gallery. My OH was in total awe and took exception to my comment that it looked like a box with two sticks jutting out of it! Apparently to Pink Floyd fans it is a sacred object.

After grabbing some lunch at the museum we set off again. The original plan had been to visit the Chelsea Physick Garden. but it had started to rain and we decided to go elsewhere. We ended up in one of my favourite haunts, Kingly Court, just off Carnaby Street. While we were there I bought some yarn to make some socks for my OH in 'All The Fun of The Fair' and had a browse in 'Buffy's Beads'. We ended the day by having some tea and cake in the Camelia Tea Rooms before heading back to Victoria and home.