Fourty shades of January

I was thinking of how to describe the current weather and feelings and the only way is GREY.  Low blanket of cloud, with barely a glimpse of sun, no rain but its damp feeling all day. No wonder I am wandering around in a brain funk..... I need sunshine and light.  At least it has not rained in some days.

Trying to get fit, I have continued to find small patches of the garden to tackle. I have studiously ignored the large veg beds that need digging over. Yesterday I stole my husbands builder's line from his shed site and remarked the edges of the asparagus/strawberry bed. Monty Don once said if your garden felt a mess the easiest way to make it look like you were on top of things was to re cut the bed edges. It is true, a nice sharp edge to a flower bed does make for a smart look.

Trouble was by the time I had cleared the grass edges of the first 5 feet of the asparagus bed I was knackered and had to go in to make lunch. Staggered back later to empty the wheelbarrow.  Hopefully I can carry on nibbling away re vamping this bed in the next week when we are predicted to get up to 10C.  When I am done with the strawberry end I think I will put down some black weed suppressing cloth round them as the weeding never got done last year.  I will put more mulch on the asparagus.

Indoors I am playing around with one of Christmas presents - 3 packs of fat quarters!  There was a pattern inside the packs for a patchwork tote which I have made straight away.

My husband immediately said I should sell it on my Folksy site but I have to admit I made a mistake on the other side.  I find concentrating very hard these days and when I got to cutting out square 18 I got it all wrong and had to make up 5 cms on the last 2 squares.  Besides it was such a lot of work that I could never charge the hours it took and I could do with a new bag for the Spring myself..

My next target for learning new skills is to work with stiffening/interfacing in bags and to work with D rings etc.  I started with this bag by adding a purse attached by a  clip to a sewn in D ring.

I soon found that to sew the D ring in I needed to change the machine foot to the zipper foot so I could stitch close in. I should have also chosen the setting that automatically over stitches at the start and end.

I have got hold of two types of interfacing both labelled as "stiff" but so far I am not sure they are hard enough. One is labelled "foam" but is hardly that.  I am trying to make a fabric box as shown on the blog  Shecansew.   Again it is stretching my concentration and accuracy.

Weather forecast is for cold, possibly some sun later in the week, and some very high tides.