My mother is out of hospital and recuperating at home. In the end I never spent any time with her because she stayed in hospital for a whole week rather than the promised single night and now I have a cold so I can’t be with her. I did spend a happy couple of days with my sister (more on some of our thrifty creativity in her new house in a later post) and made some progress with the masterpiece.
The core of the masterpiece
The central panel is complete, with the nine squares bordered and stitched together, and I am now putting borders around some of the other squares and blocking the ones that need it. The edges are relatively quick to do and the yarn is lovely to work with. I think that stitching them together is working well and allows me some flexibility with manipulating slightly different-sized squares (although the edging reduces the variation).
A fair share square
Plus, there have been a couple of additions from the blogosphere recently. Jill (Nice Piece of Work) has sent a beautiful square from South Africa. She chose to represent the permaculture ethic ‘Fair Share’ in her choice of local, ethical cotton yarn, plus the contribution of the central flower from a friend. You can see what she wrote here. This is my first square from South Africa and makes a lovely addition to the project – thank you Jill.
In addition, Katrina (Crochet Crush), who made the beautiful flowers of Australia square for me, sent a postcard showing the flowers that inspired her choice of colours. This is certainly going into the scrapbook, but I wanted to share it with you here too:
And look how the square captured them:
Flowers of Australia square
Thank you again Katrina, and I promise to e-mail the picture to you now I’m back home.
The Snail of Happiness 
