Furniture in the retreat

This week I've been busy making up for lost time and working on the retreat. The first thing I've made is a dresser for the kitchen area. While I was thinking about the kitchen I sanded down a little footstool and a kitchen chair - just enough to take away that really shiny finish that bought furniture often has. I'll be painting the chair and stool in due course.

You can see that I hung a lace-edged blind at the window too.

The dresser is made from mat board painted with three coats of a medium green emulsion, then one coat of a much paler green. I then sanded all that down a little before giving it a quick wash of water-based wood stain in oak. I left that on for only a few seconds then wiped it off again with a piece of kitchen paper, just leaving a very faint and patchy wash behind. Then I sanded it again (very fine sandpaper) and finally buffed it with a piece of scrunched up brown paper to give it a natural looking sheen. This was all done before I started to cut out the pieces to make the dresser.

I also have a little more stitching to show you ...

Do you remember the sycamore seeds? Here they are on the completed box. I have to say that I'm quite pleased with the result.

At our last embroiderer's guild meeting we learned how to do book-binding and I made this little notebook. I padded the cover and covered it with a piece of blue linen then made this needlelace heart to adorn the front cover. The lace was a bit of an experiment as I used some quite different and much thicker threads than usual but, again, I'm quite happy with the way it turned out.

While I was in Anglesey last weekend my sister-in-law took me to a little embroidery shop close to where she lives and I bought - and stitched - these two little cross stitch designs. Cute aren't they? And they were being sold to raise funds for Cancer Research - so all in a good cause too.

And finally ...

My garden is tiny. I may have mentioned this fact before. Six years ago, when my husband died, I bought a memorial tree - a bonsai crab apple - to commemmorate his life and his love of nature. The tree was already about 25 years old when I bought it and each year in April it puts on this wonderful display of blossom. In the autumn it even produces tiny crab apples.