I have been berated by several people for not having posted anything since February so here is one before it turns into April. Things happen and I think, ‘I should put that on the blog.’ and then real life takes over and I don’t. This month I have mostly been decorating the bathroom (it is within the realms of possibility that I may get to have a bath in my own house this year), being an emergency choir accompanist (that was hard, J.S. Bach is so much easier than Pharrell Williams) and just about managing to do all the normal things like drag my children up and down the hill three times a day.

We will be seeing the olds and the very-olds over Easter (shh, don’t tell them I call them that or I’ll be in big trouble next week! Hmm, oops, I think it’s too late anyway…) so I thought they would like to see this one before then. I finally got round to turning this:

into this:

The piano stool belonged to my great-grandma but the top she had made for it was worn out by so many bottoms and I was doing a new one to replace it. I’ve been making it for several years (Small was considerably smaller when I began it) and it stalled after I had done the interesting bit in the middle. In January I gritted my teeth and did the twenty or so rows of beige that were left and the border and then put off turning it into a finished thing for a bit. The best bit was when I eventually dug out the box of two thousand (minus a couple of hundred) 3mm brass nails that were left from something else (because it appears you can only buy small brass nails in boxes of two thousand) to put the bit of trim around the bottom and promptly tipped the entire box all over the floor with my usual style and panache. Tiny very graciously agreed to pick them all up and keep me company while I nailed the rest into the piano stool; her job took her nearly as long as mine did.

The tapestry is stretched around a piece of MDF which looks a bit boring inside so I lined the lid with some interesting paper which we got ages ago in Sheffield to do something with and didn’t. It is Roobarb and Custard doing funny things (with descriptions like ‘Running away’, ‘Sitting (worried)’ and ‘As if rolling up sleeves’) if you can’t make it out. You can click on it to embiggify it if it helps.

The other thing we have been doing is this:

There was a large box with only one flap that had lots of plumbing in it (thank you Mr. Screwfix) which was crying out to be made into a treasure chest. It is to put all the Octonauts in which no longer fit in the box that contained the world at Christmas (it is a globe, not really the whole world, there aren’t that many Octonauts) and is much more fun than buying another plastic tub.

Apologies for the second picture, it was taken by an unsupervised small Photographer C-class who doesn’t know about the flash but I never took a decent one of it in that state so I thought it would have to do. In case you were wondering, because I know you want to know, there are eighty-five rivets each made out of a scrumpled up sheet of loo roll. I counted.

It’s not quite finished yet, it needs a few finishing touches. Oh, and all of the inside still wants painting.

Good job there’s no school this week.