I rustled up these summer dresses over the course of the last few days. They're all pretty easy, and made from wonderful summer cottons that I bought on the Goldhawk Road. The red one was cobbled together when I discovered that I didn't have enough of either the red or the green flowery cottons to make the entire dress, and I have to say, necessity being the mother of invention and all that, I'm really glad that my erratic fabric buying forced my hand. I'm rather pleased with the not-so-matchy contrast.
My purple dress just involved following a pattern. And, whilst it's perfect for hot, dusty summer days in Spain, it doesn't enthuse me as much as my improvised dress does.
As I've sewn, and ripped, and pressed out seams and tacked up hems I've listened to the wonderful alternative version of world history that I mentioned last week. It's an epic read (or listen in my case) that runs from the days of the mighty Persian Empire to the fall of Saddam Hussein. Maybe I got so much sewing done because I was totally engrossed in the narrative.
It's been a busy old week all things told, and I didn't get around to much restrospection on what I got up to during June. I've been trying to take a review of the month just gone as each new month of the year kicks off. It went really well for January through March, but then my wagon came off the tracks as other demands on my time left little energy for retrospection of any kind.
But June deserves to be treated differently. June was a big month for me. You see Mr B, my husband, had surgery to replace the ligament of his left knee in June. It wasn't a huge deal: it was never going to kill him. But it could have turned out badly. He could have been left with a long, painful recovery, or a permanent limp. As things went he's made a splendid recovery, and I'm feeling really blessed that he will be restored to full health and will be able to do all the things that he used to do. We're tennis buddies for one thing. We both play a really rotten game of tennis: he's a bit portly and I'm as blind as a fruit bat. But that doesn't matter because we play as badly as one another, which means that we're perfectly matched. We have epic battles on court. Any decent player would destroy either or both of us in the flash of an eye, but pitted against one another we're stiff competition for each other, and every victory is hard won.
Together we ski, cycle, hike and swim. None of it is done to any great athletic level, but it's fun and it's life-affirming. It would have been sad to have lost all of this from our lives. So I'm feeling very grateful.
And I'm also feeling grateful for long summer days with nothing very pressing to do. For lazy walks in the park, the locomotive panting of the WonderDog who invariably finds the coolest, darkest corner of every room we enter, the semi-meditative delights of cross stitching, the soft berries ripening in my garden and the long stemmed beauty of my hollyhocks - I can't tell you how much I love my hollyhocks. Summer totally rocks!
All the best for a fabulous weekend,
Bonny x
