More Passacaglia cogs

I have a few more cogs for my Passacaglia Quilt to share with you. This one is my favourite of the two as aqua and pink feel such easy colours to work with. When I make a cog with these colours I have a restful sense of being at home, in an unchallenged, slopping-about-in-my-pyjamas sort of way. Although, the dash of very dark green in the star points did feel like a brave venture to finish with.

By contrast, this apricot and aqua cog felt like more of a challenge, but was perhaps entirely appropriate as it's so sympathetic to the bare plaster which I photographed it on and which was monopolising our days at the time it was being made.

We've now moved on from plastering to actually getting our hands dirty ourselves! Since Friday, I've spent pretty much the entire time painting the loft and daubing myself in paint. This photo was taken at the start of day 3. I'm such a chaotic painter that the only way to try and contain the mess normally is to also don a shower cap and plastic gloves along with these old summer pyjamas…unfortunately, England's current humidity levels meant that the wish to remain unsplattered by wrapping myself in plastic was overwhelmed by the desire not to actually cook myself, even though I think if I had chosen that route it could have passed as an all-weekend Bikram yoga session, as the combination of heat and the bendiness required to paint sloping walls would almost certainly qualify - they are, unexpectedly, far worse than ceilings with a higher frequency of paint-in-eye.

I have just one wall left to do before we're ready for carpeting tomorrow, shortly followed next week by the arrival of much of the Ikea catalogue. After promising myself several years ago that I would avoid Ikea in the future, I have found myself magnetised by the simple, clean-lined whiteness of it all and how incredibly affordable it is when you find yourself faced with the need to buy several items of furniture at one time.

This photo was taken during the final week of work, when we had six or seven workmen from different trades in everyday - it was incredible quite how much they got done each day. I've never had building work before that didn't involve several days' wait as different trades came and went or those frustrating days where for no apparent reason suddenly no one arrives at all…but somehow the man in charge of our loft seemed to have everything planned like a well-choreographed ballet performance and less than six weeks after it was put up, our scaffolding is gone, along with the men who seem to have broken my fear of heights by imploring me to climb it. This week, I stood on a bar stool to change a light bulb - a task which normally induces vertiginous sickness and requests that the children don't ask me questions incase multi-tasking causes me to fall - and realised afterwards that I'd done it without any sense of panic at all.

This week I will have to delay any more English paper piecing until I've made a roman blind for my daughter's new room. I really dread making any sort of window covering and it's at these times that I temporarily wish I didn't know how to sew so that I'd be able to justify outsourcing the task; I find the maths for roman blinds and getting all the folds to cascade in just the right way to be a real headache, but I'm keeping in mind what a good feeling it is to sometimes put my sewing to such practical use. I've made some before, but it feels curiously like starting afresh - my mind is a blank slate when it comes to remembering how on earth I did it. Luckily, after several hours of staring at paper, YouTube tutorials and feeling disbelief at the numbers I was churning out for the folds, I found The Roman Blind Wizard and used a free credit to let it calculate the measurements needed. There's a brilliant YouTube video which talks you through how to fill in the slightly complicated-looking form and I've decided to trust that the measurements it's come up with are right, on the basis that the woman who did the demonstration video for the calculator had a kind, reassuring voice and spoke as though it would definitely work. I'll report back on whether this was good rationale.

Florence x