At year's end

Vestiges of my time living in Japan still remain with me and one of those is the inner urge to do a complete clean of my house, my car and me before midnight on the 31st December.   You can imagine how busy the past few days have been!!  Now it is almost midnight and the fireworks will soon begin, so a ‘clean me’ is off to sleep in my clean house :-)

And my final "job" for 2016 was to add up and average my food bill spend.   Did you hear the happy dance?   I managed to reduce the weekly average by $4.09.   So for the past four years I have been able to continuously reduce the supermarket spend -  a total weekly average reduction of around $50. The DBEM was impressed and then said "I didn't think you were trying so hard this year" which kind of popped my balloon a little.   I am pleased and will definitely try again in 2017.   What has helped is doing a bulk shop every 5 to 6 weeks and only getting a few fresh fruit and vegetables each week.   This has been a huge saving on time and has made me very strict about writing a menu then a shopping list and sticking to it.   

I’ve not had time for a lot of stitching these past few days as the DBEM has needed a lot of help with her knitting.   Today we counted up the garments she (and I) have made in the nine months since April – a happy total of 25.   Several of these need buttons so I have promised her a trip to the button store next week but I do want to get my sewing done too.  

So the Quaker Christmas Sampler has not had much attention.   Here’s a progress shot -  I’m working on page four and trying to get to the top of the sampler.   She looks like an unbalanced Angel of the North although possibly a little prettier.  The remainder of the left wing is on page three!   I am tiring of the nearly monotone colouration of this so when page four is finished will have a break and stitch on something else.   Next post I hope to show you my “want to stitch” list for 2017

Meanwhile Happy New Year and thanks to all for reading my little blog.