The Week Before Christmas 2022 - Part 1

Sunday, was my day off as usual and I took it very easy as I always do. I had a lovely walk with the dog over Hackney Marshes, which was still covered in snow after a week.

The rest of the day, I spent chilling, doing laundry and continuing with some patchwork. In the evening, we had a family film night and all sat together to watch the movie Liquorice Pizza, which was interesting. It's rare for us to do this, so it made a nice change. 

I was back at work on Monday morning. It had rained overnight and the snow had disappeared. I was secretly glad about this, as it's one less thing to worry about in terms of getting to work. It was much milder too, so I didn't need to layer up quite so much.

I managed to rearrange the blood test for Tuesday afternoon and headed off to work for 11am. Work was super busy for most of my shift. You can tell there's less than a week to go to Christmas, as the queues at the till just never seemed to go down all day.

I had to do the weekly shop after work and then came straight home. I was so glad to get home and relax, once I'd put the shopping away that is. I'd not had a good night's sleep on Sunday night, so I was pretty tired and went to bed early.

On Tuesday, I stayed home, save for the blood test. I managed to make my way through quite a large pile of ironing, mostly towels, sheets, pillowcases, etc. There's still a few things in the basket, but they are mostly summer clothing items, so not a priority.

I received the all clear from the recent bowel cancer screening I'd participated in, which was good news, other than this, it was a very uneventful day. 

Apparently, there was a power cut to some houses down our street the previous night. I'm glad it didn't affect our house (we're on a different circuit), as I have all of the Christmas meat in the freezer. To be honest, though, we're now close enough to Christmas for it not to matter too much if they defrosted.

On Wednesday, I wasn't at work until 5pm and OH offered to take the dog out this morning, so I decided to get a bit creative and do a bit of sewing. 

I started by making a tree skirt. We are using a new to us small artificial Xmas tree this year, that I bought from the charity shop last Xmas. I was struggling to get our old tree out and up, as it comes in many pieces and putting it all together had become a chore and was taking the fun out of putting the tree up.  This little tree has just two pieces and is very easy to put up. With just me and OH at home most of the time, we opted to use this one this year. 

The decoration is a bit of a mish mash, I only put on things that I liked, but they weren't bought with this tree in mind, so some are a little large. It's pretty enough though.

To make the tree skirt, I used the lid of my laundry basket to cut out a circle, which I then cut into and made a small hole in the middle. I hemmed it all around and bound the middle circle as this was tricky to hem. I then used small press studs to fasten the ends together, once it's on the tree. 

Half way through, I did think of an easier way to make this, by making it double sided, thus it would not need hemming, you could just turn it out instead. I may make another one next year, out of plain coloured velvet or some other fabric and I'd make it a little bigger to cover the edges of the table we use to put it on, but for this year, this will suffice.

Here's a picture of it on the tree:

I then proceeded to make a table runner for the kitchen table. I'd cut the material to size at the weekend and just needed to sew it together. It didn't take long and here it is on the table:

It needs a bit of an iron, but it's a pretty fabric.

Finally, I thought I'd show you a picture of the finished fabric wreath. It's not perfect, but I quite like it and may make another in red coloured Xmas fabrics, as it's a super simple make.

I hope you're enjoying the lead in to Xmas this year.