In amongst the boat-making I have been carrying on with the patchwork for the garden bench. It’s now reached the stage where I need to think about joining the squares together. Fairly predictably I didn’t have sufficient quantities of anything suitable so I had to make a trip to one of my favourite fabric shops. As it was a sunny day I combined the outing with a trip to the seaside, well the Thames Estuary, and went to Belle Fabrics in Leigh-on-Sea.

Equally predictably I was seduced by other fabrics: the stripey fabric is for future boat sails and the brown and dark turquoise for a patchwork I have had in mind for some time based on the tiles at the cathedral in, I think, Urbino, Italy. I saw them in a picture in a book some time ago but I still need to find the picture and plan the quilt so that is some way off. The blue is the fabric I needed.

Jane