Sewing Room Lighting Upgrade

Not much sewing got done this week as we had the electrician in and also have my mother-in-law staying with us.  Its her first stay with us since we moved and now we have a nice new sofa bed for her in the sewing room.  Apparently its quite comfy and she's enjoying her stay with us.  We're having a family sewing weekend away next weekend so Mum has her machine with her and I was able to set her up to sew on my cutting table so that will give her something to do on the days when we're at work.

I was happy to see the electrician as his most important job (as far as I was concerned) was to put in some lovely bright LED downlights in the sewing room, so now I'm all set to sew!

Here is the lighting before - just a central light with not so bright globes. They were some sort of energy saving fluoro globe.  I had to turn them on 15 minutes before I went into the room as they took ages to get to full brightness (which wasn't that bright!).

Here is the new and improved lighting (along with newly installed hard wired smoke alarm) and ceiling fan for when I get too hot when I'm quilting.

The photo above is taken with a flash and the one below without one. These are super bright LED downlights. I've also had a dimmer installed for the days when I don't want the lights quite so bright!

My only sewing done this week was to make some more yo-yo's for my hand stitched quilt.  I'm getting there - 57 out of 132 done.  Now I just need to get back to doing some more on putting the quilt together!

To finish I thought I'd share some photos of some of the lovely garden in our new house. We came back after being away for a week in our caravan to find lots of flowers had come out. They are tucked away in the garden everywhere and add a splash of colour amongst the green.

Most of them are this colour:

but there is one which is a much brighter shade of orange.

Its an even nicer colour in real life!

The other reason I haven't got much sewing done is that I've been helping my hubby and his friend Craig to rebuild his aviary. We had a really large aviary and this smaller one at our old place and my husband had to compromise and downsize to just this one. In the end we kept the covered section and rebuilt the front part using all new steel to fit the shape of the garden bed.

Its mostly finished but needs a bit of fine tuning including painting the wire black so you can actually see the birds but I think it fits the space very well. We've designed it so that we can build a second smaller one next to it in the future if necessary, using the small garden shed to the left of this photo for a covered section.

Once its been painted and we get it planted out with some grasses and a shrub or two I think it will look really nice (nicer than the old one at the other house in any case!).  Brian's just itching to get his birds back from his friend Tony who's been babysitting them for the last 2 1/2 months. I'll be glad too because then he'll be busy with them and I can get more quilting done!  A big thanks to Craig for all his work building it and Tony for looking after the birds for us for so long - you're both lovely guys.

Thanks for visiting my blog today,