Postcard catch up

I've been hanging on to these until I had a full set but then I tidied my sewing room and lost them amongst the tidiness.  So I've decided I'd better show them now unless I lose them again.

 Continuing the year long swap based on Sara Coleridge's poem "The Garden Year" we've reached July, which brings cooling showers, Apricots and Gillyflowers.  The two gillyflowers above are from (top) Inge in Berlin and bottom from Alice in Glasgow

 Helen's depicting the cooling showers (above) as is Pauline's goose below.

I put my cards in the post before I took a scan so you will just have to imagine them.  I created a background of rain using metallic thread and then sewed down flowers I'd burned from sheer fabrics (several layers together) using a different metallic thread.  In the corner I created a sun.  Background was a sky/cloud patterned fabric.

The next card set is "Travel" and again I forgot to take a scan but mine was space travel.

I liked the fact that all of the swappers had used maps as part of their backgrounds but none had duplicated the mode of travel.  From top to bottom, Miriam, Helen and Jan.  I love Jan's chair its the only form of travel I've been doing lately.

I'm finding the house very quiet, even though Keith and I were not a noisy couple.  It's the little things you miss, I often turn to say something to him and he's not there.  But I still talk to him and I'm sure he continues to listen to my pieces of useless information.  

At the moment my hands are full trying to help my sister cope.  She has been signed off work ill for almost a year, diagnosed initially with depression.  Now though the doctors think its a physical problem rather than a psychological one.  Her gait is very strange (she walks like a baby with a full nappy), she has some facial palsy, cognitive problems and her memory is very unreliable, plus she has lost a lot of weight.  The gut feeling of her consultants is that she has muscular sclerosis but they cannot be certain.  Although she has many of the symptoms of MS the numerous blood tests, xrays, MRI/CT scans show very mixed results.  She has now been referred to a neurologist to see whether she has some rare variant of MS but cannot be seen until September.  I just hope they hurry up and find out what is wrong with her.