A few things happened this month. The main life change I experienced was leaving my job of nine years.

There had been a few rumblings of discontent for a while so when my boss decided it was time to move on to a new job it felt like the right time to make my move.

We had a great team and we all knew our responsibilities well and things ran pretty smoothly. But with the linchpin removed, what followed was the exit of four more key employees, including me.

I stayed on the longest and I did my best to hand over the tasks to the new management. They are doing amazingly well considering they were thrown in to a tough situation.

My last two scheduled shifts didn’t actually happen. That week, we had a major forest fire grow quickly out of control and threaten neighbourhoods only minutes from where we live. In the last week thousands of people have been on either evacuation alert or order, and some have lost their homes.

Our family of five has four cars between us and we had them packed and ready to move in case the fire moved our way. Thankfully it didn’t cross the highway…but it did jump the lake. Burning embers blown by the wind landed and caused fires on the other side and more people had to evacuate.

The store where I worked was in an alert zone and actually closed for four days.

So that beach day I enjoyed in early August was the only one I had all month. My Nightshade shawl did get knitted, just not at the beach as I’d hoped. In fact I finished it today and it’s currently blocking.

As you can see from the photo above, I had about one gram of the red left at the end, so I’m glad I decided to make the lacy sections smaller to conserve my yarn.

Doesn’t it look different when it’s had a wash and been pinned out on the mats!

I sewed a very cosy sweater from this pattern. It’s view A with the curved hemline. The fabric is chenille with a fluffy fleecy backing.

I’ve been cutting squares for a quilt from my cotton stash. I’ll be talking more about this and my other crafting on the next vlog which I’ll be filming in a couple of days. Please do visit – Stitches and Slapdashery on YouTube.

Mr Fixit and I managed to get out of town for a couple of nights, despite the fires, for my birthday. We revisited a little cabin that we’ve been to a few times before and it was very peaceful and less smoky than just about everywhere else.

And I buzzed my hair! Initially it was going to be maybe 10mm, and I was going to give it a fresh dye job, then I accidentally cut a 3mm swath through it and had to make it all that length. It was on my bucket list and now I’ve done it! That was two weeks ago and it’s grown a couple of millimetres so today I added colour. If you want to see it, you’ll have to go watch the vlog. I still need to shampoo the excess dye out of my scalp!!

So that’s it for now. Take care and be safe.