Cleaning does Pay.

We have a cabinet maker making cupboards in a few rooms of the house. He is a bit like that guy O'Reilly from Fawlty Towers. He is totally unreliable and disorganised and inclined to make mistakes. He has a very strong Irish accent and half the time I don't understand a word he is saying. So a job that should have been finished before Christmas is dragging on and my house is like a jumble sale with cupboards waiting to be filled and rooms piled with mess.
In the meantime my eldest son has moved to Sydney to do a short course at NIDA for 6 months. His room is not part of the cupboard tragedy but it probably was in a worse state than the rest of the house. So with no ability to control the house mess I decided to fumigate his bedroom. Hours of cleaning, washing, throwing out and dusting has been well worth the while and his room is spick and span and looking fabulous.
So what has this got to do with patchwork? Well I found, packed away in a box, an old dress of mine that I bought about 30 years ago. It was from an African Shop in Surfers Paradise. I hardly ever wore it but I couldn't bare to give it away.
It yielded metres of fabric, once it had been pulled apart, and it put my stripy log cabins together very nicely.

So apart from the satisfaction of having one clean room in my house, I also managed to make this almost entirely from recycled clothing and scraps.

PS I am sorry about the quality of my photos lately. I miss my little Sony. It's touring Japan with my middle son and won't be home till March.