Held hostage by my teen

The last day of the school holidays and I expected Thea to spend the day glued to the TV or the Playstation.

(sniggers evily) - that is of course after I made her help me this morning. We had a pantry clean up and brought in all the jars of jam and chutney from the barn and stacked them in the new spaces we created inside, cleaned all the shelves down and reordered everything, then scrubbed the floor clean around the gas cooker.

After all that when she sloped off to her room I did not expect to see her again until this evening when she normally starts demanding pizza or chips or some such teen food.

So you could have knocked me over with a feather when she turned up at the door of the studio and asked whether I would stop sewing and spend some time with her watching a film or something.

In the end she set up the laptop in the studio - well I did have the fire lit and she discovered my biscuit stash - and we had a lovely afternoon watching box set DVDs, giggling, eating junk food and I still managed to get quite a bit of my cross stitch done - did you guess what it is yet? - you can just make it out in the photo.

You also just see the bag I had started to make when she trotted up, but the machine was too noisy to run over the DVD so I have that to look forward to tomorrow!