Two More Finishes and some CFS / Bad Science News

 Two more finishes?  I know!  It feels really good!

This quilt in particular has been on the go for a long time.  My DiL died in 2009 and I've been using his shirts ever since - the primary objective of making quilts for his 4 grandchildren was met quite quickly, but other quilts have been ticking along more slowly.  This quilt is the very last one - the one for my DH.  I used all the scraps that I had leftover to make the hexagons - but it's taken me years to get the individual flowers sewn together!

This summer I finished sewing them together and appliqued them onto a grey spot background.  Last week I quilted and bound the quilt.  Finished and given to my DH!

Approximately 60" x 40"

This little quilt has also been on the back burner for a while.  The top was finished last November, I think..... so it was good to get it quilted and bound this week too.

36" square it was a 'use it up' project using scraps from various sources.  It has a few fragments of a nursery fabric including a teddy bear head, so it's been called 'Square Bears'.  It will be off to Linus at some point.


I'm also pleased to say that the variegated Shasiko thread that I'd run out of has been ordered and arrived, so I'll be back to hand sewing the project that needed it soon too.


Now, onto the bad science news that I mentioned in the title of this blog post.

You may know, if you read this blog, that I suffer from ME / CFS.  Earlier this month data from a landmark study in 2011 was released to the public.  This was the study that had been telling the world that people with ME / CFS could improve their chances of recovery if they undertook 'graded exercise' - doing a little more exercise each day.  This didn't chime with my experience, where days might be good or bad, and trying to do 'more' on a bad day could send me into a horrible relapse where I would struggle to get out of bed.  I spent three years almost housebound, and although I'm not as bad as that now (thank you, pregnancies and cranial osteopathy!), it's only by carefully preserving energy for planned things (like my children coming home from school, or seeing friends for an evening once every two months) that I get through my days with reasonable grace.  I still miss out on lots of things that I've love to do and can't.  If there was a cure I'd be first in line for it!Sometimes it makes me sad and sometimes it makes me cross but I don't generally whine about it as I'd rather use the energy for something positive. 

HOWEVER it has now been shown that this study was bad science and that the results aren't at all reliable.  Why is this important?  Why is this important to me?  Because the original study was widely picked up in the 'popular press' and I suspect that the new interpretation of the data won't be.  Please, if you've read this far, read this article about it

Bad Science misled millions with CFS.

Then think about sharing it with your friends too.  I'm only one person with CFS/ME but there are lots of us around - and we'd all love you to understand a bit more about our very variable condition.

Off my soap box now, and planning to do a little calm hand sewing.