Frosty mornings, lovely days

Hasn’t it got wintry – I love this time of year when the sun bounces off frost covered pavements and people are starting to walk with a spring in their step as they plan their free holidays over Christmas.  It’s so different to January when the nearest Bank Holiday is a way off, summer seems so far in the past it’s impossible to imagine the warmth ever coming back, and that time off you enjoyed so much over Christmas has triggered a period of reflection so intense you’re considering all sorts of crazy options to “change your life”.  I’m sure self-help book and NLP CD sales spike in the New Year. 

Anyway, my point is it’s a beautiful day.  If you live on a big hill like me, then you might have struggled to make your  way down to safety but despite the perils I couldn’t really see a few small patches of ice as a reason to work from home so striding purposefully down the centre of the road, I made my way deftly to the station and into work.  The wander along the river was bracing and lovely.  The little patches of wintry sunshine surprisingly warm although I didn’t linger for long as I could feel my toes starting to curse the December weather.  My sheepskin mittens meant the fingers were safe.

I got home last night to find my craft room finished and the IKEA shelves built – what fantastic builders.  They’d also phoned me to tell me the shelves were extremely heavy so where did I want them as once they were in, they weren’t likely to be going anywhere.  I managed to knock my back out when I went running yesterday but I couldn’t resist starting to move things into the craft room so have hefted all my books, sewing stuff, crochet cache and knitting gear out of the living room, dining room, bedroom, hallway etc.  You get the idea.  The boxes currently conceal a myriad of things I’ve got to sort out.  Hell, the cushion is perched over a shelf of doom that I’m going to sort on Friday but the point is, the flat is gradually looking like a home again and some concerted work on Friday should bring it all together.  Can’t wait.  Ended up propping myself up on cushions to sleep, having taken some ibuprofen and that stuff is a miracle as am no longer doing the Velociraptor walk that makes my colleagues laugh quite heartily at my painful expense.



From this ...



... to this (still a work in progress)



The next thing I must make is Roman blinds – it overlooks the street and I don’t really want to be working in there in the evenings exposed to the nosey gaze of passers-by.  My sister-in-law has some spare cappuccino coloured fabric that I can use, and I’ll need something to contrast it.  I wonder if a blue and white ticking would work as the centre, or if I should go for another plain cream fabric.  The plan for the lights is a dark lime green shade from John Lewis, and then I’m going to repaint the white shelves – which are not very attractive and don’t quite fit anywhere in the room but are extremely handy – perhaps in a green colour like the lampshades or a very dark brown, or perhaps a dark purple.  So much to think about.  I do love a project.  I’m also not sure where to get the actual stuff to construct the things – dowels etc – all the bits and pieces.  Ho hum, I sense some googling coming on and an eagerly awaited December pay day.  If anyone knows any online places to find the essentials and/or good and thrifty curtain making fabric/lining etc, I'd love to hear.

Pierrot rising

Pierrot pondering - another fan of the onesie (image from Pinterest)

I was looking back at my earliest blog – not hard, there aren’t many – and it struck me how quickly the blog changed.  I’ve gone from writing about things I like and how that appeal would lead me to try and make them, to writing about the process.  How I’ve gone about learning things and my technical challenges etc.  As a result, I think I’ve held myself back in terms of making things but also letting my imagination take over a bit more.  I’ve allowed my desire to make things to hide behind the process of learning.

So it’s time to stop focusing on the detail.  Well, stop focusing quite as much - I actually quite like the detail too - and start focusing more on the things that inspire me and capturing those images/thoughts/words etc.  These are actually quite numerous but I then get myself into a “I don’t know how to translate what I see into what I make” quagmire and don’t push through it.  I’m slightly hampered by only having my Blackberry camera which is quite good but not great.  Dear Santa, please bring me a camera for Christmas (or vouchers towards a camera).  And maybe an embroidery foot for Bobby if I’ve been really good this year.  I’ve already bought the pin boards for my craft room and as a consummate hoarder already have plenty of things to pin up to inspire me as Bobby and I are sewing away. 

Early to be making them but a New Year’s Resolution is to start pushing past the pattern.  Pardon the alliteration, but I really think this helps.  I should probably also not confess that what got me thinking was packing pyjamas for a trip to see my brother this weekend.  I decided on the marvellous space saving onesie that I bought recently to much derision from the OH who described my attempts at demonstrating its chicness (it really isn’t) and general practical loveliness as akin to a demented convict mime.  Rude.  If the floor hadn’t been covered in fugitive stuff from the soon-to-be craft room (picture of current devastation above) he’d have been sleeping on it.  I would also add that the onesie doesn’t have feet  - I love a onesie but am not trapped in some kind of crazy infantile regression-style breakdown where I don’t know where the edges are between my adult life and “inner child”.  Or something.  Anyway, it got chilly last time so making a playsuit was impractical.  Come spring, perhaps that’s the sewing project to kick off with.  Let’s get through Christmas first people, let’s get through Christmas.



This was a cupboard - currently a crime scene - soon to be a craft room (I hope)

At last, they’re finished.  In the end, it didn’t take very long to construct them.  The decoration took the most time, and with hindsight there are quite a few things I would do differently to achieve a better finish but the mistakes have developed my understanding further of the properties of different types of fabric so good learning.  I also got very focused on how to pull the whole together (dreams about stitching the lining for example) without considering sufficiently the constituent parts.  The plush sheds a lot as well – the flat looks as if it has been carpet bombed by a yeti. 

And ground breaks this morning on the craft room.  Rather daftly I have forgotten to take a before picture – actually I didn’t forget so much as run out of time after a panicked “must get fit” revelation as I fell asleep last night which propelled me out of the door before the crows were up this morning which meant I was then running late for the schlep to the office.  So no before picture, but I will take some work in progress shots as the week goes on.

My cushion has been banned from the living room - apparently it's "very nice but one for the craft room only".  Honestly, I should have made it in beige and pastel flowers. Grr.  Oh well, am sure I'm not alone in this - having a warm and untroubled fondness for something I've made, then being surprised when it is not shared by other people.  It's probably a bit like being a parent to a ugly child - no one thinks they're child resembles The Thing, and I love that ugly cushion goddamnit.

Anyone else been taken by surprise that it’s Christmas in four working weeks – the trouble with getting excited and baking the cakes in early Autumn is that it’s a constant low level hum and a body doesn’t realise the event itself is sneaking up.  I've suddenly realised I have no time to decorate the cakes I made as gifts, and also don't know how to decorate cakes.  Ah well, nothing like learning on the job and under pressure.

View from the (Wobbly) Bridge

Crumbs, it’s actually properly November all of a sudden.  As I wandered into work along the South Bank this morning, clutching my Thermos (yes, people still use them to take packed lunch to work) it was a stunning winter morning.  The fog over the Thames was thick enough to obscure the north of the river so I had to take a picture of the view (pardon the very poor literary pun above).  I was not alone – I lost count of the people taking snaps of the mist; perhaps we were all a little lost in the romance of Dickensian London and wishing we were wrapped up in our bed jackets at home in front of a roaring fire and reading a jolly good book.  I still envy tortoises, snuggling down to sleep in a nice fuggy straw lined box for the whole winter.  Lucky bastards.

Last night’s craftsploits took me north of the river to the Make Lounge in Islington where I learnt more about machine quilting.  We were tasked with creating a Log Cabin quilted cushion cover - quilting probably doesn’t get more straightforward than this which was great.  I’ve taken Friday afternoon off work to start making the baby quilt up (and finish those Christmas stockings so I may be being slightly ambitious) and I already had an idea of what I wanted to do.  The workshop last night hasn’t changed my view, but it was fun to sit in a room of other people all sewing away. 

There were a few quizzical looks when I pulled together my fabrics but while I was bearing colour theory in mind, I didn’t really want to stick with pastel florals, all spots, or harlequin solids.  There’s not really any point being frightened of pattern or colour given my view that if you like something and the way it works together, it really doesn’t matter what other people think – it works if you think it works.  I have my favourites of the fabrics, I might have used bright pink instead of orange thread, and I’m not a big fan of what I think of as slightly 1980s graphic prints (which is why I decided to use it to challenge my thinking a bit) but overall I’m really chuffed with the outcome and do think the colours and patterns work together well. 

I've rejigged the quilt pattern and swapped out some of the white spots for the orange fabric. I now think I'm going to scrap the four orange squares on the outside of the formation and replace them with a solid colour, probably light green so it tones down the busyness.  I also wonder if I prefer the first formation, and perhaps in that case I should switch out the white spots for a solid colour.  Thinking thinking ...  

Original layout - not quite right ...

New layout - still not quite right

This morning I started reading some preparatory work for my creative writing course in January and am suddenly realising how much I’m taking on by starting the Certificate at the RSN and a 22 week writing course; but life’s there for the challenge and the things I want to be doing are writing and making, which means I’ll find a way to fit them in.  Ultimately, I’d like to work with textiles and right now feel as if I’m right at the start of any kind of understanding, but am just not sure of the steps I need to take so all of these things come together.  Am taking a bit of a “ah Grasshopper” view of it and assuming that if I keep trundling along learning what I’m learning, and listening more to the little voice that says “take a picture of that”, “have a go at drawing this”, “how would that look in stitched form” that eventually I’ll get there in my own little way.

Having bought myself some beautiful dark green wool fabric from Fabrics Galore at the Alexandra Palace Knitting & Stitching Show (without owls - although have you noticed owls and small birds are everywhere), I decided the best use for it was a dress and opted for the Trapeze dress from Merchant & Mills.  Coincidentally, I really like their “eye test” cards and have bought a couple to frame up and decorate my craft room with.  More on that later.  I hadn’t counted on how much fabric I would need for the Trapeze dress so the wool isn’t quite enough – I’m wondering whether to use two different fabrics and see if that might look quite interesting, or to use the stuff I already have for a skirt and invest in some wool suiting fabric.

In the meantime, I'm knitting my first jumper in great big super chunky coral coloured yarn.  It's a reverse stocking stitch so I'm having to overcome my aversion to the Wrong Side as that's the side I'll be wearing as the right side.  It all seems very bizarre.  Running out of a ball of yarn halfway through a row hasn't happened to me in quite a while and now it's haunting me that I didn't tink that row - it was late and I wanted to press on but it's really niggling and I wonder whether I should just pull back to that spot.  Reasons not to include the fact that a) it's my first jumper, b) it's for me, c) I'll be hypercritical of anything I make anyway and d) I'll also conversely be delighted that I've managed to knit a jumper.  The super chunkiness of it and therefore the speed of it is a great antidote to the fiddliness of the baby blanket. 

The craft room work starts next Monday so blinds are weighing on my mind – not least as I haven’t a clue what type of fabric to use for blinds, where I get it from, or where to buy the little fiddly bits for putting them up etc – it’s new territory.  Clearing the room should be weighing on my mind more, but that’s the least interesting job, not least as I’ve then got to figure out where all the stuff that can no longer live in the room is going to go.  Trying to fish my boots out for work this morning was slightly problematic as stuff is now occupying the middle of the room ready to go into the loft, to the charity shop, or identifying its new home.  It’s a nice problem to have though and having spent yesterday evening cutting out the squares for the baby quilt on my living room floor having a work space will be great and I’m itching to move myself in. 

I decided that a square quilt would better suit what I wanted to do so I’m now going for 6” squares, 7x7.  This has gone from 6x7 to 9x7 until I finally settled on the idea of a square quilt.  Having worked out how much of each fabric I had, and therefore the maximum number of squares I could get from each piece, I assigned a number to each of them and then drew out a grid of squares and started plotting according to colour, texture and dominant colour in the main themed fabrics – the owls.  The owl range from pink to yellow, green to blue, orange to brown so I wanted to try and complement and contrast where possible.  I ended up with the following which I quite like but feel it loses impact in the middle so after work tonight I’ll have a bit of a play – I think the answer is moving some of the orange squares towards the centre, and some of the white spots out a bit to provide balance for the darker green spotty fabrics towards the edges.  We’ll see. 

Finally, the Afternoon Tea on Saturday was a lovely day.  We had about 15 or 20 people there who could enjoy the glorious sunshine from Kate’s beautiful kitchen and raised £200 on the day.  With contributions from people who couldn’t make it and other halves we should have around £500 for Pancreatic Cancer UK which both Kate and I are chuffed with.  We weren’t sure anyone would come, and for everyone to have been so generous was very touching.