Christmas Cards

Here are the three I did for the church Christmas card. They chose scrabble. Feel free to use and send as E Cards! x




Woo! Christmas!

Christmas peg angel

It is nice having a little baby that just sleeps and feeds- it is a tranqil transition to motherhood and means I'm still able to make things. Don't worry I am not under any illusion that this will last!
I am making a Christmas card for our church at the mo and for one of the concepts wanted a little angel. Inspired by a sultry peg senorita that Mel gave me, I whipped up a holy peg angel. Here she is with her more exotic friend...

Gosh look what else I made...

(with a little help from my loving husband and the Creator of the Universe, obv.)

Ramona Lily
8lb 11
Monday 15th November, 9pm

Flapper band for a lovely little head

Ah, maternity leave is the bees knees! I basically just make stuff all day, maybe have tea and cake with someone, loll around on my birth ball. It's lush. I've also been initated in to the mums club with my two besties and my sister and their riot of rapscallion kids. Tomorrow it is a party for one of them who is turning two, so I whipped up some pretty head gear for her, 1920's styles with a few bits of lace, polka dot fabric from a pillow made into rosettes and then some delightful buttons.
To be delivered in its own little felt envelope, with the wrist from the armpit slipper jumper.
With a personalised stamp and a quick knot she can undo.

This is probably the kind of thing you make for a little kid before you have kids and know how unrealistic it is for them to keep something fancy like this on their noggin. Oh well, I'm soon to become a more reality based maker of kids things!

Impending motherhood...

So, birth pool is in the lounge (well, originally it turned up at my work and sat in the middle of my open plan office, all massive and logo'd up for three days that I was away = mortifying) 43 hand me down baby grows are washed and I had my last day at work yesterday. At 38 weeks this little bun is pretty much just getting a good crust on. I am still loving pregnancy, it is all pros and no cons- i.e still able to ride my bike but get the joy of people's double takes, hehe.

I am having a luxurious day reading the paper, listening to my lovely new Brooke Fraser album, watching the odd delicious youtube video while Tim gets on with painting the halls. In the last week we have had all our halls plastered, hoping to paint and get Carpet Derek in before this baby checks out.

I just saw this image and love it - thanks Juliet.

Tomorrow we have our first Make in our lounge. Make is a monthly craft afternoon, tomorrow we are crafting up social justice patches for the Craftivist Collective's social justice quilt. Exciting!

The 6 minute felt slipper

I think I have mentioned before that I am a rubbish sew-er, an impatient, corner cutting seamstress. This was proven to me big time today when I tried to make some simple felt slippers.

You see, excitingly, our house is progressing. This morning Carpet Derek came and laid 100% wool down on our bedroom floor after a good week of plastering and painting. This is fab, as it means that when the baby comes (I am 37 weeks today!) we will have at least one snug little room. However, today's dillemma was that we have this lovely new carpet in one spot, and rancid, dusty (cool looking though) floor boards everywhere else. It will be far too easy for that muck to creep into our creamy lushness. Clearly, I need some slippers to leave at the bedroom door!

Having just been to a jumble sale at the Camberwell Sallies, organised by Mel, and picked up a wooly jumper for 10p, I quickly stuffed it in the machine on hot and felted that bad boy.
I then googled "simple felt slippers" and came across a couple of really lovely options. Rather than limiting myself to one recipe, I thought I should sort of mix them. I was aiming for Martha's neatness but rolling with Mary Jane's more freestyle feel, and um, just like when I do baking combos, it was a fail. I got one slipper. It was properly ugly and about 3 times too big. I was pretty mad after measuring my foot and cutting out newspaper and Everything.

In my madness I put my foot in the armpit of the jumper. Hello!!!! I had stumbled upon the easiest felt slipper ever- it was basically ready made! How I have managed to make the most simple of all sewing projects even more basic I will never know.

It goes like this:

1. Put foot in armpit of felted wool jumper. Toes pointing toward wrist end of sleeve.
2. Snuggle your foot down till it feels cosy.
3. Cut off the excess jumper hanging off the back of heel, and excess sleeve hanging from your toes.
4. So a straight line up from your heel (should be about 8cm or so)
5. Sew a point around your toes.
6. Turn inside out.

Done! Then, if you have some lace, or other goodies you've picked up from a carboot, wack that on and voila.

If this takes you more than 6 minutes per slipper then you are a worse sew-er than me! (Or perhaps it just means you are meticulous which means you can go far in sewing world, my friend.)

Above- the corner of my original attempt next to the proof of my practice on newspaper (it's not worth it, even when I do practice it doesn't pay off)
Below- the six minute beauts that will save our new carpet, hurrah!

Bunting fiend...

I love bunting. It is transformative. It turns a room into a party and turns grotty pajamas into a lovely decoration.

We have about 400 metres of bunting stowed under the stairs because we make a new batch each year for the Fair Christmas Fayre that we run. So we have miles of it, even despite having left at least 200 metres of it strung up around Bishopgate after the Climate Camp last year (it features in a lot of the photo's of the day, like this one, really set off by the luminous coats of the riot police).

Normally I make it quick and dirty, sawing off triangles with whatever pair of scissors I can find, stitching it inaccurately to balloon ribbon. This is what you have to do when you are aiming to smother the world in bunting.

But this week I took my time, I was only hoping to acheive a metre and a half of it to give as a gift to our little two year old friends at their christening today. I sewed each individual triangle inside out (Yes! Seams and everything!) and scouted out some real bling ribbon.

Recent free or frugal finds

We went to Cornwall last weekend, for a little holiday. What an amazing and exotic place! We had the luxury of a; a car and b; being outside of London - a combo that could lead to only one Saturday plan: CAR BOOT SALE! It was with expectation and excitment coursing through our veins that all six of us (Tim and I, bro and sis and Tim's mum and dad from NZ) piled into cars after breakfast, navigating in trepidation the windy lanes, to discover that I had the time wrong and it wasn't until the afternoon. But after an exploration of a beautiful little fishing village and a scrummy pub lunch we headed back to that muddy field.

And what joy it did bring us. Amongst the endless piles of VHS's and foot spas, we found an old working typewriter for £2, and several old games such as Scrabble, Pit and a dominoes set (that's what you see in the cream case) each bought for between 50 and 70p.
Last week I gallavanted off on the 176 to East Dulwich, in particular the fabulous vintage street of Northcross Road, with it's gourmet fudge and French like antique shops. Not that I could afford anything there; I spent my pennies in the equally delicious charity shops on the main road. I found the little wooden box in the games picture above, which houses a chess set. I also got this fun frame, which with a lick of white paint and a selection of my old Happy Families playing cards inside is pretty cool. It sits atop a ravishing old wooden ladder that Tim pulled out of a skip a few weeks ago, complete with splashes of paint and rust.
We also thought we had found a miracle in a pair of curtains from the Mind charity shop in East Dulwich, they were lovely; thick, simple, perfect width for our bare lounge windows... just 8 centimetres short.
Oh dear!

A spot of craftivism- Yoko Style

Friends over at the Craftivist Collective have just launched an initiative "And sew to bed". It is craft based activism (I love it) in bed (I love it doubley) to raise awareness of global injustice (can I love this any more?)
The idea is that people craft up a patch on a global issue of their choice, then send in a flick of them talking it through, and a picture of their bed- in.
Never one to miss such a moment I got stuck straight in this morning in a few delicious spare moments I had free from work. So this is my patch:
Being 34 weeks pregnant (I know! Can you believe it?!) I am hoping for a world where every women can have a pregnancy as low risk and safe as mine. In the world's poorest countries, 1000 women are dying a day just trying to have a child. This is insane. With a commitment to good, free and universal healthcare this is a problem that can easily be fixed. (Pressure our government to make this choice here.)

This is my bed in.
Do join in. How can you resist?

The art of unfinished-ness

We haven't done quite as much with the house as we perhaps might have hoped by this stage. Holidays, parties, boxes and busyness have all seemed to get in the way. But the look we have right now is rather delicious- particuarly in light of this beautiful book; Recycled Home by Mark and Sally Bailey. Every scene is just one of rusting corners, bare walls and floors and reclaimed bits of junk. In this house it is our style bible, which is not really motivating us massively to get painting.

We have screwed our new fire place up against the hole, and need to really do all the plastering buisness around it. But just look at it in it's incomplete state- what a feast for the eyeballs!


And then there are just these bare unstripped walls, with all their layers of various plastering and hole-filling. So hot. Here they are being set off perfectly by a left over bit of birthday bunting, a little vintage stool Shelley gave me for my birthday and a big bunch of house warming flowers....


So in many respects our house is still, well, quite a dive. But little rough scenes like this totally fill me with joy. (This is the start of a terrible journey towards house-proudness perhaps?!) Which doesn't bode well for us actually getting round to painting and all that shenanigans...

A hole in the ceiling and and a spurting bump

Top Six things from the last month

• Tim and his friends cut a hole in the ceiling with a saw and installed a loft ladder (yep, I'd have said that was a job for pros too but...)
• We don't have a single unpacked box left- in the main bit of the house. They are now all up in the fabulous newly accessible loft, woohoo! Yep, still unpacked and they'll probably still be there when we next move but hey, out of sight out of mind and all that...
• We painted the spare room and Shelley has painted her room and they look scrummy (makeover posts coming soon!)
• Tim's parents arrived from NZ to stay for a month (hence the hurry with the spare room), it is lovely having them here and they are even going to help us strip wall paper.
• Ten days camping in the South Downs and the Cotswolds- in the coldest August Britain has had for 17 years (how is our luck?!) but still we had a beautiful time with some amazing friends and food - and some brilliant wild swimming spots. Particuarly memorable was Gullet Quarry - breathtakingly beautiful (and unnecessarily scandolous) - it was like being in an altogether different world.
• Wrigglewriggle has had a MAJOR growth spurt. 31 weeks old now and truly living up to the name. Fists up in my ribs, it's bottom has turnd my belly button into an outy, my whole tummy convulsing as if an alien is about to burst out. I love this wee thing.
  
  

Extreme (more cosmetic, really) Makeover: Bathroom

On our return from the camp at the weekend I persuaded my ever loving husband that we should makeover the bathroom- "It will just take a couple of hours, it's all just aesthetic stuff: it will be an easy win." Oh, how wrong was I. It was painful. Not so much for me, I got to just make up crafty things. But Tim got stuck with laying the stick-on tiles that, erm, didn't stick.

So, several arduous evenings later we have almost finished. I wanted to share it so that it gives the impression that we are doing more than ignoring our unpacked boxes and ripping the odd bit of paper off the walls when we happen to be passing. Hehe.

What we used:
24 slate coloured stick on tiles from B and Q- £24
Fluro orange spray paint- £5
A utensil to scrape off ceramic animals
Some old containers and crockery
A vegetable rack

I wanted to go for an "industrial meets natural" feel, metal and orange with a dash of woven fibres to add a bit of a homely feel. I love it. Tim thinks it is a bit weird. What do you think?

BEFORE:

Meet the duck. There were ducks, dolphins and shells glued on all over the place. Alas, they didn't fit the new theme. They will be missed.

The floor was just really quite minging. It had to go too.

It is really quite small, so nice looking storage of things was proving to be a challenge.
INBETWEEN:
This is me in the back garden painting and spray painting random objects haphazardly. It was a lot of fun.

AFTER:
To sort out the storage challenge I spray painted some old biscuit tins. They house the million peices of rubbish bathrooms (well, all our rooms) gather- old sun tan lotion, vitamins, more vitamins and more sun tan lotion...


These beauty little safe boxes have been sitting in my stock room at work, I had to put them on show so gave a little extra into the petty cash for them. Definitely my favourite bit, and practial too, storing even more extras.
I spray painted some orange dots (I fashioned a stencil out of the front page a swanky RSA bookletI got in a charity shop for 20p.) We pulled about 8 of these white tea pots from a bin last year- no lids, so not good pourers but perfect tooth brush holders amongst other things!


These frames once held those bright fake gerbera flowers -know the ones? Now they hold plastic tikis, shells and string, in colours that are very on-brand for our new bathroom, courtesy of that lovely spray paint once again!

Serious bit of bumpage...26 weeks

Just a quick little visual update on the baby bump...

26 weeks and only just at the point where strangers can ask my due date without fear of offending someone with a chubby tummy, and where women give me goggly knowing eyes.

We are off tomorrow to run a social action stream at a youth camp in Epping Forest for the week, then back to work for some urgent business then off again for a week of camping. Very excited!

Extreme (or maybe more quick and dirty) Makeover: Kitchen

The kitchen was right up there as being one of the worst rooms in the house. It was a mix of Little House on the Prairie and Little Shop of Horrors. Dirty pine covered everything, making it feel dark and oppressive. While we realise we eventually need to give it a serious overhaul, we have decided we will do this when we are on the way out so that we don't have time to put our hot burny pans on the brand new surfaces. (Ahem, not that this is a, er, regular occurrence or anything.) And in the meantime we got to create this rough, fun, vintage look just with a can of white emulsion and some sandpaper. It has created the perfect canvas for some of our lovely car boot finds and has really lightened the whole space up- and all done in a couple of hours. This is my kind of makeover...

BEFORE:

AFTER:
We took the slat door off the end cupboard to create a magical little cubby hole for some knickknacks...

This is some of my Jessie Tait crockery- I am a little bit addicted to its loveliness- and you can find bits everywhere. This makes me a collector, eh?

The distressed look on the cupboards was done with just a lick or two of white paint, then I just took some sand paper to the edges and corners to pull out some of those nice curves. I'd wear gloves in the future though...

Sadly not many of the other rooms are going to have this fast a turn around, we have to, like, strip wall paper, and plaster up wonky bits and stuff like that. Bummer eh. I'm all about quick fixes/ botch jobs. He he.

Signed, sealed, delivered...

Well, how momentous has the last week been?! Not only have we exchanged, completed and MOVED but we have already started painting and decorating! Amazing has wheels can turn so painfully slowly and then all of a sudden it all happens in a matter of days.

Technically we have only moved our bodies- me and Tim have slept their for the last few nights but all our stuff is coming in a lorry tomorrow. This has meant we have been able to rip up carpets, paint the kitchen and pull off wall paper.

We spent our first night going "Uh oh. What have we done?" - overwhelmed by the mountain of of making over needing to be done before the baby arrives in November. But it is amazing how significantly action can change your frame of mind. Once we started attacking the ugliness, dominating that worst of the eighties badness, we began to feel better about things, and now we are positively stoked!

The grimness was so bad that I didn't even take many "Before" pictures- I just couldn't bear to point my camera at it. But I took enough to hopefully capture some of the transformation and, crikey Jim, it needs a transformation.

My next post will be the kitchen make over. From pine covered grime to shabby chic lushness....

In the mean time here is Tim looking pretty proud...

Hurray!

I love lamp and B for Betsy

After the brilliant news that we are exchanging on Monday (house buying speak for swapping contract for cash) and a joyous evening of dancing to the All Stars at The Scoop I arrived home late on Friday night feeling not at all tired, but very craftilicious and filled with energy. I tried milk drinking, yoga, all sorts, but I was just too excited to go to sleep so took it out on some objects around the house.

First, I bettered an old lamp with the aid of some scrabble letters. I love lamps, their ambient warmth, the endless possibilities of crafting them up. And I love scrabble letters; glued on to the end of clips to stick in my quiff, stuck onto old wood with a dollop of paint. So I did a little match making, using a line from a Coldplay song. Lights will guide you home (Minus some vital L's and a G- anyone got any spares?)...

Then I paired up a white summer blazer with a cherry dress, both of which fit me no longer, and made a B for Betsy, our little friend, offspring of the fabulous Mel, who is having a birthday tomorrow. Mel used to run the kids club I went to and now she is Mum extraordinaire, with a whole hoard of the coolest little people in a lovely Camberwell home too.

Off to go an play with my mums just-bought chickens, yay for poultry in the garden, fresh eggs daily. Maybe next summer we will get to go on a chook buying journey ourselves. Woop woop!

Introducing Nessa and Stacey...