A wrap for Wrigglewriggle- my first baby make

So, yikes, it's been a while team. Sorry about that, although I guess I do have a good reason; Ramona is 8 weeks old and a whopping 6kgs. She is completely amazing. She is smiling and gurgling, and still sleeping lots which is delicious for us.

I wear her everyday, every where, in a beautiful ring sling my friend made me. I love having her so close and believe the benefits for both of us are massive. However to keep the weight distributed evenly I wanted to mix it up with another one. I have been to a couple of Slingmeets, seen and tried loads of carriers -as well as meeting fab parents too- and decided that a stretchy wrap was most comfty with a tiny tike. And, easy to make too!

I cycled along today to Peckham's famous fabric shop and purchased two metres of thick tee shirt material. (It was the first time I had been without Ramona, but she had a lovely half hour with Dad!)

This afternoon I cut it lengthwase so I had 4 metres, about 75cm wide. I sewed three lines (extra strong) to join end to end. Where the seam showed I sewed some bright salmon lace, meaning the other side was smooth and plain so Tim doesn't have to have the lucious lace revealed when he wears her.

It feels so good on, really supportive. I love the look and it is easy to put on.

All for £12 and half an hour, my first very practical baby make! Hoping to tackle a Mei Tai carry next.

More exciting things coming soon...

PS I look, um, yellow, in this pic. I haven't fake tanned, and i'm not anemic. It's just a weird un.

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!

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.