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!