Busy, busy, busy!

It's been a hectic old time, here at OST headquarters. The extension is going great guns and is only a couple of weeks off completion. I shall be breathing a huge sigh of relief because it means that I can then actually clean my house properly! We are just at the 'breaking through' point, which means that there is a nice thick layer of red dust on pretty much every single surface. 
Considering we've only had one builder on the job for the majority of the time, it's been a speedy build - especially given the size of it. We have a fabulous builder and I can't recommend him enough. He's been diligent, considerate and he even tidies up after himself each day. He also really loves kids, which is good because they've been MOST interested in what's been going on!

In the meantime, I have been doing the odd bit of sewing. I managed to do my first bit of paper piecing and made my mother-in-law a mug rug for Mother's Day last month. It was surprisingly quick and easy, although I do still need to work on my binding technique a bit...

We had a lovely Easter - I hope you all did too. The girls got to go to the school Easter disco - it was Tabby's first one as she's not actually at school yet. I was there to do the face-painting, so they got to go off and dance, run around like lunatics and consume as much sugar within the next two hours as they could. Needless to say, they were both rather tired and cranky by the time I got them home!

There was an Easter bonnet competition at the disco and Ellie wanted hers to have spring flowers on. Her teacher keeps telling us that Ellie isn't very good at using scissors and so I decided that she'd have the most scissorly intensive hat she could. I drew the shapes for her and she cut them all out. Her hat was lovely when it was finished and she won third prize for it. I don't think a jelly animal lollipop (her prize) has ever been more appreciated!

In other sewing, I've been making the usual assortment of bibs, blankets and bunting. I also made a couple of personalised door-hangers:

 
 









Last, but by no means least, I made this Kindle cover for my mother-in-law. It is her 70th birthday today and I thought it was about time she had her own Kindle. She and do a lot of book swapping between us and I've been evangelical about my own Kindle. She does use her iPad to read ebooks on, but it's not ideal. She's got the new Paperwhite version, so I'm very jealous! 

I thought it would be nice to make her a monogrammed cover for her Kindle and searched around on Pinterest for ages to try and find one that I liked the look of. I had something in mind and knew I'd seen it somewhere but couldn't for the life of me find it. I had a eureka moment late one night and popped over to Flossie Teacakes - one of the many sewing-related blogs I read - and found the pattern for her Cocoon Laptop Cover, which was exactly the style of Kindle cover I wanted. 

Obviously a laptop cover would completely swamp a Kindle but Florence's pattern is very scaleable and so was very easy to adapt. I had to do the embroidery first, before cutting that particular piece out, in order to make sure that it was in the exact right place to not get covered by the flap or the pocket. 

I used a plain, cream-coloured linen from Ikea for the main part of the cover, and some home-decor weight fabric from Laura Ashley (Summer Palace in duck egg colour) for the pocket and flap. I think it turned out quite nicely, although the final part of construction was a bit tricky. This was because the lining gets attached to the main part by slipping it over as an open-ended sleeve (right sides facing) and then just sewing all around the opening. On a laptop cover - which is much bigger - this isn't a problem, as you can simply slip the arm of your machine through the cover and sew all the way around. On a Kindle cover this doesn't work - at least not on my machine. I suspect it might be ok on a standard machine but mine is really quite large (because it is a combined sewing/embroidery machine and has a large sewing area for making quilting a bit easier!). Other than that issue, everything went swimmingly!

I'll do some extension photos next time...

Crafty Bums Sewing Group

I am a member of several craft-related groups on Facebook and one of them is the Crafty Bums Sewing Group. We are a real hotchpotch of nationalities, fields of expertise and skill levels but it's such a lovely group, where everyone is so friendly and helpful. It's quite easy for online forums (fora) and groups to become a hotbed of bitchiness. Not so the Crafty Bums!

When I joined the group last year, I arrived just in time to participate in one of their monthly challenges. That one was to make the Made by Rae pattern for a Buttercup Bag . I duly took part and created this little bag:

I used some fabric that had been in my stash for well over a year but I'd considered far too pretty to use for something really mundane. This photo was taken inside, at night using the barely brighter than candlelight wattage in my dining room, so you can't really appreciate the lovely pinks in this fabric. It's from Amy Butler's 'Soul Blossoms' range and this particular one is called cherry laurel dots. I added some piping to my bag too, for a little extra interest. It's a really easy pattern to follow and this took me a little over an hour to put together, despite my hands being badly arthritic that night. 

Following that challenge last year, we had another one in February. This time it was a little more complicated and involved participants making a mug rug (an elongated fabric coaster that allows for a cup of tea and room for a biscuit!) for someone else, and then posting it out and sitting back to wait for the postie to bring them a mug rug in return. The swap was done anonymously to begin with - with one of our 'chief bums' doing all the address and name swapping for us. Each person made for someone else but then someone different made one for them. We also had a document where people could put suggestions for their maker if they wanted. 

My swappee had disclosed that she had a bit of a gnome obsession so I gleefully dug out some fabric I'd had kicking about for a while. The range of fabric was called Better Gnomes and Gardens (do you see what they did there?) and I went browsing on Pinterest to get some ideas for mug rugs...Several weeks later the emergency services found me emaciated and dishevelled on the sofa, having pinned 1000s of things on my sewing related boards ;)


Having decided to go with a circles theme, I chose a suitably gnomey fabric and got to work. This is what I ended up with:

This is a photo that my recipient took, having decided that some of her gnomes needed to use it for a picnic rug! She really liked it, so that was a relief! In hindsight I wouldn't have used linen for my main fabric - it was really awkward to work with. What the photo doesn't show very well is the fancy stitching that I used around most of the circles. I'm trying to work my way through each of the (over 100) stitches on my machine and so I used a different one for each circle here. 

The mug rug that I received was really lovely too. My maker also included some little felt flowers to have a little impromptu game of noughts and crosses (tic tac toe). Here's a little pic: 

Isn't it really gorgeous? She obviously read my comments about liking purple too!

Some of the other lovely ladies in Crafty Bums Sewing Group have kindly allowed me to share their mug rugs here too, so here they are...


 

By Laura Bremner

By Sonia Spence

By Magdalena Kurek

By Sarah Murray

By Gemma Jones

By Amie Freemantle

By Antonia Gorman

By Leah Glen Day

(Sorry about the ecclectic photo layout, I really struggle with the Blogger niggles!)


Some of these ladies have blogs of their own:

Sarah can be found at Sew Now We Are Four
Sonia has her blog at Fabric and Flowers 
Leah 's blog is Sew To Bed
Magdalena has a Facebook Page over at Magda's Felt

I'm sure they'd love it if you popped over to say hi!

House Extension News!

So, as I may have mentioned previously, we are currently in the process of building an extension onto our house.

 We have three children and live in a rural area, down a track. This means we have lots of muddy wellies, waterproofs and other assorted country living paraphernalia! We only have a tiny hallway cum porch at the moment, which is right next to our kitchen. This means that all our coats and things get bombarded with cooking smells, which isn't terribly pleasant. It's also a bit of a nightmare trying to dry all our things when they get wet. So we needed a bigger hallway. 

We are also attempting to rid the dining room and front room of child chut. Despite all our best efforts at trying to offload old toys/games/books onto other people or charitable establishments, hell hath no fury like a child that sees you removing a precious possession from the home. So we also needed a family room/playroom, where I might also beg a small space to do my sewing. These two rooms formed the basis of our extension plans. 

The size of these rooms was dictated by an electricity pole we had in our driveway. Due to our rural location - and the fact that our house dates from 1845 - no electricity was laid underground, it went straight into the side of the house. We really wanted this pole removed, as it was very ugly, and not terribly reliable when it came to electricity supply (to us, or our neighbours). We vaguely knew that if the pole was interfering with our building plans, the electricity company would be obliged to move it for free (because the supply goes from our house to our neighbour's house). We also knew that we might stand a chance of getting the supply routed underground, instead of another dirty great pole, if we could give a good argument (mainly the fact that the wind is so strong up here). After several months of wrangling, we eventually agreed to dig the trenches and they agreed to remove the pole and lay the cables underground. 

As we were building quite a large extension onto the ground floor of the house, we decided to put another two bedrooms on top. We needed another bedroom anyway, for Jasper, so one more meant we could have a spare room too. We currently have three bedrooms but the girls share one and the other is used by my hubby for working from home. 

We eagerly agreed to begin the extension in January of this year, having saved up almost all of the funds we required by then. Unfortunately, this coincided with the arrival of the biting winds, sleet and heavy snowfall. Undeterred, our builder merrily arrived each day and just worked through it. What dedication! We've also had a nightmare with the footings - we've had so much rain over the last 7 or 8 months that the water table is really high. As you can imagine, high water table, ice, snow and really, really soft ground is not terribly conducive to trench digging. To say it looked like the Somme outside for a few weeks is an understatement! Even the digger sank overnight!

We should be getting the roof on by the end of next week, so things are progressing quite nicely, despite us only having one builder on site (although his dad did come and help with the footings). 

Here are a few pictures of progress so far...

The sunken digger!

Our intrepid builders

Look how high the water table is!

All the rubble and topsoil has been temporarily dumped in the back garden. It will be used to level this out later on

We had a lot of snow! The girls are standing up...

The concrete finally goes in for the footings

Blocks are starting to emerge from the chaos!

Terry, the builder, overseeing the concrete for the floor slab

Tabland

Just a quick one today, before I embark on a lengthy post about our new extension. Tabby, our middle child, has an incredible imagination and lives in a world of her own most of the time, complete with its own unique fashion rules. Even Ellie often makes the comment, "I think she's in Tabland again, Mummy!" 

Here's Tabs wearing her favourite 'Mary scarf', adorned with what she calls 'stylashes'. I'm not entirely sure what stylashes are. Today she was wearing a headband with a costume jewellery necklace hooked onto it and then draped artistically over her left ear. That was also a stylash apparently!

 

Some of the conversations I have with Tabs are hilarious. This is one we had this morning, when discussing the band of naughty squirrels that keep invading our bird feeders. I get the impression that Tabby hasn't quite got to grips with the concept of hibernation yet!



Ellie: why aren't the squirrels hibernating?
 
Me: because there hasn't been enough food around for them this year and the weather hasn't been really cold until recently. Can you remember which other animals hibernate?
 
Ellie: Errr...hedgehogs! And bears and tortoises!
 
Me: Any more?
 
Tabs: I know! I know! Lions!
 
Me: Not usually, Tabs. Animals in hot places don't need to hibernate.
 
Tabs: Oh, ok. How about rhinos?
 
Me: No
 
Tabs: (in a hopeful tone of voice) Elephants?
 
Me : *facepalm*

More Cake!

So, it was Ellie's birthday earlier this week. I had been asking her for weeks what she would like on her cake and she had various half-hearted suggestions: Hello Kitty, Snow White, Izzy (from Jake and the Neverland Pirates - Ellie's favourite programme!) but she never seemed that enamoured with any of them. 
One morning she was sat at the kitchen table waiting for me to finish making her pancakes when all of a sudden she gave a mighty shout, scaring me silly:

Ellie: I know what I can have have on my cake, Mummy!
Me: What's that then?
Ellie: JESUS!
Me: I beg your pardon?
Ellie: I can have Jesus on my cake (big pleased grin on her face)
Me: Why do you want Jesus on your cake?
Ellie: Because He just had his birthday and we should always be thankful to Him when we get presents!
Me: Right...Well...yes, we should be grateful but I don't think it's very respectful to have Him on your birthday cake. Perhaps you can think of something else?
Ellie: Fine. I'll have a pink one like Jasper's christening cake then (looking rather huffy). 

What do we think? Isn't it a little blasphemous to have Jesus on one's birthday cake? 

So, I took my inspiration from Jasper's christening cake, as she requested, and made a pink, girly version. It was quite a tall cake - with five layers (albeit fairly thin ones) in alternating pink and plain madeira sponge (lemon flavoured). The buttercream was also lemon flavoured - quite strongly - to try to counteract the sweetness of the icing sugar.

Here it is!

 

 

We had a little tea party to celebrate Ellie's birthday, and played a couple of games (pass the parcel and musical statues). In doing so we discovered that Jasper absolutely loves music and dancing! Obviously I don't mean that this is the first time in his entire 14 months that he's heard music. It's just he's never really paid much attention to it, other than bobbing up and down a bit to the nasty electronic music on some of his toys. This time he was really getting excited by the music we played (Now 83 - just right for a bunch of 5 year olds!) and every time the music was paused he burst into tears. Poor sausage! 

Jasper is a little emotional at the moment because he's just getting over chickenpox (having also had his MMR vaccination between contracting it and the spots appearing. This meant that the two viruses (as measles is a live vaccine) combined to make poor Jasper's temperature rocket to over 40C. This lasted for two days and then thankfully went back down to a less worrying level. It seemed that we were spending most of our waking hours either at the doctors or on the phone to them! He is also cutting his canines and so has had a pretty rough few weeks.The girls both had chickenpox (within a fortnight of one another) a couple of years ago so that's all three of them now. I remember having it when I was 5 and it wasn't a pleasant experience. It gets worse the older you get and so I'm glad they've all had it nice and young!

Christmas Sewing Marathon...

OK, so here's a few pictures of things I've made recently. It's been a hectic old time as I rather rashly decided that it would be a really great idea to make lots of Christmas presents this year. What's wrong with that, you might reasonably ask. Nothing at all, I might reply, except if you've only decided with two weeks to go until Christmas! 

My sister-in-law and her husband have just built a house in the bottom of her parents' (my in-laws) garden and they are due to move in this month with any luck. I thought I'd make a nice cushion to go in their new living room and so rang my mother-in-law to see if she knew what colour scheme they were having. Dark red was the answer and so I looked about for some nice fabrics in that colour. The house is an oak-framed house and so I wanted something fairly traditional and classic - I decided upon the Rouenneries Deux range (by French General for Moda). As this was to be my first cushion (apart from the monstrosity I made in Home Economics when I was about 12), I wanted to go for something fairly simple and so naturally I went with the most time-consuming and complicated design I could find. This was a cathedral window cushion and I found a rather good pattern in the Moda Bake Shop - Charming Window Pillows. I did adapt it slightly, in that I didn't add any binding around the edges, more to save time than anything. It also didn't give any proper instructions on how to add the opening and so I had to make that up. I decided to do a banded back piece, with a semi-invisible zip between two of the three panels. It turned out rather well I thought! I wasn't able to hand it over in person and left it at my parents-in-law's house whilst we visited. My sister-in-law emailed me yesterday to tell me how utterly thrilled she was with it, so it made all the effort very worthwhile. 

The front of the cushion

Side view, showing the border a little better

The back of the cushion. The zip is between the bottom red panel and the middle panel

So, that was the 'simple' cushion I made. I also made one for my niece (daughter of the afore-mentioned sister-in-law). She is 13 and has decided that she wants her new bedroom to be black and white and grown-up. So I decided that I'd make her a cushion to match her new room and again, thought I'd keep it simple. Once again this didn't happen and I ended up making her a 3D 'F' shaped cushion. Her name is Francesca - I didn't just choose an arbitrary letter of the alphabet! There didn't seem to be any instructions on how to make such a cushion so I merrily made it up. I thought, as I was short on time, I'd also add piping (that I'd made myself - just to simplify things even more, you understand). This was extremely fiddly on the inside corners of the F - the bits between the top and bottom horizontal 'prongs'. Nevertheless, I did manage to sew it together and then stuffed it to within an inch of its life. It took over 1kg of stuffing to fill it to what I considered to be an adequate density. That's an awful lot of stuffing! Just in case anyone is interested, the fabric I used is from Makower's black and white range (the piping is the negative version of the main fabric). I used the flower version but there are all sorts of other patterns in the same range.

Here's the finished article!

The final photo I am going to show you is the sofa blanket that I made for my father-in-law. He was diagnosed with cancer a couple of months ago and is currently undergoing chemotherapy. As a result he is really feeling the cold, so I thought a nice soft blanket would be a nice present. I've made quite a few baby blankets in the last year, using smooth minky (or occasionally brushed cotton) on one side, and dimple dot minky on the other (as it is so lovely to stroke!) and decided to do the same this time, just in a much larger size. Obviously I wanted something fairly masculine and so decided on Robert Kaufman Cuddle Candy Stripes (in Tiffany/violet colourway), with a charcoal dimple dot minky on the reverse. I made it as you would expect - sewed all around the outside (leaving a gap to turn right way round again), rounding the corners off as I went, then turned right way out and top stitched the entire thing. It turned out really nice and I'm thinking of making myself one too!

Sofa blanket

 
I made the mistake of throwing out my daughters' naff Christmas stockings sometime earlier last year and only remembered as I was putting them to bed on Christmas Eve and they asked why they hadn't hung them up. Oops! Bad mummy! As a result I had to make some emergency ones - as well as wrap all three children's presents. One day I will learn to manage my time a little better! The trouble is, I am very organised when it comes to buying Christmas presents. I am normally finished by about September but this means that my brain goes into 'that's me done, no more Christmas related tasks for ME to do this year' mode and I somehow end up leaving everything like wrapping and food shopping until the last minute!

Sorry for the delay :(

I realise that it's been some time since my last post - but December was a rather horrible month! 

So...here's December...

The boys (RIP) were taken to the abattoir the seaside right at the beginning of the month and we got them back (in bits) the following week. I must admit that I was very sad to see them go, especially when one of them was reluctant to get into the trailer. I was dreading getting the meat back, thinking I'd be in floods of tears, but it was surprisingly not too distressing seeing all the meat on the table. Out of the eight halves we sold five to friends and kept the other three. Unfortunately, what we weren't aware of, it being our first year of keeping sheep, was that ram lambs (as opposed to castrated lambs) start to lose condition towards winter, as they stop eating so much and start competing with one another - as well as standing around near the fence hoping to woo some women. Consequently, our lambs weren't as fat as we'd hoped but that's a lesson learnt for next time. We've already ordered castrated males for this year! This will also mean that we can keep the boys and girls together, and therefore rotate our paddocks through the spring and summer. 

Speaking of the paddocks - they are like lakes at the moment - despite the fact that they are on a slope! This never-ending rain is not good for sheep at all and I'm having to keep a careful eye on the girls to make sure that they don't get foot rot/rain scald/liver fluke/break a leg in the slippery mud...I was really quite worried about the fluke, as the snails that cause it are so prevalent in wet and (relatively) warm conditions. So many people have lost sheep because of it last year. So, I decided that I needed to treat the girls just to make sure. As fluke has been such a problem, the usual drenches were about as rare as hen's teeth and I couldn't get hold of any, not even from the vet! This meant drastic measures and so I asked the vet to come and show me how to inject the girls with an injectable treatment instead. It was fairly straightforward, mainly because our girls are so very tame. I did manage to stab myself with the first one, but luckily didn't depress the plunger and inject myself! 

I've also taken to bringing the girls up to the garden every few days, so that they have somewhere dry to stand (on the drive) and some better grass to eat. This has the added benefit of keeping the lawn down during the winter, with some self-spreading manure ;) The children have had great fun playing with the sheep outside! Here's a couple of pics...

As you can see, the playhouse in the background of the last photo is coming along nicely. Just the stairs and the veranda to go!

Other things that happened in December - On the day we sent the ram lambs off, I had a phone call from the hospital telling me that I had severe dyskaryosis/dysplasia on my cervix and so I had to go in urgently to have a colposcopy. That was really horrid, as they decided to do a LEEP/LLETZ procedure at the same time. I'm still waiting on the biopsy results but hopefully everything will be fine.

Bed is a-calling now so the things I made last month will have to wait for a new post tomorrow :)