April photo-a-day

A lot of April's pics were taken in Portugal and have already been posted, so here is a selection of the others.  I'm still enjoying the project, although think that I might have to start joining in more of the monthly challenges for inspiration.  I'm also hoping for more craft photos to feature, now that B is not quite so high maintenance.  Who knows, maybe May will be the month that I finish the never-ending ripple blanket (she laughs hysterically!)...

Portugal

Sun, sea and blue skies.  I'm not entirely sure why we didn't just stay there.

Reversible sunhat

For a while I've had my eye on the Oliver & S reversible Bucket Hat pattern from this book and have had this gorgeous Melody Miller transistor fabric in my stash.  Going on holiday seemed the perfect reason to pluck up the courage to cut into it and have a go.  I was a bit daunted by the way the pattern instructed piecing the hat together (hand-stitching - yikes!), and couldn't work out if there was a reason why the two hats couldn't be machine-sewn together and then turned inside out.  Praise be then for the lovely internet, which after a quick search, showed me that Jessica at A Little Gray had not only tried this method, but posted a tutorial on how to do it.  It worked really well and apart from it being a bit fiddly getting the curved pieces to fit together (my method: cut approximately three million notches in the fabric edges), it's a great pattern and I can see myself making lots more of these.  Here it is in action.

Photo-a-day March

March brought some good weather (finally) and the opportunity to get outside for more photos. Blue skies, spring flowers and campari! Perfect photo-a-day subject matters. I'm really looking forward to a summer spent outside with a camera.

The Eden Project

Reasons to be cheerful...

...one, two, three. We've been having such a stressful time trying to sell/buy/move house and everything has seemed very dreary and dark at times. So I'm coming over all Pollyanna-ish and trying to count my blessings - it will all turn out for the best.

Adventures in thrifting

I'm not supposed to be buying any more fabric until I've used up some of my stash, but I couldn't resist this lovely floral sheet from the Children's Hospice charity shop. It wa only £1.99, so it barely counts. It's such super-soft cotton that I think it would make great bedding for B when she's a bit bigger, or maybe even some summer clothes!

Vintage baby clothes

I've recently been inundated with lovely vintage baby clothes for lucky B. the first batch came from my sister, who has a bit of a fab collection. It looks like B is mostly going to be rocking red gingham this summer! The second batch was in a lovely surprise parcel from France sent by my friend Emma who had been helping her mother-in-law have a clear-out. Sadly I think some of the things in the parcel, especially this beautiful little white top, would be more suited to petite delicate French babies rather than my sturdy little English girl, but I'm just enjoying looking at them and think I might be able to replicate a couple of them using some of my fabric stash.

Photo-a-day February

Another month of the photo-a-day project completed. I'm settling into my visual groove now, it seems that I lean towards lots of close ups that I can then edit into something I'm happy with. I think I actually enjoy the editing process more that the actual photography part, to be honest, and am bereft that Picnik is closing down in April. Will have to find myself a new editing programme quick smart.

Learning to cook

Tim is vegetarian so I never cook meat, and have fallen into a real cooking rut, tending to rely on the same few recipes over and over again. One of my new year's resolutions was to try out more recipes and increase the variety of what we eat at home. Today I made the aubergine and french bean curry from River Cottage - Veg everyday. I had to make curry paste from scratch (using the final shallots from last year's allotment crop), which made me feel a bit domestic-goddessy and it was delicious! Definitely one to make again.

Sloe gin

Today I finally bottled the sloe gin that I've had infusing away on the worktop for the past three months. I've been holding out for the right bottles to put it in (rejecting the suggestion of the man in the farm shop that an old two litre plastic bottle would do the trick, like the sloe gin snob that I am) and finally found the perfect ones in Lakeland. I've used the recipe from the River Cottage Preserves handbook, and initial taste testing are pretty good. Apparently I need to leave it for 18 months before drinking though, and a recent article I read even suggested that 18 years would be the optimum length of time to allow it to reach its full taste potential. Chances of this actually happening in real life are slim to none. I'm not known for my patience! I still have a big bag of sloes in the freezer and am debating whether to pop these into some gin as well. There may well be a lot of gin-based presents from us next Christmas!

Missing the allotment

I realised when I was a few months pregnant with B, that I really wasn't going to be able to do our allotment justice over the next couple of years, so made the tough decision to give it up. I really agonised over the decision because I really loved it up there, loved growing our own food and even sort of loved the occasion slow-worm encounter! I was trying to be practical and sensible by handing it back, but I really do miss it so much! At this time of year, I would usually be so busy planning the plot (endless scruffy drawings in my notebook, trying to work out crop rotations and where I could legitimately sneak flowers in), starting seeds off and looking forward to spending time up there in the sunshine, and instead I'm just looking at my books and searching online for houses to move to with a big enough garden for a vegetable plot. It will happen, eventually...

Valentine's day

DVD? Check. Bottle of fizz? Check. Industrial quantities of Maltesers? Check.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Need for colour

It feels as though it has been miserable and grey outside for months. We didn't get the snow that the rest of the country enjoyed/suffered through, instead we have endless drizzle and overcast days. So I've had to up the colour quota indoors, otherwise I start to pine and become as gloomy as the skies outside.

Daydreaming

Nearly two years ago, my sister and her husband got married in Malaysia. We all travelled out there to celebrate with them and, as a lovely by-product, had one of the best holidays we've ever had. The hotel we stayed at in Langkawi served the most amazing breakfasts, a huge buffet of an amazing range of food (including a beef rendang which is still spoken of in hushed tones by my dad), fruit juices, champagne (I really should try to include champagne in my breakfast more often, it would perk me up no end! ) great coffee and finally an amazing range of teas. These teas became a bit of an obsession. As I am my mother's daughter, I swiped as many as possible each day and squirrelled them away in my suitcase to bring home, where they went on to last us for a good few months after returning. Everytime we had one, we could pretend we were in the sunshine enjoying a champagne breakfast. But then the sad day came that the tea ran out. Bad times. But thanks to the almighty power of the internet, I managed to track down the supplier's website and we were once again, restocked. It's pricey, but as a treat, so worth it. So on miserable grey days like this

I can make myself a cup of this

and close my eyes and pretend I'm here...

Treasure-hunting

As I walked into town this morning, the display in the window of one of the local charity shops caught my eye. In the centre was a set of vintage crockery with a pattern that I recognised. As a bit of background, my family are generally champion hoarders, bargain hunters and thrifters - especially my middle sister, who is the queen of this kind of treasure-hunting. We can't resist vintage loveliness and I realised that I recognised the pattern from my youngest sister's house. A couple of quick texts later and I was struggling home up the hill carrying six dinner plates, six bowls, six cups and saucers and a fruit bowl for my sister, all purchased for the princely sum of four pounds! I was on a bargain-induced high for the rest of the morning.

Photo-a-day January

This year I decided I needed a creative focus to stop me spending my entire maternity leave in a blur of daytime tv and aimless wandering around town. So I joined an online photography group with the aim of taking one photo a day for the year. So far I'm loving the challenge, although pretty quickly realised that on some days, especially ones revolving around poorly children, the photography was going to slide. So with the slightly adjusted aim of seven photos in seven days (so that some days I can take a spare to balance out the off days) I've completed January and here are a few of the pictures.

It's making me look at my surroundings in a whole new way, there really can be beauty (or at least an interesting shot) in the simplest things, and I'm really looking forward to starting the new month tomorrow.

Escaping the pink

When we had our daughter eight weeks ago I thought I was prepared, but it turned out that I really hadn't fully comprehended how huge the tidal wave heading our way would be. I'm talking about the inescapable flood of pink! I'm really not a big fan. It's not that I mind pink as a colour, but it's how ubiquitous it is when it comes to little girls that I object to. I have this Oliver & S pattern that I want to try to make for B and while I'm still the boss of what colours she wears, I've ordered these gorgeous fabrics to use. I think I can get a few years of blues and greens in before the pink takes over...

Topsham

It was freezing cold, but the walk was beautiful and the cake at the end of it was even better.

All the cups of tea

I'd forgotten that life with a newborn baby means never getting to finish a cup of tea. She has a cold and won't be put down, so every cup I brew ends up abandoned. I keep making them though, ever the optimist! Inbetween dealing with baby germs and cold tea, I've managed to finish crocheting a pair of wristwarmers for my three year old niece. We're making the journey north to see them soon and I wanted to get them ready to take with us. It's a bit of a cobbled together/made up pattern using Rico Creative Cotton and I still haven't quite mastered changing colours neatly, but hopefully she won't mind.

Farewell to Christmas

Today we packed up the Christmas tree and put away the decorations for another year. I absolutely love Christmas, but as soon as it's over I feel angsty about the decorations being up, as though if they hang around for too long, they won't be special anymore. So I have the will, but not always the inclination towards action (last year we didn't manage to completely pack them up until the beginning of February), so this year I'm already feeling terribly organised and ahead of the game. These decorations were new this year and are my absolute favourite and best.

Museum nostalgia

The Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter has just reopened after being closed for refurbishment for the past 4 years. We visited today and I really loved it. Upstairs is the most amazing collection of taxidermy, butterflies and sea creatures, as well as all sorts of fascinating artifacts, all arranged beautifully but also managing to make you feel as though you are rummaging around in the attic of a Victorian explorer (everyone knows that's the best kind).

It made me feel ridiculously nostalgic. There was a time, mainly on our travels, when T and I were never out of museums and galleries. We'd rock up in a new place with our backpacks, find somewhere to stay and then spend the next couple of days wandering around the local museums and galleries, looking and learning . From huge slick modern operations to tiny little dusty local ones where you'd have to find someone with a key to let you in and would be the only people there. And for a few days afterwards you'd retain the information you'd read and know everything there was to know about the course of the Mississippi, the relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, historic Fijian hairstyles, or the history of paint-by-numbers. And then it would gradually slip away, leaving only the odd 'useful' fact behind (the inventor of paint-by-numbers kits always insisted on including the colour red, whatever the subject matter - fact fans!). There was a lot of beer consumed on these travels as well, which may have contributed to the patchy retention of information... I miss it (both the freedom and drinking beer in the sunshine!) but then I've found there's nothing like spending all day at home with a newborn to make you long to pack up your backpack and head off again. We will one day, I'm sure.

Anyway, back to the RAMM, I wasn't sure if photography was allowed and there was nobody around to ask, but I couldn't resist taking a few furtive pictures of the butterflies.

First project of the year

So far this year, when I have not been trying to get to grips with a new baby, toddler-wrangling or fighting off a host of evil germs with a hotshot combination of flu medication and industrial quantities of left-over Quality Street, I have been working on my daughter's ripple baby blanket. I'm using Debbie Bliss Ecobaby yarn, which I'm smitten with. The colours are so gentle and it's such a beautifully soft cotton that it's a complete pleasure to crochet with. I'm using Lucy from Attic24's ripple pattern and it's just such a relaxing one to do, just count to four, increase, count to four, decrease. Just about the maximum my brain can manage post-Christmas/new baby.