Tree Fall

Various Miscellany

I apologise in advance for the lack of cohesion of this post. I keep waiting until the weather is good enough to take some new photo's and until I have more than five minutes to piece my thoughts together and until I actually have something to show you. And I think that that way lies disaster! Or at the very least, a very quiet blog indeed. So in the interests of keeping this thing rolling, I present a jumble of images and thoughts.
First off, I recieved this wonderful birthday present last week from Lesley .

I was so very touched when Lesley asked me for my address and then even more so when the postman dropped a lovely parcel through my letter box a few days later and I opened it to find this beautifully embroidered picture.
I love it and must say that when a friend of mine saw it she sighed and said 'you have so many lovely things' and she was purely looking at the wonderful work of my fellow bloggers. And I realised as we discussed it that it's only been since we have been stone broke that I've become the proud owner of such lovely things. Back in the day when I was still a recognised member of society and earnt my own money, if I wanted something I popped out to a store and bought something immediate and generic. If I wanted to change the look of a room I would pretty much be able to do it in one day, with one shopping trip. Which is all very well, but so little of what I bought was original and none of it was actually made for me! And I know I keep banging on about this, but I LOVE that I'm looking at real art, made by real people. And I also love the fact that my friends are a little jealous!
So a massive thank you to Lesley! We've all said it, but it's so worth saying again - the kindness and generosity of the blogging community is just amazing.

I meant to post this picture on Friday as part of  Fiona's WIP Fridays. But just didn't get around to it, so I guess this is now WIP Monday.

A couple of piles of mattresses, a couple of disgracefully tardy fruit patches and some princesses. And in the background the start of a new topsy turvy doll - assuming that the fabric works. I'm a little worried that it may be too stiff to facilitate the topsy turvyness.

I've been meaning to show you this book for a while now. I just haven't been able to work out how to crowbar it in to a post until today.

Trapunto has always made me a little nervous. It seemed to me to be rather complicated and something that I should just avoid. For those of you that aren't familiar with it, trapunto is not a type of car (as Jim has just suggested!) but a form of (usually) whole cloth quilting that results in a raised surface. The pattern on the quilt top is often something like a vine with leaves and fruits that is stuffed with cord or batting.
It's a nice effect but not something that has really caught my eye until I bought this book. As I've said, trapunto is usually used for vines etc, but this (slightly crazy) book uses it much more interestingly. Just look at these crazy toaster and breadbin covers!

Mmmm, beige towelling!
But dodgy fabrics aside, this book really did simplify the method for me and gave me some cool ideas that I want to try out. I really like the look of the tote on the front cover. And I don't know if you can see it, but that apron has little trapunto mushrooms on!  Lovely.

And finally (I think), I've been wanting to wait until they were all finished and ready to go in the shop before I posted new Coney Rabbits, but the speed I'm working at the moment means that that may never happen! So here's a peek at some of the new rabbits, with still more to come.

There are blue and green rabbits still in various stages of evolution that I'm hoping to have done this week and then I'll be updating the shop. I've also got at least one quilt to add to the shop and maybe a couple of other little pieces. But that could just be me mistaking my life for someone elses!

A Pox On Your House

In the space of a couple of days we have gone from this,

my beautiful girl eating her first ever piece of cake, which I must say she managed like a pro. Definately her father's daughter when it comes to cake!
To this,

my poor baby has chicken pox and is as miserable as sin. And you know what? After my post the other day about never having a sleepless night, Bella stayed up until 5am this morning and then woke again at 7am. The poor thing is feeling very poorly indeed and I am feeling horrible and helpless and useless. And I never again want to see my daughter look at me with such confusion as to why I won't  make the pain go away. I guess that will teach Jim and I to feel sorry for ourselves! It is just so wrong that I can't make her feel better.

On a much nicer note, here are a few books that I got for my birthday.

This book is wonderful! It's full of beautiful images of both modern and traditional rooms.

Sorry about the poor quality pictures, my scanner isn't working at the moment and the lighting wasn't very good. (and a poor workman always blames his tools!).

I also got this book.

Which is jam packed with fantastic photos! But I must warn you - alliteration is a dangerous thing in the wrong hands!

But this is my favourite one.

As it says, it's a recipe book, but it's oh so much more. It' s beautifully big and heavy and absolutely heaving with the best photo's ever.

If you've got all of Nigella's books and you want yet more, this is the book for you! It is personal and evocative and wonderful to actually read, with it's annecdotes and family photos. And it also has some fantastic looking recipes. Seriously, buy it!

What Is A Butterfly?

Continuing on the theme of books that I've recently bought at car boot sales, this is a lovely childrens book that I grabbed last week. The cover is so fantastic that I wasn't in the slightest bit bothered about whether or not the actual book was any good. I was indeed judging a book by it's cover!
Fortunately the inside is wonderful too.

It's tell the story of the butterfly in text book form but with gorgeous, gorgeous illustrations.

I'm getting quite a collection of childrens books and I keep wondering what to do with them. I kid myself that I'm buying them for when Bella's older, and I even put them on her bookshelf. But the reality is that I love them and want them for myself. What does everyone else do? Do you keep any of the thrifted vintage childrens books for yourselves or do you actually give them to your children? I suppose that it's different once they're older, but at the moment Bella would obviously wreck them and I guess I just can't picture a time when she would take care and appreciate how old and beautiful these books are. I just have this image in my head of coming home one day to discover that Bella has cut up the books for the pictures!
Don't get me wrong, we love books and we will raise Bella to hopefully love them too, but she'll still do what kids do. And of course, if I say that the books are hers then she's got every right to do what she wants with them.
It just seems too precious and anal to keep these books away from the very people they were intended for. I guess the answer is to just wait and see. Bella may grow up to love books as much as I do. I would be interested to hear what others have done though.

Here is the reason for the lack of craft posts at the moment.

I have been working, working, working on the Princess and the Pea sets.

I'll be putting another few sets in the shop later today I hope (with a little added extra, not shown in the last sets).

(They're in the shop now).

Flower Arranging

The great thing about thrifting - or in my case, car booting - is that it allows you to start collections that you ordinarily couldn't justify. I mean, if I was paying full price for the books that I buy at car boot sales I most definately would not have started a collection of vintage flower arranging books.
Flower arranging is not a subject that has ever held much interest for me. But when a book catches your eye and it only costs 10p, you can afford to figure what the hell! And I'm very glad that I did.


I love the vase on the cover and I love that they used pink text.

Everything on this page appeals to me. Those trays are just wonderful. The orange one shoud be living in this kitchen .

That vase again. It really reminds me of   Troika , which I am always torn about. I love a lot of the shapes but the dark, dense colours don't always appeal to me.

How beautiful is this image?  This is my kind of flower arrangement. Although I love a bunch of wildflowers just thrown in a vase I am also a big, big fan of very sparse, sculptural arrangements.

Brown, green and white. Beautiful.
The whole book is wonderful and I've been surprised by how interested in the art of flower arranging I'm becoming.

This is actually the first of the books that I bought. I had no real interest in the subject and actually bought it with the intention of perhaps cutting it up (eek!). But once I got it home I realised that it was just too perfect to ruin.

It's much more traditional than the Japanese book, but is still has some pretty wild arrangements in it.

Look at the deer! And is that an actual vase?

This one actually makes me kind of sad. That deer looks so wistful.  But I may have to copy it next christmas because it's just so cool.

And just in case flower arranging wasn't strange enough, I've also started collecting vintage cake decorating books!

Great Mail Day!

Oooo, I love mail! At least today I do - yesterday, not so much! But today was definately a good day!

These lovely parcels arrived from Claire . And inside were all of these (I'm not boasting, just very grateful and happy!).

Beautiful ribbon! I wish, wish, wish I could get ribbon like this over here. Why is the UK bereft of lovley ribbon? What did we do to deserve our lack of beautiful ribbon?

And this wonderful, beautiful pin cushion. It is so perfectly made, I can't tell you. And the colours!!! How I love the colours. Just yummy!

Also a set of Claires ATC's. Now I'm very aware that I'm running out of superlatives here, so please forgive my use of the words, beautiful, gorgeous and wonderful again - but I'm pretty sure that you'll agree that they are completely justified. How lovely are these? They're going to be framed and hung in Bella's room. (This blog has led to Bella having so much original, fantastic art in her room and that makes me very, very happy indeed!). These are the first ATC's that I've ever had and it was great timing because whilst looking at them I was listening to this . How perfect is that?

Claire also sent this great magazine. We can't get this here. Is it seperate to the Kids magazine? I haven't seen it before but I love it and it sparked great excitement in Jim when he saw the 'Collection in a Box' piece. He apparently used to make little spy kits in matchboxes when he was a kid! How cool is that? It's a side of him I didn't know about. Not the spy side, we still pretend we're spys, but the making things side of him. Don't get me wrong, he used to make films, but I've never known him do anything actually crafty. Very cool.
And did you notice that I also got one of Hillary's postcards? They are the best postcards ever. Yes, ever.
Thank you so much Claire! I love everything! And I shall be putting some ATC's in the post for you very soon (once I've made them!!).

The other thing that arrived today was this book. In one of those bizarre coincidences Amanda got hold of a copy of this book at the same time as I won it on Ebay. Isn't that weird? I'd never heard of this book before I bid on it last week and then I see it on a blog. Sometimes the world feels very small.
I can't tell you how inspirational this book is. Actually I can. As soon as I opened it I started to embroider a tree on a scrap of fabric. Literally as soon as I opened it.

Wonderful!

I love knitting

As I'm feeling a little better today the three of us went out for a coffee at Borders. I haven't actually left the house since Friday so this was more of a treat than it might sound!
Usually I'm pretty good when it comes to buying books. I know I can get them cheaper at Amazon and I don't have a problem with waiting for them, and since I don't have any independant bookstores to support, I don't need to feel guilty for going for the cheapest supplier. But I just couldn't resist today. My defences were weakened by the flu. It wasn't my fault. Honest.
So even though I don't knit and can't knit and dare I say it, hate to knit, I bought this book  today.

I know that other people have already got it, but it's the first time I've had a chance to look at it. And it is heaven! Even Jim agreed that my lack of knitting should not stand in my way of owning this beautiful book (he's such a good husband).
So, I now have to re-learn to knit and re-learn to damn well enjoy it, because Bella's getting everything in there, even the boys stuff!

Scanner, PC, Zip Drive, Laptop

It's as easy as 1, 2, 3, (4) to get a scanned picture on to this blog! For some reason my Laptop will not recognise my scanner and my PC runs too slowly to try and upload from. Also my PC does not have a cd rewriter (how old ??) as I discovered last night when I popped a CDR into it's cd tray and tried to save to it. All I got was a prompt asking me to put a cd in. "I have " I kept shouting. Finally I realised - that it wasn't the PC being dumb, it was me! It wanted a real cd, you know an audio one, because it only plays cds. Duh!
So, in order to get a picture from a book to my blog we follow the procedure listed above (after formatting the CDR because the PC won't recognise it otherwise!). And thank you to my lovely husband for sending me to bed and then staying up to sort all of that out!

And this is what I was determined to post about today.
 
I found this book at a carboot sale just before christmas and I just love it. Look at all these lovely pictures! (sorry I've just discovered that although Jim did a great job of sorting all of that out last night, he didn't actually copy all the pictures -so this is only a few for now)

I love these leaves so much!

Can you see that embroidered circus bedding??? I know a little girl who's gonna be getting circus themed bedding for sure!

I like the simplicity of this hanging, although I'm not keen on the yellow and the pink.

And I know it's a bit late for this picture , but how great are these Christmas cards?

And to top it all off, inside the book was this handwritten list!

Childhood Treasures

                     

These wonderful books were delivered today and I'm almost too scared to look at them properly. I keep picking them up and flicking through them but I want to savour them and the combination of tv, baby and husband makes that impossible. I need a warm, comfortable armchair, in a well lit corner, with a glass of wine and a note pad so that I can jot down any ideas sparked by this wonderful inspiration. Instead I have a sofa covered in sweet wrappers (albeit Lindt orange chocolate!), fabric remnants (the detrious of a failed craft attempt) and magazines, in semi darkness, due to my side lamp having to be moved to fit the christmas tree in, and then one set of christmas lights dieing yesterday! I have to have the ceiling light on at the moment, and this is something that I totally agree with Alicia at Posy Gets Cosy on - ceiling lights are indeed evil! Atmosphere? Sure if work canteens  are your thing.

I truly love being a mom, it took a long time to happen and has been a daily joy. But I do miss having time.  I miss being able to chose what to do with my free time. I miss getting up in the morning with a plan that I can stick to. I miss spending all day in my workroom, in my pj's. I miss staying up all night working because I'm on a roll, and it doesn't matter what time I get up the next day. I love what all of that has been replaced with (a daughter who laughs at her own farts - what could beat that?) but I do sometimes wish there was room for a bit of a compromise.  And I wanna be able to read my books!

Surprise

About 4 or 5 months ago we went to Ridgeway Crafts in Sheffield with my mom and dad for breakfast. Ridgeway was originally set up as a craft village, with lots of  open workshops, where you could watch the crafters at work and purchase their goods. Unfortunately, over the last few years it has changed quite a lot, and now pretty much consists of a couple of shops selling cardmaking materials and teddybears. There is one workshop still open though, that sells reconditioned and replica clocks and that's where I spotted this little number. It's called Edinburgh (which is where I used to live and where Jim and I met and married) and I really liked it. I mentioned it to my mom in passing and didn't think about it again, until with total surprise, I unwrapped it on Christmas day. Yay and double yay! My parents had gone back the very next day and bought it for us. Everything about the clock was a surprise. It's not the sort of thing my parents usually get me, and they don't usually buy on the spur of the moment like that. And I had totally forgotten about it. Again I say, Yay. Oh and it's going to look perfect on my mantle in front of our lovely new wallpaper.

 

This book wasn't a surprise. I just love the cover so much that I wanted to include a photo of it. I bought it two days ago and still haven't even opened it, but don't those apples look delicious?

And this is just because the clock and the book looked so pretty together!