Birthday Swag (or Book Review Night)

Ah, looky, longtime no post. Sorry, been busy, y'know, up and down the hill to school and back 4 or 5 times a day ...... Leggies are a bit tired, back protests, knee totally wonkered. Mummy has to sit down and do a lot of nothing each afternoon in order to recover...

That aside, last month, I posted a pic of my birthday swag, which mostly consisted of a good pile of books! In no particular order, I received:

The Littlest Matryoshka (Corinne Demas)
All Year Round, A Calendar of Celebrations (A Druitt, C Fynes-Clinton, M Rowling)
The Children's Year (S Cooper, C Fynes-Clinton, M Rowling)
Bend the Rules Sewing (Amy Karol)
One Skein (Leigh Radford)
Fashion DIY (Carrie Blaydes and Nicole Smith)
Omiyage: Handmade Gifts from Fabrics in Japanese Traditions by Kumiko Sudo

All really interesting. On my birthday, I looked at the pictures in most of them, and since then, I've been reading them properly. Already I've made one of the gifts in the Omiyage book - the marble bag for a friend's son's birthday, and it was very happily received, and I'm currently working on a popcorn stitch crochet bag from the One Skein book.

Omiyage is a beautiful book, gorgeous photos, clear diagrams and templates and evocative text. It is an inspiration, if only to start writing a new fabric stash wishlist - silky kimono material galore! One Skein is mostly knitting patterns, not many crochet (I will have to brush up my knitting, sigh) and all created from one skein of yarn. There are some lovely hats, scarfs, mittens, bags and socks in here, all fairly easy to follow and nice photos to illustrate the projects, but the one that really caught my eye was a rug made from a knitted tube of all the colours you could imagine - their suggestion is to use all your odds and ends up - fabulous!

The Children's Year, and All Year Round, are lovely - both illustrated with lovely hand-drawn pen sketches (no photos) and absolutely stuffed full of things to make, do, read and enjoy with your children or other family members.

The Last Minute Fabric Gifts is an inspirational kind of book, together with Fashion DIY. Although some of the Fashion DIY projects are a bit out of my style area, there are a lot of good tips for customising, altering and generally jazzing up your clothes. The gifts in Last Minute Fabric Gifts are sectioned into roughly how long they take to make - ideal when you're running around the house looking for something for so-and-so five minutes before you have to leave to go to theirs... I will be making the little fold up garden, complete with soft bunnies - so cute!

Bend the Rules Sewing is something I've hankered after for a while, and I was delighted to receive this in my birthday parcel. Amy has a relaxed approach to sewing, which really appeals to me as it's the way I do things, and there are some fantastic projects in the book (nice bags!), coupled with many useful tips, that I will be deploying on my next machine sewn project.

And last of all, The Littlest Matryoshka. Not a craft book, but a story. It's for children really, but I love Matryoshka dolls and this book so appealed to me - I'm so glad I got it - the illustrations and story are just lovely. The children love it and I have to read it to them in the morning before school. Although it currently resides on the shelf at the end of our bed at the moment, I think it will deserve a place in my pile of 'Mummy's special books' that I keep upstairs in my living room, together with Down Buttermilk Lane, Brundibar, The Keeping Quilt, and the family monster atlas! Hopefully, a classic for all to enjoy.

Breathe ... And Relax

We went out today, on a proper outing, and had FUN. You know, that old fashioned thing which makes you feel good? Hasn't happened around here for a while, but the sun came out today - which is something so rare lately it can't be wasted - and we made a picnic lunch, packed up the Lemon and went to Bridport, and then Lyme Regis.

These are two of my favourite places to visit locally, for various reasons. We parked at one end of Bridport and walked up past the river (in full spate, due to all the rain), ate our picnic in the children's playground, and then visited as many charity shops as we could. Although they were disappointingly stocked today, we did get a big score at the market - a lovely wooden rocking crib for dollies. I have been looking for one for ages, and was delighted to see this at one of the stalls today. Needless to say, I snapped it up immediately without any further discussion with Teflon Boy, or the kids! I know what's best for that lot, they will obey.

Anyway, once we'd dragged that off to the car, we continued on to Lyme, where we camped out on the newly improved, larger, sandy beach - and actually SWAM in the water, without dying of cold! Amazing, the first day of summer, ha ha, and we're half way through September already. We had a great time, the sun was warm, the water was a reasonable temperature and there were lots of other people with small fry also having fun too. Quite a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. And we treated the beastly little ones to a toasted cheese sarnie and an ice cream for their tea so they stayed happy even though we made them walk all the way from the bottom of the hill right to the top to get back to the car park.

Please note, for those of you not familiar with my family and its idiosyncrasies, or anyone who hasn't been paying attention:
the Lemon is what we call our Citroen Something-or-other,
our children have both been exceptionally unpleasant lately,
I have completely lost my sense of humour about everything,
and the weather has been unspeakably sh*tty for oooh, about 3 months (all of the Summer, really)