Missing in Action

Been busy enjoying the not raining weather of late, including some days off with Teflon Boy. We're just doing long weekends during the school summer holidays - Friday to Monday, which is just right for full-on family activities! We've even enjoyed some olympics related activities, we tried some sporty things at the Sports Arena down on the beach at Weymouth - Kayaking was the big hit with all the family, so much so that we are now considering whether to buy our own. In other news, it's very nearly my Extremely Big birthday (40), and I have requested a ukelele as one of my gifts. I hope to achieve great things (!) but as I haven't practised or played on any musical instrument since the arrival of Things 1 and 2, I expect my ambition to exceed my ability by quite a lot. In the interest of research, this morning I clicked through from the lovely Wikipedia, to this handy site where I found an AMAZING video of The Waffle Stompers, covering Gotye's most recent hit 'Somebody I Used To Know'. Please watch their video, the kids and I enjoyed it so much, I believe I'm going to be watching it all day now!

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.

As promised, a crafty something

Well, I've finished Baby Nattie's present for Sunday, and as yesterday's posts were all about the cluckers, I thought you might like a crafty something instead. So here it is, a tinkly, softy, easy catchy ball for a 1 year old:

Made from my stash of quilting cottons, sorry about the quality of the photo, I have been drinking wine tonight, so may not be focusing properly :P . I may even be brave enough to go and load the other crappy pictures up to my Flikr - it's been a pig lately, just like my daughter. Who likes to scream very very loudly, about absolutely everything. Anyone want a bad tempered 2 year old? I've had a headache all day. Blah, the end.

See you tomorrow, probably.

My Birthday!

Well, I mentioned last week somewhere here that it was my birthday (and no, I'm not telling), and I wanted to show you the lovely goodies from family and friends:



A great pile of reading material for crafting, (with or without the children); a lovely story about Matryoshka dolls; a beautiful hand made mousey pin-cushion complete with new pins - what luxury - I've been too mean to go out and buy my own!; 2 pictures from Charlie, signed; a georgeous bunch of dahlias from one of my Mum's dearest friends; a crochet magazine, and unseen, a fantastic new bell for my bicycle - it goes trling, trling - perfect! And of course, an IOU, for 2 chickens, from my husband - you've seen their pics already!

The day itself was not too bad - the sun actually came out for the first time in about 3 weeks, and was pleasantly warm, Mum and Dad popped in, and a friend came round to drop off a gift, and ended staying for lunch. All good.

However, first thing, before these nice things, me and the little burdens had to walk to the store for food items, which is fine, but burden No 1 decided to take his bike along. Which he has had for 8 months. He managed to park it, and both his sandals in an enormous pile of the most revolting, sticky, icky dog poo about 100 yards from the store! I said to him, 'well done, so you choose to make this humungous error on my birthday - thank you so much' (in an ironic manner, I hope you realise, through gritted teeth). Whereupon, we had to return home, to relieve ourselves of the aforesaid s****y shoes and bike, replace shoes, wash hands, turn around, and go straight back out so we could get the damn shopping. As I am sure you are aware, walking around with toddlers is a painful process at the best of times, so a trip that at best should have taken about 40 minutes, took an hour and 40 minutes. And involved dog mess. I know, it's the fault of the dog owner that left the stuff lying around, but dang it I was MAD! And I might have done a bit of shouting, I mean, it was my birthday for goodness sake.

Now, I'm glad I got that off my chest again. The rest of the day was OK for a birthday. Thanks to everyone who sent cards, or messages!

Gussie

IMG_0395
Originally uploaded by rowsew

Birthday girl No 2, not such a good pic, but here nonetheless! She is also a Light Sussex cross, I think with Black Rock, but not 100% certain. Anyway, she's a big girl, and I'm hoping for many eggs coming soon!

Just a quickie (oo-er!)

I haven't posted much lately, hopefully I'll have time for a big catch up at the weekend after my birthday. In the meantime, here's a quote I found today, which led to some thinking - an event which really needs to be applauded with a loud fanfare! :

"Parents are responsible for their children’s education. Not the government. Wouldn't it be great if more parents knew that and did something about it?

(Gayle Joubert)"

Thanks to Home Education UK for that one.