Bits and pieces

Hello bloggy friends! I have missed you! I have made a resolution to post more often. It is nice to come here and warble away. I don't visit often enough. I have a great excuse to be here today though, as I'm waiting for my literature search records to export on my other computer, so am temporarily paralysed work-wise!

I haven't been making very much recently as we've been thinking about moving house so all my thoughts have been on mortgages and property rises/crashes etc. Eek! We have looked round a few houses that are quite nice on many levels but alas, it's expensive in the Bath and all houses that we can afford have a fatal flaw. Some recent examples of fatal flaws:

-house built on top of cliff and garden perilously clinging to cliff, necessitating perilous cling to cliff for selves to navigate to shed.
-house built at bottom of cliff, necessitating much artificial lighting or slight troll-feeling whenever in back half of house
-house in good location but internal walls in wrong location, necessitating builders coming and talking of 'steels' and '£1000 for that, £1000 for that, oh yeah, another £1000 for that' jobs
-house perfect but location imperfect (ie adds another 30mins to my 1.5h commute)
-house perfect but costs too much

So, still hoping for a miracle unflawed house, and will probably get the sewing going again while I wait!

I have been being DIY handy though. Not much call for this in a rented house admittedly, but our house is plagued by black mould (curses! condensation. problem with single-skin stone houses!) so requires a fair bit of maintenence to keep mould at bay. One of the more distressing mouldy area discoveries last winter was the inside of our coats. We had hung them on the back of the front door, and condensation had built up there and there was mould all over them! So horrid. So I bought this frankly OTT girly coat hook thing from the shop opposite work. More of a convenience purchase than an actual style decision (am surprised the husband did not complain. Perhaps he is a secret shabby chic lover). Put it up last year but the weight of it pulled one of the tacks out of the wall. We had (the shame!!!) been living with this for a while:

Sorry about the perpetually shabby photos.

This situation was not satisfactory, but the tack had ripped a hole in the plasterboard and couldn't go back in. So it was MILLIPUT TO THE RESCUE!!!! I love milliput. Most of our house is held together with it. It's this sort of plasticine-type stuff that comes in a grey part and a yellow part. You roll the two different colours together and get a sort of yellow-grey putty stuff. You can then make it into whatever shape you want, and it will become ROCK HARD in a few hours. I stuffed it into the hole and then put the nail back in and waited a bit. I also got a knife and smoothed the wall so it was flat and not all lumpy with weird grellow plastaciney stuff (good tenant?!!!!). Now we are set for the heavy coats of winter:

Yes, that is a little bird sitting in the girly coat hook. It had a little picture frame in the 'o' of LOVE (of course!) so I framed a scrap of happy Tilda fabric that I had (used here). I love it! Although am now thinking I should have used something more manly to offset the 'Love'. Perhaps a photo of a lorry? Or a muscle? Suggestions welcome.

tweeeeeet! hellooo!!!

Ooh and whilst references 1001-2000 download (groan!) I will just show you the few other things I've made since we last spoke:

Veg cake mix (incl beetroot). Turned out lovely. Note also pleasing 1980s juicer in background!

Ooh and this tea cosy for my lovely work friend who got married in a flurry of bunting and joy:

Yay! Made with leftovers from our own wedding bunting. 2011/12 truly are the years of the bunting!

And finally, the one I'm most proud of: A LADY!!!

Was going to give her to our niece. Fairly sure I still am. Quite in love with her tho. Ack!!

I made her from a pattern in Mollie Makes. So proud!

Ooh and talking of proud, and ladies, our friends in the Midlands recently welcomed a GORGEOUS baby girl to their family. Just so happy for them. Congratulations J&F. 

I wanted to show you this quilt I made for them, which will hopefully be a nice playmat or something for their little one:

Tried to be gender-neutral as they didn't know whether they were expecting a boy or girl, and think it worked ok! Yay. I basically made it up as I went along. First one I've ever made. Def won't be the last! So satisfying. And the nice thing about sewing gifts is, you can feel your love for the recipient as you make them! If that makes sense.

Have a lovely evening everyone! xxxx

iPadded: a handmade quilted iPad case!

I have been wanting to show you this for ages, but couldn't because it was a present for my Mum, who likely comprises 50% of everyone who reads this blog (hello Mum!). Now it has been handed over (and is reportedly in use), I can unveil:

I am v pleased with it because it is one of the first things that I have made that actually turned out a) anything like I hoped it would, and b) not looking like a child had made it. The patterned fabrics are from Tilda and the other bits and pieces are random leftovers that I had lying around.

I basically just got our iPad, measured it, and added a few cms for general seam allowance plus my own margin for error (things I sew ALWAYS end up smaller than they are supposed to, unless they are a tea cosy, in which case they end up as gargantuan things suitable only for giant's tea parties and headwear for men with big heads and little shame. Strange but true). I used the measurements to make a little lined fabric bag with a layer of batting in the middle. I sewed a piece of elasticated gingham into the top seam and a button on the other side to hold it closed. I did toy with making a little quilted lid to protect it better and probably would have done if the iPad was in there loose. As it is, iPad is always in a little black leather protective case, so this case is extra padding for pretty highdays (iDays? hehehe) and holidays.

I have a few more projects on the go at the moment but seeing as the PhD is the only one which pays me, they are a bit dormant! I have vague ideas of becoming like a lady I met at a lovely fabric shop who takes pretty sewing things on holiday with her, but the thing is, it seems to require so much effort just to pack enough clean and (vaguely) matching clothes for a holiday that I am not sure that the organisation required to bring fabric plus needles and thread, etc, is within reach at present! We Shall See.

Toasty ears

So, if you know Husband, you will know he is Super Cool. He is Down with the Kids. He is an Uber Trendsetter.

These traits meant that he was becoming increasingly unhappy with his headphones. They were free onesI had got off a drug rep at a conference (pretty good freebie I thought, right?). He claimed he wanted ones with better sound.. but I know that secretly he wanted ones that looked BETTER. In keeping with his bad self. I also suspect that he wanted them to fit in with the headphones of the other people on the bus.

So, he bought a massive pair of headphones. They are big and cream and quite amazing. I was with him when he bought them. They also come in black and powder pink.. When we were in the shop, it became clear that he couldn't tell the difference between the cream ones and the pink ones (he's colour blind). OH OH it was tempting not to say anything as he admired the pink ones. But in the end, the cream ones were chosen. 

They are very large and um, cream. They needed a safe place to go when in his bag. His bag deserves a blog of its very own. To keep things succinct, I will just say that it is a place that papers, old plastic lunchboxes and cookie bags go to decompose. One day perhaps evolution will occur and a new superhero might emerge and we will be rich. Until then, however, it was necessary to protect the headphones from the bag. So I made them a little padded bag, from my old jumper and his old shirt:

Nestling

I think this case makes him even more super cool. He has managed to maintain his status as Trendiest Man in the Office. I believe he even managed to keep an air of cool when one of his colleagues walked in, saw him wearing the headphones, and asked him if he was 'planning to land a plane'. Heeeheheheee! Aww. Love.

A nice warm thing

Just wanted to drop in to show you this. I thought it might happy things up a bit as it is nice and pretty, unlike the ongoing chest of drawers story, which is currently ugly and dusty..

In my previous post, you can see a picture of some drawers on the floor, with a set of double doors behind them. The drawers are in our dining room, and lead through into the room with no name.. or more accurately the room with many names.. the utility room/ garden shed/ laundry / sledge storage / toolshed/ workshop / mud room / garage. This room is invaluable but also inhumanly cold in winter, as it is single-glazed and has no heating. Those double doors that you can see have a finger-sized gap at the bottom of them, so in winter a wind blows through into the dining room as if from a sort of Bathothian tundra.

One day, feeling in a crafty mood, I decided I would EXCLUDE that draft from our lives. Hooray! I got lots of fabric scraps that I had left over from our wedding decorations, and a few other projects, and cut out some rectangles using my cutty mat, big massive ruler and rotary cutter (if you do anything with fabric you NEED to own these excellent things, they make the boring bits much better!):



Note essential hedgehog pincushion (from my bridesmaids) and sewing-box house (see here!)

 I then sewed the big rectangles together, chopped them horizontally into three, flipped the middle bit over, and sewed it back together so I had a long, thinnish bit of patchwork. I sewed some extra bits of fabric with hearts on it just to make it a bit more pretty. And to appeal to husband. Haha! Then I just hemmed the ends and sewed the long ends together to make a tube. I threaded ribbon through the ends and pulled one end tight to close it.

Next, I looked around for something to stuff it with. I generally save all my fabric scraps so thought I might use those, but I wanted to be able to wash this as it will spend its time being kicked around on the floor and couldn't bear the idea of either making a liner or emptying all the scraps out to wash it. Then I had a stroke of genius. GENIUS! Remember I told you we got some lovely new bedlinen when we got married? Well, we were overrun with old bobbled duvet covers. I took one of them, folded it into three, rolled it up and hey presto! Perfect. Here is the finished thing.. so proud!