Once upon a time on a rainy and cold Sunday afternoon in mid-winter...

... we took our new go-cart out to Bridlington. And you know, it's amazing how a homebuilt wooden cart with two lads in raingear can bring a smile to people's faces. We had at least 10 people comment on it, reminiscing about the carts they used to have when they were kids. Nostalgia is alive and well in Bridlington! ;-)

D couldn't resist squeezing into the cart himself together with Tick to race it down the ramp to the beach promenade.

Building sand castles at Bridlington South Beach.

Father and son...

Some Time Alone...

... can be something very precious indeed. With two little lads, our lives are full - gloriously, industriously full of play and laughter and business. It's wonderful but it's also exhausting, and it can be difficult to have so little time for each other and for yourself. D and my evenings are sacred. Once the lads are in bed we sit down together. Sometimes we talk, or watch TV or read, but we always treat it as time together, spent as a couple. It's important and it's precious, looked forward to every day.

But there still isn't much timee to be alone. Before we had children, D and I used to spend whole weekend days doing whatever we liked most... D would build or fix something in the shed / garage, and I would knit, sew, draw, read... We always had some projects on, there was always so much to do, and we used to 'meet up' for coffee breaks and lunch to tell each other about what we'd been doing.

Today, there is little time for that, so a while ago D and I agreed with Grandma that every few months or so the lads would have a Grandma day while we just... tinker. There is a real sense of decadence in those rare days - to get up and immediately launch into something and to know you don't need to stop until it is either done or the day is coming to a close.

Today, I decided to get the oil paints out. D got an easle and paints for me about... 2 years ago?... and ever since then they've sat in a corner of the dining room, waiting for that one day when they'd finally get unpacked and used. Since this is really nothing you can do with little ones around it's taken a while. ;-)

Now, I've painted before, not for a long while, but I used to love it and used to dabble in it on and off. Never with oil paints, though, so this is a completely new medium for me, and I was VERY excited to finally get to try. These two projects were supposed to be just starter experiments to see how I'd work with oil, but I'm actually quite pleased with them:

#1 Wakeful

Oil on canvas. Painted wet over wet. A red bird in her nest, wakeful and diligent in the silence of the night.

#2 Doodles

Oil and mixed media on canvas

This was really just that - doodling. The way I tend to doodle while talking on the phone. Just with oil and bits from the kids crafts box and a few pieces of ribbon. I didn't have a particular project in mind and just kept on filling in the blank spaces until it was - full.

Afterwards it ocurred to me that it looks a leeeeetle bit like the art of Mati Rose McDonough. I still have a print of hers somewhere, waiting to be framed. I wasn't conscious of this while painting it but maybe my subconscious was inspired by her?

And while I was so busy inside, painting and getting high on paint fumes, D was in the shed, making this:


A go-cart! How cool is that! It's entirely made from scrap, found in the shed - old bits of wood and bicycle wheels. The lads were so excited when they arrived back home earlier. D needs to finish up a few things this week, but next weekend we'll take it out for a ride.

Ten Favourite Childhood Games

Curtesy of Carole Knits.

1) Clue - I loved this game as a child. The gardener did it with the candle holder in the library...
2) Monopoly - I used to play this for HOURS. Honestly, I wanted to play this game all the time and for as long as possible. Nobody in my family shared my fascination with it or my stamina.
3) Rummy - I used to go on a skiing trip with my gran, and my two great aunties once a year around Easter time. During the day I went to a skiing school for kids and in the evening we played endless rounds of card games. I used to be very good at this - now I can't even remember a single one of the rules!
4) Nine Men's Morris - again, as above. One of the games we played during our annual skiing trip. I used to beat the old ladies all the time. ;-)
5) I Spy - kept me entertained on endless car journeys
6) making up stories - I used to make up endless stories on long walks and entertain (or bore) my family with them. And I used to play a Tell A Story game with my gran on the phone where we would each have to think up a story and tell the other. We spent hours on the phone...
7) Make Believe - I used to love 'becoming someone else'. With friends I used to spend whole days being detectives, or indians, or farmers, or doctors and patients, or pirates,...
8) Dressing Up - my great aunt had a box full of dressing up stuff. Alternatively my mom's ball gowns and high heels would do too... ;-)
9) Reading - I was fanatical about books ever since my early childhood and used to spend whole nights reading under the duvet.
10) Mensch aergere Dich nicht! - a German board game that is fairly similar to the game Sorry! I think... We played this quite a lot when I was little.

It's done...

... actually, it was finished a few days ago, but I didn't have time to upload a picture. It was immediately hogged by the lads, which is kind of nice. They like to snuggle under it as they watch TV. :)

In terms of craftmanship this isn't that great. It's wonky in places, there are a few creases, and the trimming is pretty terrible. I forgot all about how to do this properly and fudged my way through it. The corners would make any seasoned quilter run away screaming. I don't really mind, though because this is not a gift - it's just for us to love and use. And it's already getting a LOT of use here from both the lads and us grown ups. I'm considering stitching a few more colourful hankies on top of the others to brighten it up, but for now I'll leave it as it is I think...

I am shocked...

Well, colour me shocked. My last post was in 2009, when I had just finished the Primeval socks. So much time has passed, Primeval is actually on TV once again.

I declare, things will have to change. I acknowledge that with two very lively little lads and a busy job I don't have a lot of time for lengthy posts, but since Bean, older of the two lively lads, is developing both a crafts and photography addiction I should have ample opportunity for photoshoots. We may have to remodel the blog a bit - make it into more of a communal project rather than a solo enterprise, but that's an exciting change, no?

So, more photos, slightly less writing. There is also less knitting going on these days. Not none, but time is limited, and I'm doing a lot of crafts and mosaicing and painting with the little ones during the day and also some sewing at night, so things progress somewhat more slowly around here than they used to.

This is the plan:

1) posting approximately 2x per week. I have two days with the lads, so those might be my posting days.

2) one progress / crafts photo per week (we do a lot of STUFF)

3) one snapshot of our week (a still with very little comment) - everyone has those moments every day. Moments that you want to capture and that require very little commentary. So you'll get one of those

There may be more, but probably not every week. I don't want to overburden us with plans that we might not be able to live up to. Busy lives and all that.

So to start this off, here is my WIP right now:


This is my handkerchief quilt, made from old family handkerchiefs that I have kept and/or have been given over the years by members of both my and D's family. I kept them because I always rather liked those dainty little fabric square, some of them with quite exquisit lacework, others more utilitarian and plain, but each of them with a story to tell, with intricate monograms in the corners, mended patches, fine and at times brittle fabric. A little scrap of history, every single one of them. Not knowing precisely what to do with my little stack of handkerchiefs it ocurred to me that they would be perfect for a quilt, so I sewed them all together and backed them with a length of blue paisley fabric I had in my stash. Not finished yet, and far from perfect (turns out that handkerchiefs are really awkward to sew together - all that brittle fabric...), but very much anticipated as a snuggle blanket by the whole family.

Primeval Socks finished!

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you...

* drumroll *




Tada! My Primeval socks.

Ok, so they don't really look primeval, but they were knitted while watching Season 1 of Primeval on DVD, in that precious 2 hour slot in the evening after the kids have gone to bed and before D and I drag ourselves up to bed to promptly pass out.

The yarn was skein of Duet sock yarn in the colourway 'best friends', a gift from Craftylilly for a contest that she had on an eternity ago. It was great fun to knit with. The pattern was supposed to be for the Herringbone socks, but apparently I've forgotten how to read a pattern and totally ignored the second line of the herringbone pattern, which says that you have to knit one row in stockinette. Oh well, the result is a whole new pattern and although initially there may have been quite a bit of swearing when I realised my mistake (almost at the end of sock one, after I a lot of bewilderment why my sock didn't look anything like the pictures in the pattern) I am now rather pleased with how it looks.

I will knit another pair with the correct pattern, though, just to see if I like that too. ;-)

Moderations to the pattern:
* ...er... the herringbone pattern. It's sort of a different pattern now.
* knit on 2.5mm circs with the magic loop technique
* I only cast on 48 because of the larger needle size

Knitting from stash...

... means that before you can knit you need to wind. Yarn into yarn cakes, that is.

I've been going a bit crazy on the winding of yarn into balls. In one frantic evening that had me bent over my swift and yarn winder for a couple of hours while my bemused husband was watching proceedings from his rather more comfy place on the sofa, I turned skein after skein into yummy cakes.


From Back left to front left, clockwise: three balls of Rowan Tweed in grey, left over from another project, two balls of Knit Picks Memories Sock Yarn in Redwood Forest, three balls of dark blue Rowan DK Tweed, five balls of orange/yellow handspun, one massive ball of laceweight handpainted 100% cashmere from Hipknits, one ball of grey handpainted and handspun merino sockyarn from Hipknits, one ball of 100% cashmere sock yarn from Hipknits, and finally one ball of handpainted wool that I got via a swap from Australia.

Phew, that was a lot of winding! I've been knitting and crocheting too, though. Mainly granny squares, but then the urge to knit something larger and I grabbed two balls of lovely soft Misson Falls 1824 wool (merino superwash) that I had lying around, and cast on for Zoe Mellor's Dinosaur toy. I didn't bother to do a tension swatch because really, what does it matter if a toy comes out a bit larger or smaller than the pattern states? Yeah, right. This is one MASSIVE dinosaur - more like a pillow, really - and I also ran out of yarn so had to do the legs and belly in a different yarn. That'll teach me... Anyway, she's called Gerti. :-)


I've now cast on for another project - Tang from Custom Knits. I love that book - how often do you get a pattern book and want to do every single project in there? I'm using a GGH yarn, also from stash (it's kind of addictive, this knitting from stash... and I have enough to keep me going for quite a while!).


More knitting from stash to come soon. Watch this space... ;-)

Well...

... what an odd sort of day yesterday was!

Because after writing that post about my thwarted Flylady attempts I decided to tidy. Yes, I was so tired that I could have dropped on the spot, but I had no kids at home today and really, if you have a day at home with your children in daycare you have to do something that uses this precious time in a valuable way. While it is arguable that a dose of uninterrupted sleep (haven't had that for about 9 months now) might have been exactly that, I instead decided to get the house ORGANISED.

Well, not quite that, but I made a start anyway. Laundry was done. Nearly all of it, including the bits of fabric that have been lying next to the washing machine for months now, waiting to be washed. Laundry was hung outside on the line.


I'm not sure what it is, but I love the sight of laundry on the line. It looks all crisp and clean and summery, swaying slightly in the breeze...

Then laundry was taken off the line and folded. Yes, it was hot enough yesterday to get several batches of laundry dry, despite a short shower around mid-day which threatened to put an end to my laundry ambitions.


Then I tackled the kitchen. I made dinner - some chicken casserole - and I tidied the kitchen table. We have a new acquisition there. BIL gave us his old aquarium and after languishing in the shed for months and months we finally decided a couple of weeks ago to get it all cleaned up and get some fish. We debated for a long time where to put it (no space in the lounge, no good in the office, no suitable piece of furniture anywhere) before we realised that we had the perfect place right there - the kitchen table. It's sturdy, it's the right hight, and we can always see the fish when we eat. It may even pursuade the Bean to stay at the table long enough to actually eat something.


Right now we don't have fish yet because the guy in the shop told us that he'd wait for at least 2 weeks with that. Instead we have a snail called Speedy, who feels very much at home and has already started to diminish the vegetation in the aquarium. He does so in a rather alarmingly efficient way, scooting over to the base of a plant and biting through the stem until it floats up to the surface. He seems to have a particular liking for a pretty light green feathery kind of plant, which is now nearly gone. Hopefully this is not a sign of things to come or Speedy and I will have to have words...

Anyway, I got sidetracked - I tidied the kitchen and made dinner. I switched on the dishwasher. Then I moved back into the laundry room and tidied and swept the floor there. Then I packed up a bunch of ebay parcels (we've been trying to declutter a bit, recently) and took them to the post office.

Then I sat down and had a well-earned cup of tea and a chocolate bar (kindly purchased and donated by D on his way back from work). After all that I felt very, very tired, but oh it feels good to have achieved something.

Oh boy...

... I'm so tired.

Yesterday evening, at bedtime, the littlest member of our family decided to drink a whole bottle (he just randomly decided a few days ago that it was OK after all to drink from a plastic teat - yay!) then to burp uncomfortably and, when I picked him up, to throw up his entire stomach contents all over my top. In fact, like the practical and competent person I am (HA!) I caught most of it in the little dip that my nursing bra makes, right there in the middle. Ugh! He then, poor little thing, demanded mama's milk rather than the bottle, and proceeded to sleep fitfully, for about an hour at a time, throughout the night. We were both rather shattered this morning.

Which is one of the many reasons why I think shall not devote much time to my task of the day - The Main Bathroom and the Laundry Room. Yeah, I know, I signed up to The Flylady ages ago and receive her emails every day - cheerful testimonials of successful housecleaning and house organising, largely ignored by me while I struggle up the stairs, holding an infant and clutching the hand of a toddler, past the laundry basket blocking the way in the hall, and the boxes, destined for the attic, which clutter up the stairs and hinder my progress. At least I have done some laundry today. Mainly because it had baby sick on it.



I always seem to have plans for the house. Grand plans. Little plans. Humble plans to perhaps finally hang a picture or two on our blank walls. The husband resists my attempts to get him to drill holes and stares in horror at my suggestion that perhaps I could do this. To be fair, he has a point - our walls are fragile, with old crumbling horse hair plaster skimmed with a few millimetres of new plaster, which tends to come off when any nail or screw comes too close, leaving unsightly huge holes in our pristine white walls. Maybe not the right kind of project to learn whielding power tools. In the end he relented and finally hung that mirror. That mirror that I bought nearly 2 years ago, took nearly as long to paint, and which has been standing around, tripping us up, all this time. I'm still startled every time I walk into the lounge that there is something ON THE WALL. It's quite a shock to the system.



The surprise was that the drilling wasn't too bad this time. Which has led me to drag out every single picture hidden away in the attic, and line it up (to be tripped over) so the husband can see it and think "oh, I could hang this up!". Well, one can dream, right?


In the meantime, I could wash the floor in the hall, or the kitchen, or do some more laundry, or dust (everywhere), or hoover the stairs, or clean the bathroom, or declutter the guest bedroom, or plan my week the way The Flylady suggests. Instead, I've been crocheting Granny Squares. I've become rather obsessed. They are everywhere. Tick has been playing with them. The Bean lines them up on the living room floor, Kipper the cat makes his nest on them. Such a good way to get rid of those spare balls of yarn! I've nearly run out now and have turned to thinking of yarn that I could use for the last round and the stitching together of all the squares. I still have a half-frogged Shetland sweater lying around somewhere. Maybe that would yield enough yarn?


So The Flylady has not really been a resounding success around here. Don't get me wrong, I like the concept (although not the testimonials - it's all a bit too weird) and I think it COULD work if one gave it a real try. Of course I find excuse after excuse - mainly that the house is still not finished and we have boxes standing around and bare floorboards with old rugs over them everywhere - but really, lets face it. The house will never be finished.

"But we've been busy!" I stammer, tripping over myself to justify my idleness, "we've been going to weddings at the other end of the country (Devon). Going to Germany to see my family. Doing work type things. Negotiating part-time work for me. Generally living and trying to get stuff done..." and it's true. Still maybe I should give it a chance. 10 minutes of anything isn't such a long time, is it?

Maybe tomorrow - when I'm not so tired.

The sea is on the naughty step...

Hornsea, East Yorkshire.

Bean has a thing about the naughty step. I think the older boy at the childminder's he goes to a couple of times a week might visit that step sometimes when he needs a few minutes to get his little self back together, and Bean thinks it's the coolest thing ever that people who are NAUGHTY are sent to sit there. "I put the timer on!" he exclaims whenever anyone does something he deems naughty. It's never him, though. Funny, that...

The sea, the poor thing, never gets to leave the naughty step at all. After all, who wouldn't have to be sent for a time out for continuously teasing and pretending to come and get you?

The truth is, Bean is a little scared of the sea. I think it's D's fault, because the last time we were at the beach he told Bean that the sea was coming and that they would have to run so it wouldn't get them. It's stuck in his impressionable toddler mind and refuses to be dislodged. This time, just to make sure, he insisted on being carried the entire time. As long as his feet didn't touch the sand he was safe, you see? The only place he agreed to walk was behind the sea defences and he had fun chucking a few stones into the rock pools, but on the actual beach? "Noooo! Daddy carry me!"

We had a good time - a beautiful early summer day, not many people around (nobody seems to go to Hornsea), and some bacon sandwiches in Eddie the van. What could be better?




A windy but bright day.


Brotherly affection... and some gazing out onto the sea from the safety of the van.


Also, I've been sewing a bit - mainly trousers for Tick (here he is wearing a pair made from some curtain off-cuts!). It's hard to fit a cloth nappy bum into normal 6-9 months trousers, so some wide-leg pants were needed. I used the tutorial that SouleMama has in her book The Creative Family - so easy! She wasn't kidding when she said that it only takes 15 minutes to make these trousers. I might have to raid my fabric stash and makes some more...