Finally feeling festive!

It always seems that after the clocks go back, the countdown to Christmas properly begins. I wasn't feeling at all Christmassy until last weekend, but then the Country Living Christmas Fair came to town!

It may have been pouring down outside, but the sight of this really did brighten my day. :o)

This year I've developed a real love for magazines with an interior design theme. It started with Ideal Home, I bought an issue when I moved house in March to get some idea of where to put things, and I haven't missed an issue since, despite having limited space and an even more limited budget - it's aspirational to say the least! Country Living was a later discovery, but oh, their designers are brilliant, I love their look. The display above is entirely typical.

So I went to the fair fully expecting to find cute festive things to decorate my house with and present ideas. I wasn't expecting to find stash for things I'm planning to make, but that was a bonus! Fabric, and ribbon, and even pretty tape for wrapping and scrapping! Here's a sneak peek:

These colours - red and white - are very much part of my world at the moment. Having come up with a design that can be feasibly repeated 80 odd times, I now have the job of making a third of the wedding invitation folders for my sister, and these are also her colours. My mum and my sister are helping to make the rest, so I had the interesting task of writing instructions to recreate what I'd done, which proved trickier than I imagined! I wouldn't dream of revealing what the finished article is going to look like before the guests find out, but I can show you the beginning of the work in the progress:

The trick is going to be to finish these before my making of this year's Christmas cards kicks off. If only I could slow down the clock! Five weeks to go and counting... x

Happy Halloween!

Say hello to my first ever carved pumpkin! Things I have learned: if you're going to carve a pumpkin from the bottom, don't think that means it's fine to put a small pillar candle into it. I nearly set both pumpkin and kitchen on fire that way. Oh dear. Here, we're back to tea lights and happily it's still glowing away behind me with both pumpkin and kitchen intact.

I decided to bake some Halloween treats - chocolate brownie cupcakes. No trick or treaters came to call, but they missed a fine feast! We also had a fair amount of cheese, and jelly babies for biting the heads off.

Happy Halloween to all (at the witching hour)!

Autumn love

Now that's a cheering sight on a cold morning! Beautiful fresh veggies that were in the ground this time yesterday, a rainbow of goodness defiantly standing out against the greyness of the sky.

And this is what attracted me back to the market after a long leave of absence. Apples! I will go miles for a good English apple in season, and the varieties you get at the market are very hard to beat.  Favourites so far are Laxton Superb and Cox's Orange Pippin.  I love mixing up the varieties, they are beautifully fragrant, staggeringly tasty and look pleasingly rustic in my fruit basket.

This stall just makes me want to make soup. So far, I have made 4 pans of various soups, and the novelty still hasn't worn off. I like how there is always some left for the next day, and probably still enough for lunch the next. It also inspired me to make this.

Mmm, Shepherd's pie. Is there anything better to eat in Autumn than creamy mash that has been made crispy under the grill? Not the prettiest dinner in the world, but one of the nicest. I have also been cooking with apples, mainly crumbles, I highly recommend Blenheim Orange apples for this, mixed with pears. Gorgeous.

The other lovely thing about Autumn is the cosy nights out where it's dark early, which is good excuse to light the candles. I never saw a prettier makeshift bar than this one.

Candles in glass jars, candles in old fashioned stands, candlelight making the bottles gently glow, random twigs in a plain cream jug. The shutter speed has made the barman look a bit like a luminous ghost, which I actually rather like! It was a room in North East London where the ever wonderful Matthew Robins was recording his new album. It is called Noah's Ark and will be an absolute cracker, I love that they recorded it in front of a live audience. He's definitely worth checking out at the Barbican this Christmas and is also doing the puppets for Katie Mitchell's Beauty and the Beast at the National Theatre, which should be pretty intriguing.

Love the mirror balls too. They go nicely with my other musical love affair of the moment, which is this.
Click there, get lost, and feel like dancing round your room. Seriously, I love it!

Consider Autumn well and truly embraced.

A not-so-mini Paris mini!

Hello! September and the first half of October have passed in a bit of a blur, with birthday celebrations and weekends away filling the time I usually spend here. But it does mean I have a few things to show you though, now we're well into Autumn.

When I was last here, I talked about this time of year being an auspicious time to start new projects, and a couple of weeks ago, I started this one. I would call it a mini-book, but think it's a bit big for that at 8x8"!

Earlier this year, I went on a weekend break to Paris, and took loads of photos. I got them printed online and bought a photo album for them, and then realised the photos were 5x7" and the album was for 4x6" - oops! The photos then went into a box and stayed there, and the album became a good excuse to print some of the many photos I take each month. But the Paris photos still didn't have a home and a scrapbook seemed like too large an undertaking for all of the stories I wanted to tell. That box made me feel guilty every time I looked at it.

A couple of weeks ago, I started sorting through some of my scrapbooking boxes to restore a bit of order to them, and I found a Shimelle class kit from a couple of years ago at Version Scrap in Paris. This seemed very serendipitous when I looked up at my box of photos. The class was called 'Wrapped in Wood', and it contained 2 chipboard covers, cardstock in blues and purples and some sheets of patterned paper. I remembered breaking the kit up at some point to give some to my mum, so I shopped in my own stash for some other papers to match, and found the class pdf to remember what it looked like.

So I chopped up all my papers to 20cm x 20cm, and then followed the cover instructions more or less exactly because I loved it - thank you, Shimelle! I spent a happy couple of hours one evening sorting through my photos and then didn't really look at the pdf again for the duration of the process, but the result is very much inspired by it.

The kit included two little dividers, which I turned into markers to show what day we were on. I like the mixture of sizes, it makes it a very tactile book. I had to think of it as a photo book rather than a scrapbook to make it a less formidable task to begin, but it has ended up being much more scrapbook-like than I set out to do. The more pages I finished, the more I enjoyed making them. By some miracle, I had more or less just the right amount of photos for my pages (front and back), which was possibly more by good luck than good judgement!

It took about a week and half of evenings to finish all the pages, and last weekend, I sat down to bind it. I have a bind-it-all, so that is how I put it together. I was terrified of ruining it at this point, but apart from marking the cover slightly and having to move a flower embellishment midway through punching the holes, all was well.

It was a very frugal project really - all of the paper embellishments and mounts came from scraps from cutting the base pages to 20x20 cm, so I had very little left at the end. I'm really pleased with how it came out, I finally got to use some papers from my stash that I love and hadn't found a use for, and it's a really nice record of our trip. Win, win. 

In other news...

New shoes of joy!! :o)

**The start of something new**

September already. The tell-tale signs of early autumn have definitely been in evidence this week: a nip in the air, the sky a little darker a little earlier, a definite urge to buy new shoes, and it also feels like the perfect time for something to begin.

One of my earliest blog posts told of my excitement about Nanna's sewing cupboard, and her enthusiasm to give so much of it to me. Boxes and drawers and old sweetie tins full of threads, lace and beautiful fabrics from way back when. Among the fabrics were several cut out hexagons for patchwork, some already basted and paper-pieced. These came from her sister, and it's difficult to date them, but it must have started more than 40 years ago. I'll never know if these are the remains of a bigger project or the beginnings of a fledgling one, but I have thought about doing something with them since I first set eyes on them. And last weekend, I finally made a start.

On a shopping trip to Liberty this summer, I bought this beautiful book about patchwork. It's the one that went with the V&A quilt exhibition last year, and it's a lovely thing in it's own right, with well chosen photographs, illustrations and ephemera to illustrate its notes on technique, and some of the patterns with different fabrics are amazing.  I started by sorting through the different pre-cut hexagons to see which ones went together best.

Then I drew round one of the pre-basted ones to make templates, and based a few more. And still with no clear idea of quite what it was going to be, I found some matching thread and started stitching them together.

So the red basting was done by my great-aunt Hilda, and the blue by me. Looking at the back of it, you can immediately tell that her hexagon is very much neater than mine! I think she must have ironed hers before stitching it, which is what you are meant to do. She seems to have used a bit of an old dress pattern as a paper template for hers, mine are a very light card. I have already learned that paper would be very much easier to baste through (and is probably easier to take out at the end too).

I love this small flower and polka-dot print, the colours are so vivid. I know patchwork is meant to be thrifty, but I am already planning a post-payday trip to Liberty to try to match another print to it, because nothing I have is quite right. I may not know yet exactly what the finished article is going to be, but I have an idea what kind of pattern it will have and (whisper it) I'm seeing it as a training ground for a quilt. But this will be hand stitched, rather than machine stitched. There is something very relaxing about hand stitching, and I think mine can only improve with practice.

So, a combination of something old and something new; it's really inspiring to be bringing these hexagons back into the light of day so they can be made into something that can be enjoyed, rather than hidden away in a box. I like the sense of continuation in a family of creative women two generations later too. I'm also excited to be working without knowing exactly what it will become, those projects are my very favourite kind. I only hope I can do justice to something that will be very much a joint creation when it's finished.

Memories of Edinburgh

"Who indeed that has once seen Edinburgh, but must see it again in dreams waking or sleeping?"

I have just returned from a wonderful week at the Edinburgh festivals. 5 days, 24 shows and lots of happy wandering through the cobbled streets of the old town and the grandeur of the new town. This is my 4th Edinburgh festival, and this year I took the time to  sit in the gardens, in coffee shops, and just to walk around in the time between the shows.

The sun actually came out this year - I was lucky in my choice of week, as apparently it had been pretty awful for the first couple of weeks! 

This was taken at one of my favourite places, kind of a central hub between a number of fringe venues. A great place to watch the world go by. This is the top of Candlemakers Row, and you might be able to pick out Greyfriars Bobby!

There are a lot of hills and steps in Edinburgh, and it's a lovely size for walking around, it never seems to take longer than 20 mins to get anywhere, and it's definitely good for the thighs!

I go to the festival mainly for the theatre on the Fringe, which is still thriving despite the ever-growing dominance of the comedy side of it. Of my 24 shows, only one was a comic (Laura Solon, who was very good). My favourite shows this year were Daniel Kitson's storytelling at the Traverse (It's always right now until it's later), Little Bulb's delightful Operation Greenfield at Zoo Roxy and a fab 40s take on Ovid's Metamorphoses by a young company called Pants on Fire. If any of these get to be seen anywhere else, I heartily recommend them to you! Lots more good stuff too.

Something strange happens to my sense of time in Edinburgh, it passes so quickly! I can't wait for next year. x

Online cropping, pt 2

Posting twice within a couple of days, very rare for me. Especially given I'm so tired and about to head off on my travels to the Edinburgh Fringe, via my friend's wedding!

I'm not quite there yet, so I thought I'd wrap up my cropping activities this weekend. Shimelle did us proud and kept the inspiration flowing thick and fast.

Yesterday I headed out to see a terrific account of my favourite play. Plays on Sundays - what a great idea! While I was there I took the opportunity to take a picture 'up above'.

I certainly picked the right day of the weekend for it - the weather couldn't quite make up its mind what it was doing the day before, so I went out fully equipped, waterproof poncho in bag! Luckily it wasn't needed and I stayed dry throughout.

When I got home, I stuck down the prototype page I'd put together earlier, involving quadrants.

I used four 6x6 papers from the same range - it's My Mind's Eye's Bloom and Grow. I'm not entirely happy with this - perhaps a sign I really do prefer plain cardstock backgrounds at heart! But it serves a useful purpose, catching up with Document 2010. I'm really loving this project, it's coming to life more and more as the year draws on and it's starting to get more difficult to remember exactly what I was doing in February! This is my collection of bits and pieces from June. I've been finding I'm better at keeping the evidence of my month in a designated place than actually doing something with it, but it's also really good for jogging my memory when doing the pages in hindsight, as I am now.

This page also features a layered embellishment made with the scraps at hand.

Admittedly it's pretty simple - a Sassafras whimsy, a bloom, a sticker, some ribbon scraps, but hey, it matches the rest of the page nicely and is something I made rather than bought, which is always good.

By the time I'd got this far, my scrap space (aka coffee table) was getting pretty messy. Note the essentials - glue, pens, scissors, cup of tea...

I also thought I'd take a picture out of the window, but it was night again before I got round to this one, and I didn't foresee being reflected in the window!

But that covered another one, so I didn't mind too much. :o)

So I tried again. One of the characteristics of my flat is how close I am to next door, which is particularly obvious when we both have our curtains open. I've always liked lighted windows against the dark, and old sash windows, and I can also see both the view and the reflection in this photo, which I am quite pleased with, despite it not being the world's most promising photo. A reflection of the here and now.

I have been so very inspired by this online cropping lark this weekend, and it's been great to see what everyone else is doing too - hurrah for the blogosphere! I also made this next page. It's for the May section of Document 2010, and it doesn't fit any of the remaining challenges, but I thought you might like to see it anyway. :o)

Thanks again, Shimelle!