Thoughts about words

I love quotations, I have a few favourites that I keep meaning to do something crafty with and then forgetting about.  I have a particular fondness for the unlikely sage, Nicola Roberts, who rightly points out that 'Beyonce wasn't built in a day', and plan to embroider this onto fabric for our soon-to-be-redecorated bedroom, just above my mirror.

Today I finally got around to reading Saturday's paper and found this new (to me) quote, from dramatist and screenwriter Shelagh Delaney, who is revered in my home town of Salford and many other places besides.

A day in the life

It's that time again, Claire has called us to action to produce another Day in the Life post. I took part once before, last February. Catch up with other contributors, Catherine, Marceline and Laura (amongst many others, it's even happening over in Brooklyn) and take part if you like!

3.55am Wake up to hear the battery low alert in the baby monitor. Plug it back in and amble dangerously back to bed. I don't really do half asleep.

6.12am Wake up again, this time it's the baby asking me to nip upstairs and get her. In the universal language of pre-speech infants. Which is loud and irritating so I drag myself out of bed in a bid to make it stop. We settle in bed and I spend the next half an hour keeping her away from my glasses, my iPod, my book and everything else that is on my bedside table.

6.42am I am relieved from crawl-preventing duties by my husband and nip downstairs to make coffee and milk. We have our drinks in bed while we watch all the latest from the Island of Sodor, where the trains are slightly more efficient than Scotrail and make it to their final destination without the use of a bus replacement service. Which was yesterday's special adventure.

7.52am I am showered, breakfasted and dressed in the lovely giraffe t-shirt I bought in Portland, OR on honeymoon (it still fits! it still kind of fits!), by coincidence, Phil has dressed Amelia in her giraffe t-shirt, and we head off to the childminder's farm, where Amelia is spending the day in preparation for my return to work next month.

8.10am I get the weekly shop in at our local supermarket. Included is a big box of Lemsips as me and the husband continue to shake off bad colds. In the middle of summer. I also buy six packs of Stoats porridge bars as I really admire the guy who set the company up in Edinburgh around the time I was graduating and moving on to big retail, and they are reduced to 49p for five flapjacks, with a use by date of September. Result! Interesting fact: we were going to have Stoats bars as our wedding favours if we hadn't found The Other Mousie to make pirate kitties for us instead!

8.40am Unpack the shopping, and a few scooped up random items from the car - including a handknitted baby blanket, and a toy owl I made on Saturday night. Tidy the living room, including putting away random bits of owl for future owl making purposes.

9.05am Race upstairs to get some details on an eBay item I'm selling that finishes in ten minutes, for a last minute question-asker. Race back downstairs to post the details on the listing, just in the nick of time. It is a sample size Clinique lip gloss and it netted me £1.74, from a person with 'giraffe' in their user name. Today is too giraffey by far and it's only just gone 9am.

9.20am I package up 10 items I've sold over the course of the weekend and fill out a proof of posting form. So far my day is incredibly exciting, so I go for a cup of tea and a sit down. I'm knitting a baby blanket for my sister with Rowan Calmer yarn, the same kind of yarn used in the blanket I made for Amelia last year. My new nephew is due to arrive any day so I'm not entirely sure why I started this yesterday and not six months ago but hey ho. It's a big departure for me with bright bold boyish colours, and I enjoy working on the first few stripes as the pattern unfolds.

11am I realise the time and consider leaving the couch. I pick up my laptop and impulse buy two sets of vintage fabric remnants from Etsy seller Rope, that I was eyeing up on Sunday. I make a treasury based around zines and coffee, and wish I could afford to buy all the zines on this list.

11.45am I realise the time and run upstairs to my craft room to finish off the last zine in the Answers on a Postcard series. I format the pages into PDFs and zap them downstairs for my husband to print off on the supercomputer. My printer upstairs needs new ink and I keep forgetting to pick some up.

12.47pm Time to make lunch and maybe dose up on another Lemsip. We're having chicken pasties with mash and gravy. Yum! After we've eaten I tidy up the kitchen and wait for my New York friend Sabrina to phone for a catch up.

2pm I settle down for a bit more knitting and a watch of the newish HBO series Treme. I'm up to the last episode having watched the whole first season in the last four days. It's a great programme and I definitely recommend it. Don't wikipedia it to find out more (like I foolishly did, when trying to check whether the location filming for Davis' hotel job was in a hotel I'd stayed in on one of my few weekend trips to NOLA - later on in the series the same hotel is used again and the front door and signage is shown, and yes it was!), there's a terrible spoiler that kind of ruined part of the series for me. One of my favourite actors (Steve Zahn - one of the cast in my favourite film of all time) is in it, and what's more, he sings! There's a great ensemble cast and separate storylines which occasionally interlink. And there is so much wonderful music in it, you can watch it while you work on a craft project and still get loads of enjoyment from it. If you've been to New Orleans, keep your eyes peeled for great location filming, like Preservation Hall, Cafe du Monde, Pat O'Briens, all the usual places.

3.30pm I start to think about finishing up what I need to do, like collect in the recycling bin (today is collection day and our bin is halfway up the street where the council workers left it), check my email for any more orders to send out, quickly write a new home card (from Dude and Chick) for my sister and her family, who are moving house this week as well as anticipating a new arrival any minute!

5pm and I'm home with the baby. We play in the living room for a while before thinking about dinner. Amelia has already had something at her childminder's house, but me and Phil are having her favourite, asparagus, with our dinner, so she joins us at the highchair with a few pieces of asparagus while we have an early-ish dinner at 6.30pm.

9pm and a bit more knitting later, I catch twenty minutes of a TV documentary about Orthodox Jewish people in my home city, Salford. The accents make me feel a bit homesick and I think about going to bed. Just one more stripe of the blanket before I go up with a night-time bottle for Amelia and hope for everyone to have a full night in their own beds.

Disclaimer: I cheated and wrote about Monday because Tuesday my cold turned into the flu and I thought that 10am napped, 11am drank lemsip, 12noon napped through lunch, 2pm more lemsip and a scone because I couldn't face cooking 4pm napped etc was a bit dull

PIF of the week

This week's PIF is a small batch of envelopes I made from a hoarding poster advertising the release of electricity, by Suede. I have a ton of these posters saved in a big tube from my student days and wondered if there's a market for some lovely nostalgic envelopes - I'm viewing the PIF as kind of test marketing!

I've even thrown in a set of co-ordinating grey flatcards. Envelopes measure approximately 7 x 11cm and cards are marginally smaller with rounded corners. Also happening in the etsy shop right now is a bit of a flash summer sale. Use the code TOOHOT40 for 40% off, but hurry because I'll be withdrawing the code at some point this week .

The world's least exciting make-along... Part 1

Excuse the not very dramatic photo, but we have a drafty front door. As I'm not back at my day job until July, we can't afford to replace it, and kind of want to replace all 3 of our external doors at the same time anyway, so an interim measure was called for. The husband put down some draft excluding tape stuff in the gap at the bottom of the door, but frankly, its insulating properties are debatable and it keeps getting unstuck and tripping me up. A solution was needed, but what?

Around the same time as I was mulling over what we needed, I was listening to a programme on Radio 4 where a new challenge was issued to clothing manufacturers. Basically, the guest pointed out that while the success of polycotton is in its durability and easier care, it also means that once polyester is bonded with cotton, it never dies, it never degrades fully and it's an eco disaster waiting to happen. He encouraged all of us to rethink the way we buy clothes, and to buy classic pieces that last - we'll look better, and less with go to landfill. Now, of course, this isn't news to probably most of the people reading this blog, but it reminded me of something I'd been meaning to do for ages - reuse a duvet cover that got ruined by a project involving superglue being spilled on it, and also to reuse a fleece blanket that was attracting too much cat fur to be sanitary or nice to look at or touch - case in point illustrated by Clyde here.

Ordinarily I'd just give the fleece blanket away, but this is a fleece blanket with history - bought while this commotion was going on in the background. I am sentimental about silly things like that. And glad I was buying synthetic fabrics that day.

So I measured up the door and here's the fix I came up with. More to come next week, as I'm having to work around unpredictable naps!

I cut down the blanket and duvet cover to the size of the door frame, long enough to cover the letter box. I didn't do it full length as the blanket and usable portion of the duvet cover wasn't big enough, and the main drafts come in at the windowed portion of the door as well as the letter box.

Next step - iron the duvet cover inside out so the seams sit nice and flat - using two of the seamed edges already on the duvet cover means more chance of my edges being nice and square.

With the duvet cover inside out, pin together a duvet cover and blanket sandwich. I sewed all around the edges, leaving a hole just bigger than my fist on one edge, for turning.

I also made a pair of tabs for hanging the draft excluder, these were sewn into the shortest edge. I sewed along three of the edges of a pair of fabric rectangles (right side together), then turned them inside out. Then realised I only needed to sew along two edges but it was quicker just to keep the needle down and turn.

I really do struggle with ensuring that my fabrics line up in the corners and that I end up with straight and more importantly, level, lines where I need them. Especially when working with a stripy fabric! This piece of thin MDF makes a great template for use with tailors' chalk. The weight in it ensures the fabrics stay put, too.

After letting loose with the sewing machine, I remembered to trim out the bulk at the corners as well as all around the piece.


So my tabs work perfectly and my door is technically covered in all the right places - with the exception of that droopy bit in the middle. It looks a bit meh, though, definitely still recycle and not upcycle quite yet... I have my thinking cap on for how to make it a little more interesting and I'll bring you an update soon!

A little contest...

I'm currently working on putting together the next issue of Answers on a Postcard and thought of a fun little contest. I originally had just over 12 questions to ask the contributors to the series, and some questions have been more popular with our correspondents than others, which means I think I'll have to double up on some issues to make sure my customers are getting lots of answers for their money, every time!

However, this will still leave me with a few additional issues to publish towards the end of the year. Before I write out to current contributors to ask them to think about some new questions, I'd appreciate your help...

Email me at katy (at) girlindustries (dot) com, or leave a comment on this post with your idea of a fun and interesting question to ask. I'll randomly pick an answer from the list to win a prize of a four month subscription (January - April, to help you get caught up) to the zine series, or a refund on your original purchase if you've already bought a subscription.

If I pick your question to be a theme for an issue of the zine, not only will I send you a copy of the issue in question as a little thank you, I'll also credit you as a contributor in the zine and online.

Of course I'm always looking for new contributors to get involved, so email me or leave your email address in the comments here if you haven't answered any questions yet. You get access to the contributor rate for subscriptions and zine issues, and the chance to impart your pearls of wisdom around the world - with copies so far being sent to the US, Europe and all over the UK.

You have until the end of the month, Friday 30 April, to get your thinking caps on, and leave your comments here. I can't wait to hear your questions and comments, so don't be shy!

Claire Payne's Pincushion Swap

I signed up to do this swap recently, and was thrilled to receive my pincushion in the post over the weekend. Unfortunately the chocolate eggs did not last long enough to be photographed, but I got great sunny shots of everything else and posted them to my flickr for you to look at.

Thank you for Paula of Diddle Dumplin Crafts (I can't find her anywhere online so would be grateful for a point in the right direction!) for my wonderful new pincushion, and thank you to Claire for organising the swap. What did I make? Well you'll just have to wait and see...