The antidote to Valentine's Day

is this beautiful black and white treasury from etsy artist SunshineScot. Happy 14th!

Over the border in Fife

I live about three miles away from the border of central Scotland with the Kingdom of Fife, which is home to a new Etsy shop I discovered this week, Ziggy and Friends. Jay, the artist behind the shop, creates the loveliest illustrations, ideal for a nursery or just for fun.

Jay was kind enough to feature me in a treasury on Etsy this week, go and have a look by clicking this link. While you're there, all you need to do is click through to order your own set of upcycled mini tags... market season is coming!

Ysolda Teague

Reading the latest edition of the alumni magazine from Edinburgh University, I discovered that knitwear designer Ysolda Teague studied on the same course as me! She graduated with her MA in English Literature 8 years after I did, however, but I too remember knitting in my lectures while no doubt my fellow students thought 'who's that granny over there?'.

I had completely forgotten about the option to study printing and making books as part of the course - tutorials held deep in the basement of the library. My own degree was combined with French, so I had fewer options to choose from, but my favourite module was 20th Century Feminist Fictions - we watched and critiqued the Alien films, great fun! As part of my French course I studied the linguistic development of babies and children, so it was a pretty broad brush approach to each subject. And of course Edinburgh was a wonderful place to live, work and study.

To find out more about Ysolda Teague, visit her online at http://www.ysolda.com/ - there are PDF patterns to buy and download for free, too. Unfortunately it looks like they are all knitted in the round, which I can't do, and you have to go through the knitty sign up process to access the free patterns, but fun to look all the same.

Looking back

I'm home alone today, and doing a little bit of work on our huge family archive of photographs. Here are a couple of photographs from our travels in the last couple of years that I thought I would share with you...

At the moment I'm looking thorugh photos of our trip to Vancouver Island in 2009, and admiring some of the quilting exhibit at the Sooke Heritage Museum, which was a lovely little spot to visit not far from the house on a lake that we rented for a week. I have a number of sewing projects on the go at the moment, and this little wagon is encouraging me to get a move on! It's part of a larger quilt to illustrate the history and scenery of Vancouver Island, which was 'discovered' just over 160 years ago, with much indigenous history prior to that.

One of my Christmas presents was a negative scanner so I can digitise my old fashioned analogue snaps, which is a project I can see taking quite a while...

Happy New Year!

Aaargh, we've had no internet for the past week and I'm itching to get my shop back up and running. So here it is, with a soft relaunch, and more new ideas and a big sale to come once I have a little time to get organised.

Happy twenty eleven!

Reindeer food

I read about this nifty little trick on a parenting website and thought it was worth sharing here. My niece is coming up for three years old and I thought she might appreciate it!

Don't tell the little ones, but it's just a box with some cat biscuits in the bottom! I've also heard of people doing this with oats mixed with glitter, but I thought my sister might have a bit of explaining to do once that didn't disappear from her tiny front garden overnight...

Not your typical snowy scene...

I had to grab my camera while we were snowed in last week to show you photos from our street, while it was unusually quiet in the middle of the day.

Look a little closer...

The rabbits usually live in the field next to the cooperage (those pointy-roofed sheds in the background, whiskey fans!), and that cat is the hardiest domestic animal I've ever known - at the time of taking this photo it was minus 11 degrees C. Plus it's tried to eat my ginger cat twice in the six months since we moved in!