Stirling sunrise

I was running a little late for work yesterday, but I didn't mind so much because I watched a glorious sunrise from the train. This shot was taken on the approach next to the rugby club, just before the river.

Line up

No, my house isn't on fire, I think I must need to clean the lens on my phone camera.  I'm trying to do a quick post a day to take advantage of the fact that my phone and iPad both have cameras and it's pretty convenient, the only problem I'm finding is that most of my crafting is done by night.  While it's been sunny in the day time since the start of the year, I've been wrangling a toddler so taking photos is at best inconvenient, or when we're out and about, can be a bit dangerous.  This is a last set of notecards in this style and colour, which are on their way to London as I type. 

I don't have any more of this particular card stock left, but I do have more cards already made up in a postage stamp and security envelope patterns, made with this lovely grey card that came from deadstock in Arizona.  I'll have to get the security envelope bunting ones in the shop asap - another thing for the 2013 to do list!

Live day in the life...

I've lost track of where we're up to with Day in the Life and have a busy day ahead of me so I thought I'd have a go at blogging what I'm doing as I go. Today is my last child free day before I return to full time work, so I absolutely have to maximise it! Check back and keep me company...First of all, I've been having a coffee and reading a free magazine, where I spotted my former colleague, Rachna, and her amazing Indian food. If you haven't already sampled her Bombay street food at various farmers' markets around the central belt, I can totally recommend it.

Next on the list is to scrapbook all my wedding memorabilia, so I can go from this...

To this...

Time for another cuppa first... Which reminds me, I have a contest to enter over at www.blu-shed.blogspot.com

For the first time in about three years, I'm completely out of glue tape, so my scrapbooking efforts are on hold for the time being. And nothing goes back in the box the same way as before, so I think we could chalk this one up as a deferred success! It was lovely to look through my old wedding cards, though!

I've tidied the living room and kitchen and put the dishwasher on, next up is sorting through a container of supplies...

And look what just arrived! At long last! I'll update the shop shortly: www.girlindustries.etsy.com What an apt photo of Laurafallulah for today, it's lovely outside.

Lunchtime!

The actual petrol station where I had my first ever job was on the lunchtime news. Exciting! This is what mobile blogging was invented for, clearly.

So I've spent the afternoon at the post office, in the supermarket and browsing Red magazine. There's a lemon and chorizo chicken roasting in the oven, along with patatas bravas and a herby salad ready to assemble.

After collecting the baby and having some play time, the little one went to bed and I had dinner with my husband. I had a look at a couple of new treasuries on etsy featuring my work, then watched an episode of The Wire (we're late to the party, halfway through season 3). Today wasn't the most productive, but I had a very relaxing day, and there's always tomorrow...

Last minute top speed knitting

I really shouldn't be taking the time to blog tonight as I'm on a mission. My friend plays for the West Coast Trojans, an American Football team, and we are hoping to go to their match tomorrow afternoon (Scotstoun, 2.30pm, if anyone's interested!) but I have a horrible feeling it'll be cold.

So after finding some very reasonably priced Sirdar Denim yesterday on a jaunt to Hobbycraft, I thought I could get cracking on a big bulky warm blanket for the little one. I was inspired in part by flicking through the new White Company catalogue last week, as we were ordering new towels in the sale. I noted that the White Company handknit their big blankets in blocks - I thought about potentially buying extra wool to make up additional panels so we can use the blanket in future on A's big girl bed when the time comes, but then realised I need a huge amount of chunky wool sitting around like I need a hole in the head!

Anyhoo, here I am knitting up 8-ply yarn in a lovely blend of browns and white, in a huge basketweave pattern. I feel all zeitgeisty now as this lovely cushion just popped up on Etsy's front page. It's by Laurimuks, who is a fellow knitter right here in Scotland, her work is just lovely.

I'll be back shortly with the pattern for the blanket (my very own!) and some photos. I hope you are all having a lovely evening, and weekend :)

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

My workspace this week

So with only FOUR weeks to go before I'm officially back at work, I'm trying to finish off as many half-done projects as I can, especially as I've been applying to craft markets for the run up to Christmas!

This week I've mainly been finishing off envelope and notecard sets that I needed new glue in order to complete. There's a specific kind of archival glue that I use which is kind to the paper and really durable, and I had run out. After a mercy dash to WH Smiths last week, all the cut out and scored envelopes can be finished off and packed away. With the offcuts from my envelopes, I try to use as much as I can for confetti shapes and also price tags. Here's a snapshot of (one of) my (three) desk(s) with it all going on!

Eagle-eyed Suede fans, look out for a special PIF on Monday...

Another Hank purchase

I knew this gorgeous bag reminded me of something when I saw it in the Made by Hank shop...

The view just around the corner from our house as I drive towards the motorway! It's hard to get the full effect here, but with all the bunches of greenery on the landscape I always think of the tough ruffles on my Made By Hank bag.

With all the rain we've had recently, it's looking extra lush and gorgeous, don't you think?

I almost can't believe those blue skies are real, given the bad weather we've had recently (Force 8 gales nearly destroyed our roof!) but I assure you, I really don't have the photoshop skills :)

What's cooking?

The book...

The recipe (we used macadamias because we don't have any hazels right now)

And....

The results - yum!

With apologies for the terrible light at the far end of my kitchen, but you get the idea.

Treating myself

picture by Lu Summers of Summersville

I decided it was time to behave more like an adult and less like a student so I treated myself to a wonderful matching set of mugs from Summersville. If you'd like to upgrade your mug cupboard, visit the Summersville Etsy Shop to buy a Bloomsbury mug or six!

Recycling... almost as much fun as upcycling!

After spending the last 12 weeks getting my flat ready to go on the market, I finally have Mondays and Tuesdays free to work on crafty things (and my dissertation, which I'm determined to finish before I go back to work in July). We have a lovely childminder called Tina who will be looking after Amelia when I go back to work and with all the work I needed to do on the flat and our house, it made sense to start her off a couple of days a week now. Especially before that magical time (around 9 months) when separation anxiety is due to set in. Providing I'm not too tired, I also have time to work in the evenings now, so blogging should be back on track, and tweeting, too.

I'm dying to show you what I'm working on today, but the weather outside is terrible, which means the light in here is awful. I have a lot of unfinished projects that I started when I was pregnant and I'm trying to get them done in some kind of order. I also really want to finish off my zine project as I put so much work into it during 2009 and 2010, as did my interviewees, that this really is my top priority. However, I have to work on it on the computer in my craft room, where all the responses are saved and my scanner/printer is set up. It's a little bit too old to be wireless, unfortunately. And my craft room is not exactly in its most hospitable state at the moment, as you'll know from recent posts.

I'm currently of the frame of mind that Mondays will be happy crafting Mondays, and Tuesdays will be slightly more dull home admin/housework, physio and dissertation days. I will see if I manage to stick to that and don't just find myself pottering in the craft room. Our house is finally starting to come together a little bit more, especially as my husband had a week off last week and we managed a trip to IKEA and to get quite a few jobs around the house done. I'm particularly pleased with him for removing the integrated fridge from our kitchen (never worked properly since we moved in) and replacing it with a recycling centre so that a) I don't have to run out in the rain every ten minutes with a used newspaper or food packaging and b) Little Miss Inquisitive can be kept out of the composting caddy once she gets a bit more mobile! What's particularly pleasing is that now we have somewhere to keep our jute and canvas shopping bags, instead of 'wherever they land'.

New things are on their way for the shop, too, we just need a bit more of last weekend's sunshine before I can get things photographed nicely.

Before: After:

Motivational issues

It's hard to want to tidy this:

When you can have a nice cuppa and look out of the window at this:

What helps motivate you?

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!

Brrrr

It's cold here! I hope it's warmer where you are... and if not, that you're wrapped up warm with a nice mug of cocoa.

More charity knitting

Aaargh! I just remembered that I knitted up a bunch of hats for the annual Innocent Big Knit, while I was unable to do much else in the latter stages of being pregnant. Luckily, Innocent extended their deadline for submission this year until THIS FRIDAY. Here's part of my contribution ready for the post, with a couple of pairs of gloves to show you where the leftover yarn for two of my favourite little hats appeared from!

I don't think I'll be doing much knitting for a little while, so I was delighted to see this donations box at my local health centre. They are crocheting a great barrier reef to raise awareness of fibromyalgia. I've donated a small bag of yarn to help them on their way - my crochet skills are still non-existent, although I wish I had paid more attention when my friend Jo tried to teach me. One handed crafting might be the way to go with a little one in my arms!

p.s. I really am writing this at 5.45am - the joys of being a new parent!

Really?

I just found this in my husband's study and had to share. Boys, eh?

My craft room

I'm hoping to get this in even better shape for the forthcoming Answers on a Postcard crafting space issue, but in the meantime, here's how my attic craft room (complete with ensuite!) is coming along...

I'm hoping to add a sofa bed, eventually, so it can do double-duty as a guest room. And I definitely want to display all my crafty treasures on the walls, too.

Bump shot

The first and only photo we have that looks good enough to share!

I'm back!

Oops, I seem to have disappeared for a while there. Not only did our new internet connection at the new house get messed up by our provider (but we kind of expected that), the problems I've been having with my back, hips and pelvis have unfortunately become a lot worse in the last couple of weeks. So much so that I've been signed off work for the next month, as well as having had to take it easy for the last two weeks when I was supposed to be on holiday.

This also means I can't do anything too crafty, not just on my doctor's orders, but also because it is bloomin' sore and affecting my concentration, as well as frustrating. The worst thing is not being able to bend over, I'm a very clumsy person and always dropping things. I'm not sure what is worse, having to wait until my husband gets home from work to pick up a dropped needle or pair of scissors, or the indignity of having to ask! But I'm in good spirits and able to blog briefly so I'll try to be a bit more disciplined about keeping up to date over the next month or so - it's very easy to fall into bad habits if you lose the hang of things for a while.

I'm going to try and take lots of photos of the new house, including the craft room as it comes together, and if I manage to get out and about, some of the local scenery - for example the lovely Ochils which you can just see from our back garden.