A Gently Productive Weekend

This weekend has been pleasingly productive...
I have made delicious brownies (well, ok that was Friday but I took Friday off so that counts as the start of a long weekend), I have made a start on a new quilt, and sewn a skirt!

Lazy-girl baking

I was inspired by the "slutty brownies" recipe on The Londoner's blog to bake indulgent gooiness from packet mixes :-)
The result is these delicious peanut butter cookie dough brownies... Yum!

Random meandering, finding beautiful things

So, this year's Solfest fancy dress theme is 'Characters from Roald Dahl Books'... My initial reaction was "ooh, that'll be great!" but after further thought, it's difficult to think of anything that isn't predictable (I suspect there will be many Willy Wonka outfits) or difficult for a festival.
Hence I turned to google image search.
I'm no further forward, but have found other beautiful things...
Take this for example:

Missed Connections: Time Out NY Competition Winner
This was found via an image result which took me to Sparkplug Minuet, which is pretty and distracted me for about 5 minutes, then I saw that image and fell in love with the illustration. Then I read the accompanying text and fell for it a little bit more...

My costuming inspiration search uncovered more specific gorgeous illusrations too,  all related to James & The Giant Peach.
Firstly there were costume designs, for the stage version, all of which are in this flickr set, but it was the centipede that really caught my eye:

Isn't he dapper? I especially love the mustard yellow spats.

All of this got me thinking of my own beloved tatttered and battered copy from the early eighties, the version with the illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert (there's a brilliant blog post about her work here). As a child, I thought James looked a bit odd, and to be honest I still do, but I love the rest of the illustrations even more now than I did then. They have such a dreamlike quality to them, and capture that combination of silly playfulness and darker, scarier things that Dahl does so well...

 

My search also brought up some fabulous cover illustrations, submissions for The Puffin Design Award 2011. Here are a few of my finds:

http://sophieburrows.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/penguin-design-award-2011.html

http://breakalead.tumblr.com/post/5486541900/laurierollitt-my-penguin-design-award-2011

 http://sarahmaycock.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/penguin-design-awards-2011.html 

http://www.behance.net/charlotte_estelle/frame/1202985 

http://laurajayneweeks.blogspot.co.uk/2011_06_01_archive.html

Hooray! Spring!

Spring is my favourite time of year (although Autumn is a very close second), and today, I am officially declaring it is spring in the bloomeenee household, because there are Narcissi in my garden*!

*I say my garden, its strictly neither garden nor mine, but 'bit of wasteland which I occasionally chuck seeds at in vain attempts to cheer it up' takes too long to type...

Oooooh! Shiny new quilt project!

Modern Block of the Month (BOM) ~ Sew Along with Alissa Haight Carlton « Sew,Mama,Sew! Blog

I just found out about this, which just goes to show how long it is since I read the sewmamasew blog! It could be a good project for the butterfly fabric and coordinates I have had in my fabric stash.since I started a fabric stash! I loved them when I bought them, and had plans to really show off the.butterfly fabric, but my taste has changed and now I find it 'a bit much'... This could be the thing to highlight the beautiful colours whilst toning down the print...

More Weekend Sewing

So, I was tidying the spare room on Friday night, and of course I decided that was the perfect time to make a new bag. the pattern is from issue 32 of Sew Hip magazine, and it was really easy.
It's a fab pattern, slouchy, absolutely huge, can be made from fat quarters! It'd be great made with patched panels too. The pattern is intended to be reversible but I adapted mine to have an internal zipped pocket and a phone pocket, and added a Suffolk Puff and a fabric loop to act as a closure.

Owls! Get your chubby little owls here!

Have been having a nice calming crafty day... Well, up to the point when I realised I'd sewn the wrong bit to the wrong bit and need to do some unpicking, but it was fixable. Overall it's been a lovely day, with tea, cake and sewing...

I've spent most of the time on the patchwork bag shown below. I used the wonderful Sprocket Pillow tutorial at CluckCluckSewfor the patchwork, and Aimee Ray's 'Happy Village' pattern from 100 Pretty Little Projects for the construction. I'm really pleased with it, and also made the patchwork piece for a sprocket cushion proper. Allison at CluckCluckSew does say that " The only problem with them is that you can’t make just one…trust me …I tried"... I think I agree with her, it may be the first of my new sewing addictions.





























My second new sewing obsession?
Owls!
Tiny, dinky, chubby little owls!
I found this great tutorial while browsing on Pinterest, it's so simple it doesn't even need words, and the resulting owls are really really sweet.


I've had a pleasingly productive weekend overall, having already finished making myself a hat and dyeing some of my handspun yarn. It's not dry and ready for photographs yet, but this is the 'before' photo...

I had kool-aid dyed the roving before spinning it, and it was a nice enough colour, just not very me (it's a sort of watermelony pink). I've overdyed it with two different darker shades of kool-aid, just waiting for it to dry, can't wait to knit it!

Apparently you're meant to do this blogging thing quite regularly...

Hello chums, some more wittering here... special end of year edition.
Well, I've had a lovely christmas, it was peaceful, I got lovel presents, and recipients all seemed pleased with theirs.

As is traditional, I finished the Christmas knitting three days after christmas... oops! Next year I shall cast on christmans projects earlier, honest.

So, its the time of year for New Year's resolutions. I don't really 'do' New Year, or new years resolutions, but that said there are things I'd like to do for myself.
I used to be so much more organised than I am now, and I'd like to get some of that back, so with this in mind I've organised my knitting plans for the year (nearly all of it from stash!) and I intend to meal-plan.

I've had the resources and intention to make my own clothes for a while now, so that's something I want to spend more time on, as well as more arty things.

And of course, I should blog about all of these things!

Hmmmm, lets see how that goes shall we?

Erm, hello!

It would be nice to say that the reason I haven't been blogging because I've been too busy gardening, but it wouldn't be true. I have been neglecting both I'm afraid!
That said, the little bits of gardening I have been doing are paying off.
That sad plot of wilderness is now looking much better, although still wild.
It's the sort of wild I like though, look!
I have poppies:



I also have loads of this stuff... Unfortunately I don't have a clue what it is!



I'm also excited to report that I have potatoes! (well, I have potato plants, hopefully they have some potatoes attached to them!)
Most exciting of all though is this cheeky little unseasonal Narcissus, which defied all odds and has appeared in my border from the mysterious and rotten looking bulbs found in a bag at my Grandads house.
Narcissus! In September!



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Not a travel blog

As an antidote to my recent text-only whingy posts, have a gratuitous picture of a seaside donkey, escaping from it's handler to chase a seagull:

Long time no wittering

Well hello there blogland, how are you?
Progress on the plot is slow and disheartening right now. After my chemical drench, the horsetail and nettles took the opportunity to just carry on growing... Presumably blowing raspberries, pulling faces and singing ner-ner-ner-ner-ner at me at the same time.

So, summoning up all the determination of her dad*, my mum took a dual attack approach yesterday: strimming till the blade fell off, then immediately drenching the lot in more weedkiller. I wait in anticipation...

As well as the plot looking like somewhere dinosaurs might go to play, I got home from a weekend at the seaside to find all my seedlings had died... Have managed to revive some of them but I think I'm going to be re-planting.

It's not all doom and gloom though, there are blooms too... Well, sort of, but blooms rhymes so I'm sticking with it.

I've been given a chilli seedling, have had some new ideas for ways of tackling things, a friend has dug over a good starter sized bed, and the border is blooming and full of cheer.
My mum alsodiscovered that someone has planted some pansies and primulas at the front of the plot... RAK for me!


*My grandad was a fantastic gardener. My grandma is convinced he used to lie in wait for new shoots of horsetail to appear...

Looks like I may be buying veggies for a little while yet.

Well, blogland, long time no see eh?
Spent Easter Monday with a watering can and some weedkiller, dousing everything except the border, the rhubarb and the gooseberry bush.
A couple of weeks on, and the result is disappointing. I now have slightly sickly looking horsetail and nettles poking through some yellowed grass! Not quite the spectacular result I wanted. I'm certainly going to need more weedkiller, and I think may have have to put plot planting plans on hold till next year.
Never mind there are always containers!


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Prehistoric Monsters Have Invaded My Garden

I knew there was horsetail in the plot, I thought I'd pulled a lot of it up and there were just a few patches left.
What a fool I was.
It's now over-run with the stuff.




It's quite pretty in a way, but that doesn't mean I want it overtaking my whole garden like this




Fifteen minutes with the strimmer, now I need to go back out with the weedkiller.
This is not a good time for mystery fatigue to hit. Hmmph.

On the upside, I have a lovely lovely hyacinthoides non-scripta that has fought through the prehistoric spikes!



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Things I found while tidying the garden:

Amongst the expected pile of broken glass, beer cans and sweet wrappers I found:
Three different bits of a lock mechanism.
A large colony of woodlice.
A single, solitary bed spring.
Two pence.
Some very pretty bits of china.
A knife and fork (not a matched pair).

I feel like it's an archaeological dig, not a gardening project!

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A Short Restart, with Art

I set up this blog over a year ago, as an addition to my more ranty and emotional livejournal, with all good intentions of updating it regularly with cheery things... as you can tell, that hasn't quite gone to plan!

So here I go again... I will bravely endeavour to post more often, I promise!

I was pondering today that one of the things that I am passionate about is actually something I rarely blog about: Art.

I love art. I love that something that human hands have created for the sake of creating it can move me so much that will cry, or exclaim, or laugh, or, most often,just want to stop, and look and look and look.

Sometimes I forget this. this weekend I have been reminded of it by a tv programme: I spent saturday afternoon catching up with BBCFour's 'Romancing the Stone: The Golden Ages of British Sculpture'.
Sculpture is possibly my favourite form of art: certainly, if I had to pick a favourite artist, it'd be Henry Moore. There is something about it that stops me in my tracks more than a painting usually can.
What I hadn't realised until very recently was how wide my love of sculpture is. I recently visited the Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology, and I was absolutely awed by it. Watching this show reinforced this: so many styles, so many differences in scale, in levels of realism, and I loved so much of it.

My favourite, though, remains Henry Moore's Recumbent Figure (1938)

I got Halloween Goodies!

I took part in a ravelry swap...

Right, this is a test post...

Every time so far that I've used this app, my blog gets locked and I get an email saying the spambots think I'm not a real person. This is no fun!
I am real, I used my real money to pay for a lovely real bag in a real shop yesterday, and now I have my real knitting in it, look!



You can even see my real finger and real leg with it's real foot on the end!

Clearly, with that bag and the pink cat shoes and button hairclips, todays outfit theme is inadvertent kitsch. Oh well!

Science and knitting and cakes... Oh my!

Since I'm planning a lovely day out today of knitting group and Makerfaire at Newcastle Sciencefest, and it's a glorious bright spring day, I've decided to blog the day in photos.
So, here's the start of my day out... Busstop shadows




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New Quilt in Progress

This has been an amazingly quick quilt top to put together. I started cutting a couple of weekends ago, but didn't start with the piecing till this weekend. With a couple of hours on Friday night and about another hour today I have finished the main part of the top. I'm very pleased with it: it has a fresh, bright modern look to it, but with the oranges and ochres still has a warmth to the colourscheme. The Japanese style prints are bold without being loud, and I love the haphazard layout, the white squares and extra pieced squres in some blocks; elements which were actually borne of necessity, not design.

Now it needs borders.

Well, its been a while since my last update. the Book Illustration class was changed to an earlier time, so I've had to drop out, which is a shame, but I've had some inspiration, and collaboration, on an idea, so I'm going to work towards that.