angharad

Late Summer sunshine food

2009-09-10T20:09:00.005+01:00

We're enjoying a last blast of sunshine here with Autumn fast approaching. Last week we harvested the first of the vegetables we've been growing in our small raised bed, a good crop of beetroot and some lovely sweet carrots.The carrots were served Peter Rabbit-style, just pulled from the earth, rinsed and eaten with the green leaves still attached. The beetroot was made into a delicious beetroot

Back to school

2009-09-03T20:17:00.004+01:00

What a slack blogger I've been this Summer! We spent the last week of the school holidays in Devon with my family - a party of 8 adults, 2 children and 1 dog staying in a vast 16th century manor house. In spite of the rain, we managed beach days, barbecues, croquet and garden chess. It was also nice to just relax in our lovely holiday home and read, bash out hymns and suchlike on the piano (I

holiday snaps

2009-08-21T22:25:00.004+01:00

Back from a relaxing week in Cornwall, staying in the pretty village of Portscatho. We couldn't have wished for nicer weather. It was lovely to be able to walk to the beach and enjoy daily (sometimes twice daily) swims - why is it that I live so far from the sea?The children enjoyed paddling, playing with their cousin and building sand cities (we've graduated from the plain old sandcastles of

Dress surgery

2009-08-04T19:53:00.003+01:00

Thanks for all the comments on my last post. Revisiting the Metropolitan Good Times dress today, as I'm cross with myself for my mistake in the sizing. I looked at the hot patterns site which suggests that the sizings equate to ready to wear, so whilst I made up the size closest to my measurements, if I was making the size I'd normally buy it would have been a full 2 sizes smaller! I'm loathe to

Good sewing, bad sewing

2009-08-03T12:07:00.005+01:00

Yesterday was very much a day of two halves. I decided to hack up the nice drapey knit I had bought for my Hot Patterns Metropolitan Good Times dress, expecting to have a lovely finished wardrobe staple at the end of my sewing session.how the dress is meant to lookI've done a bit of dressmaking in my time, but have to say I found the instructions a bit sketchy, assuming a bit more competence and

Family day out

2009-08-02T19:55:00.003+01:00

This week the four of us took a train to Bristol for a family day out, meeting with my mum and my brother and his girlfriend to go to the Banksy exhibition in the City Museum. We thought the children would be receptive as they're not averse to creating their own art installations in the living room with whatever materials come to hand (though thankfully we've never had the graffiti on walls

the quilting bug

2009-07-28T20:51:00.007+01:00

I think quilting is going to be my new obsession this Summer. Yesterday I set to work piecing the backing fabric for the coin quilt sew along I started thinking about back in March.I made a very mini stacked coin square from the last remnants of the scraps I used for the quilt, along with a few blocks of freshcut and a solid pink, all against a lovely sea of white. Then it was downstairs to tape

finished

2009-07-22T16:01:00.003+01:00

in time for bed tonight!Thanks for the lovely comments on my last post!

Operation handmade home

2009-07-22T10:09:00.004+01:00

The boy's quilt is nearly finished, and operation handmade home has been born. As I was quilting this week and the quilt was starting to look a bit more finished, I realised that I want to get a lot more handmade into my own home - and by that I don't mean all the shop items that are stashed in various boxes, drawers and cupboards, but rather making more things for my own family. I'm hideously

Friday evening

2009-07-17T20:03:00.003+01:00

End of the week and end of the Summer term for us here. I can't believe how quickly the children are growing up - it'll be year 1 for the girl and nursery for the boy in September. Really shocking - where did that year go? Tomorrow is the first day of the Summer holidays, and with a teacher husband, that means lots of skiving off and sewing time for me.I went to Ikea last Sunday with my crafty

Busy week

2009-07-11T19:58:00.006+01:00

Just about to kick back with a glass of wine and a film at the end of a busy week. When I'm tired, I tend to just ramble on incoherently, which doesn't bode too well for this post, so I'm aiming for lots of pictures and not too many words!We're approaching the end of term here, with all the sports days, visits to new schools and events that entails. I'm still holding on to the possibly

Aquisitions

2009-07-04T20:10:00.007+01:00

I seem to have been accumulating lovely things left right and centre just lately. First of all, I won a pattern for these fab snooks daisy fingerless mitts from the very talented alabamawhirly in her blog giveaway. Naturally, that meant shopping for some gorgeous hand dyed yarn from SkeinQueen's online shop, which I stalked all last Wednesday evening in the hope of buying something before it all

Cutting it

2009-06-26T19:10:00.008+01:00

It's amazing how much fun you can have just cutting fabric.Look, I made my own jelly roll ... well, more of a swiss roll,Then I messed around a bit more and cut the fabrics into pieces and thinking about the layout ...... and ended up with 5 long thin rolls of fabric ready to piece - finger rolls?Much to my amusement (and delight), when my daughter came home from school she rushed straight up to

Wallet week

2009-06-21T21:30:00.003+01:00

This week I have been mostly sewing wallets. I had a custom order for a card wallet with change purse which involved working on a new design. I won't show you prototype no. 1 as it ended up consigned to the bin in small pieces, but prototype no. 2 was a winner. Even my much loved Toyota wasn't copying well with sewing through 150 layers of fabric and interfacing, so the solution was a binding,

Beginnings of a boy quilt

2009-06-16T20:16:00.001+01:00

Reds and blues - the beginnings of the boy's new quilt. I haven't finished the coin quilt yet, but my boy has been asking me to make something for him for ages, and I do feel the guilt that he hasn't got a homemade quilt for his bed, so I bought a selection of bright fabrics with a view to making one. They seemed to be lacking something when I laid them all out to photograph them, so I went off

This week's bag

2009-06-13T18:06:00.003+01:00

I've been working on a custom order this week after receiving my first ever 'alchemy' request on Etsy. One of the things I love about etsy is the extras that make shopping a bit more fun, like alchemy, the time machine, and treasuries. I always seem to enjoy custom work more than anything else - not least because it means I can shop for more fabric in the customer's choice of colours - always fun

Adventures in overlocking

2009-06-06T20:26:00.005+01:00

I can't believe I haven't got around to blogging about my prized new overlocker/serger. With a bit of saving and a bit of birthday money, I bought this Janome 744D that I'd had my eye on. The people at Sewing Machines Direct were great, giving me lots of helpful advice on which one to go for. I ended up buying the same ex-demo model as Joanne as it was such a good deal, and I know Julia has one

Recipe for a happy cat

2009-05-29T20:33:00.006+01:00

Ingredients:fabric offcut and threaddried catnipricelength of grosgrain ribboncat1) Take one offcut of fabric (mine is Amy Butler furnishing weight fabric), fold in half right sides together and pin,2) Freehand a fish shape with some tailor's chalk or a fabric marker.3) Insert your long length of grosgrain ribbon at the mouth of the fish, long ends inside so that it will be stitched through when

Introducing Kiwi

2009-05-20T20:06:00.003+01:00

Meet the newest member of our household, Kiwi the cat! The children have been asking for a pet for ages, and having grown up with a menagerie myself I've always been keen for them to have pets of their own. So last weekend, after a call from the lovely people at Battersea to say they might have a suitable cat for us, we went into London to meet Kiwi, a 1 year old black cat. She's a tiny little

Friends, fabric shopping and a lot of laughter

2009-05-14T20:20:00.005+01:00

Last weekend was spent in the company of my three favourite fabric-loving friends, Florence, Jo and Lisa. I feel like I've had a lovely holiday after a day of shoe and fabric shopping, chatting, giggling, and eating. I am a terrible shopper normally, terminally indecisive, so it's testament to what fantastic company these ladies are that I came away with both shoes and a healthy stack of fabrics

all the threes

2009-05-03T20:44:00.003+01:00

Another year older! Had a lovely day of many hugs from my ever enthusiastic children.A birthday cake baked by the kiddiewinks under the guidance of my husbandThe cake has, needless to say, been demolished and tasted very good indeed.And to top it all off, we're having a lovely long weekend with the May day bank holiday!

from buttons to bag

2009-04-29T18:50:00.007+01:00

The green phase continues - here's another bag in sage tweed, with some more olive velvet ribbon and those Liberty covered buttons I made last week. I've had the self-cover buttons sitting in my stash for ages, then I saw the photo of this cuff when Julia posted it on her blog and felt immediately compelled to use them.I also made some false button loops in the velvet ribbon as that's part of the

Happiness is ...

2009-04-17T20:16:00.013+01:00

the fabric-covered buttons in green Liberty Tana Lawn I made in front of the Apprentice last nightpacking and posting an order from my shopmy new ultra-long Janome quilting ruler and new rotary cutter blade (I can only assume my original was blunt when I bought it as this one is a revelation)making salt dough with the childrenhandmade newspaper pots for the children to plant seeds for the veg

Easter holiday fun

2009-04-14T20:46:00.009+01:00

an Easter scene by the girlWell, dunce that I am, I've just accidentally posted a rambling half-soaked draft of this post and then had to delete it - time to start again!We're having a lovely Easter holiday. The fortnight since my last post has been spent largely gardening and Spring cleaning, and the place is beginning to look all the better for it. The boy's bedroom has been vastly improved

Fabric and photos

2009-03-30T22:07:00.004+01:00

This last week or so, I've finally been getting into a bit more of a routine with my sewing after a spell of accomplishing nothing much. I'm really enjoying the coin quilt. Progress is slow, but I like the fact that it's nice and methodical, something that I can pick up and work on for an hour and put down again without feeling I need to race through the whole thing. I'm generally a binge-sewer,