Month: November 2013

Memories are (apparently not) made of this

Gottschlich brooches

This afternoon I was very excited to spot these two little brooches at my local church’s Autumn Fair. (It was a Christmas Fair, but I suspect they didn’t want to call it a Christmas Fair when advent doesn’t start until tomorrow.) They cost a grand total of 30p each, and although they’re rather yellowed, I was really pleased with them.

I was absolutely convinced they they were a) Holly Hobbie, and b) the same as a mug and plate my sister and I each had when we were kids. Turns out I was wrong on both counts.

They’re definitely not Holly Hobbie. The little girl above is Holly Hobbie, and these little girls aren’t even her friends. (How mean.)

Gottschlich brooches and Purbeck plate

They’re also not the same as the plate and mug I had as a kid! I was absolutely 100% convinced that the little girl with the yellow cap and pink apron was on this plate. Wrong again!

However, the two little brooches are by the same artist as the plate – Gisela Gottlschlich, a German illustrator. The plate and mug are by Purbeck of Swanage, but Gottschlich’s designs must have been licensed very widely, as there are ceramics by all sorts of different companies listed on Ebay.

I’m now wondering whether the little dark haired girl is the one from my sister’s plate and mug – I know I’ve seen her before. Usually I had things with pictures of dark haired girls and my sister with blonde, to match our own hair.  (Let’s not talk about the brunette Girl’s World head that you couldn’t dye the hair of, when my sister had fancy streaking pens for her blonde one. Apparently I made up for that by messing with my own hair in later life!), But if our names happened to be on the plates with the opposite-coloured illustrations, then maybe my sister does have the dark haired girl on her plate and mug. I’ll have to ask.

Either way, I’ll be keeping one of these little brooches, and hoping my sister would like to have the other.

A lovely parcel arrived from France!

Cozy Memories goodies

Look at all these lovely goodies! I recently entered a giveaway on Facebook, when Sonia of Cozy Memories reached 500 Likes. I was very surprised to find out that I’d actually won – and here’s my prize!

I was expecting to receive the festive Mug Rug, shown at the bottom – a lovely organic cotton coaster with room for a biscuit on the side. I was also expecting the scarf, which I chose with a voucher that was part of the prize. I wasn’t expecting the matching square coaster, the lovely handwritten card, and the delicious tea bag! The scarf came in a lovely hand-dyed drawstring bag too, which looks to be just the right size for storing my tarot cards.

Cozy Memories Scarf

Best of all – everything is made by hand, with natural materials. The linen scarf is dyed with Sicilian Sumac, sourced locally to Sonia, and the colour is a gorgeous grey-toned purple. I had a really hard time choosing which item I wanted from her shop, as everything is so lovely! I was very taken with this zipped pouch, dyed to the same colour and decorated with a ginkgo leaf.

Cozy Memories scarf

In the end I decided to choose something that I could wear often, and that would fit in with my wardrobe. I have a lot of clothes in variations of black, grey and purple, so this scarf will go with all of them! I especially like the variations in the dye that you can see in the photo above. They add a lovely depth to the fabric, and a reminder of the natural dyeing process.

In the spirit of paying things forward, I’ll be having a giveaway on The Eternal Magpie Facebook page, when I reach 100 Likes. Now I just need to choose something that I think people would actually like to win!

Lots more hats

Lots of hats

Today I took a day’s holiday from work, to go to a symposium in Oxford about the care and maintenance of natural history collections in museums.

Unfortunately, when I got up this morning, it became apparent that the central heating had stopped working, so I had to stay at home and wait for someone to come and fix it. Thank goodness for the British Gas home care insurance – we’ve only lived here for a month, and it’s the third time we’ve called them already!

While I was waiting, I popped the fan heater on in my sewing room, and wrapped myself up with a scarf and fingerless gloves. The end result of a day’s work has turned out to be the little mountain of polar fleece you can see above. Eight more hats waiting for the brims and the bands to be sewn by hand, and another twelve hats cut out and ready for the machine.

Now I just need a bit of inspiration for embellishing them, as they’re rather plain at the moment. I read over on Betz White’s blog that you can use paper cutting tools on felt, so I thought I might give the paddle punches (assuming I can find them!) a try with fleece and see what happens.

Four Fleece Hats

Fleecy hat

This is one of four fleecy hats that I managed to make today. I decided that I’d start my first round of sewing in the new house by using up the fabric that’s currently taking up the most room, which is a veritable mountain of polar fleece. I bought it to make hats to take to Frome in May, but ran out of time to actually make them.

Sadly, today’s four hats have not made any sort of dent in the pile of fleece, but I’ve been invited to take the Emporium to the Berkshire Autistic Society‘s Christmas Fair on December 14th, so hopefully I’ll have time to make a few more hats between now and then!

Hopefully I’ll also have time to get some better lighting sorted out in my sewing room. Its only window is six feet away from next door’s two-storey house, so it gets very little light at the best of times. In electric light it’s just awful – the hat above is actually a lovely light purple, not dark grey!

Fleecy hats

The hats are quite plain, with an oval crown and a turned back brim. Suitable for men and women, I’ll be making more of these in two sizes. I have two black and two purple so far, both 22″ which is the smaller size. I also have more colours – two greens, some burgundy, and a sandy colour, as well as black with white skulls, and pink with black skulls. Enough for about twenty-four more hats, I think! That should keep me busy for a bit.

While I’m making the hats, I’m also thinking about what kind of embellishment might suit them. I’m contemplating a brooch of some kind, perhaps something needle felted onto a matching (or contrasting) fleece background. I’m also contemplating how best to make the polystyrene heads look a little bit smarter before the fair. A coat of paint, maybe, or some sewing pattern paper. I have plans for more hats in the future, not just a mountain of fleece ones, so I want the head forms to look their best!

Shopping Spree: Skulls, Skeins and a Spindle

Handmade polymer & gemstone earrings from Honey & Ollie

Look what arrived today – my lovely new earrings from Honey and Ollie! They arrived super quick, all the way from California. So quick that I wasn’t expecting them for about another week! As a recovering goth, I’m still irresistibly drawn to Things With Skulls, and these were so pretty that I couldn’t resist.

Handmade polymer & gemstone earrings from Honey & Ollie

The skulls and flowers are made from polymer clay, with sparkly little gemstones dangling at the top. The findings (all hand made) are copper, which complements the stones beautifully. The hooks are a really lovely shape too, and they stay in place very securely. Despite being quite big, they’re really light to wear, and I’m definitely going to be adding more Honey and Ollie pieces to my wish list.

Handspun and hand dyed yarn from The Outside, with hand carved drop spindle

This is my little haul from the Museum of English Rural Life‘s Traditional Craft Fair.

All from The Outside, on top is a hand-carved drop spindle. It’s made from yew, and it’s a bottom-whorl style. Excuse the red acrylic leader, I was so keen to try it out that I grabbed the first thing I could find! Once I’d figured out how to do a half-hitch to hold the yarn in place, I grabbed some fluff and started to spin straight away. It’s a lovely spindle, and I’m really happy to have one of my own instead of having to borrow from work. Now I can practice at home, and make as much wobbly, lumpy yarn as I like!

Handspun and hand dyed yarn from The Outside

Speaking of yarn… this is neither wobbly, nor lumpy. It’s handspun from blue faced leicester wool, and it’s lovely and soft. The vibrant colours are all from natural dyes, and this should be just enough to make a pair of rainbow-striped mittens.

The colours, from left to right, are:
1) Weld & madder
2) Weld
3) Weld & woad
4) Weld & woad dipped in madder
5) Woad & weld
6) Woad
7) Cochineal (orange oxidised to blue)

I had a lovely chat with Romilly about dyeing, including planting up a dye garden and not being afraid of mordants. There is definitely going to be some experimentation with colour and fluff in my future! For now though, I need to practice my spinning, and think about the perfect pattern for my new rainbow-coloured mittens.

First Frost

First Frost

Just a quick morning note to say how much I love my new garden.

I know it will need years of work to get it looking how I can see it inside my head. But it’s going to be worth it.

The light is so beautiful, no matter what time of day it is. Right now I can see steam riding from next door’s compost bins, there are small birds flitting between all the different shrubs, and yesterday I saw a cormorant fly overhead – a change from all the red kites!

I have visions of chickens and bees, although I’m not convinced that either Paul or my neighbours will be best pleased with those plans. The lawn will gradually give way to a proper path and a rockery/alpine patch, and the borders around the shrubs will expand so that I’ll have room for dye plants.

The only thing spoiling the perfect peace and quiet is the team of builders, who are currently building five huge houses just one metre away from my shed. I can hear them all day, and see them through the gaps between the fir trees. I’m hoping that the resulting houses won’t be too much taller than the trees, as one of my favourite things is being able to look out of the window and see nothing but garden and sky.

If I could live in the middle of nowhere, I’d be happy as anything. But as that’s not possible, my beautiful garden is definitely the next best thing.

Remembering my Grandad

GEC logo on the lamp post by the bus stop

This is the lamp post that marks the bus stop where I catch the bus to work in the morning. Every time I see it, I’m reminded of my Grandad, Leslie Clarke.

The initials stand for General Electric Company, now GEC Alstom. GEC had a large site in Stafford, and my Grandad worked for them for many years as a driver of large vehicles.

As far as I know, he was also a driver when he was drafted into the war, but apart from that, I don’t know anything about his involvement. He never spoke about it, and specifically asked me not to wear a poppy, as he didn’t want to be forcibly reminded about the war by people who had never been there. He does have medals, and we know he was in Africa, but that’s about it.

Mostly, when I think of my Grandad, I think of glass bottles of lemonade on the cellar steps, running down his very long garden, and bonfires and fireworks on the edge of the orchard. I miss him very sharply at this time of year, and I wish I could have shown my new garden to him. I think he would have liked it.

Investigating the garden

Investigating the garden

One of the reasons I was so keen to buy this house was the size of the garden. This is the back third. It has been, and will be again, a vegetable patch. At the moment it’s so overgrown that you can’t see where the individual beds are, so I thought I’d start by doing a bit of gentle clearing.

Investigating the garden

I thought this readymade circle might be a good base for a little pond. My plan was to take the sticks off the top, shovel the soil into the compost bin, and find out how deep the hole is. Unfortunately the sticks on top turned out to be blackthorn clippings, therefore covered in dirty great spikes, and my gloves aren’t very thick, so it was a slower, more careful process than I’d anticipated.

Investigating the garden

And then it got weird. I mean, who hasn’t wanted to throw their schoolbag down the bottom of the garden and bury it? Seems obvious, really.

The top layer of sticks (and the schoolbag) removed, I started digging in the soil, only to discover that it was lying on top of another layer of blackthorn clippings that hadn’t even begun to think about decomposing, so there was no way I could chuck everything straight into the compost bin. I had to resort to pulling the branches out from under the compost, very carefully, trying my hardest to avoid the massive thorns.

Investigating the garden

Which is when I met this fellow…

Investigating the garden

…who I think is a Common Newt. Definitely a newt of some description, anyway!

Investigating the garden

And then I met another one…

Investigating the garden

…and another!

I turned up seven newts altogether. They’re so incredibly well camouflaged against the soil that I resorted to picking them up and putting them temporarily in a bucket, so as not to risk injuring or treading on them. There was one in particular that every time I moved it, it ran for shelter… underneath the toe of my boot. Silly thing.

I now feel terribly bad about digging up their habitat – not least because the entire point of putting a pond into that hole was specifically to encourage newts! Apparently I’ve just saved myself a lot of digging… and the next door neighbours do have quite a big pond, which is presumably where the newts have been mating.

Investigating the garden

And now my garden looks like this. A hole full of sticks, a pile of sticks that used to be in the hole, a bucket full of things that should never have found their way into the hole in the first place (metal shelf brackets, sweet wrappers, buried plant pots, a huge lump of builders’ sand…), and a temporary newt hotel.

I’m hoping that the newts will be able to take up residence underneath the pile of sticks that used to be in the hole, as I don’t plan on moving that for a while now. I think I would still like to put a little pond in here, but I’ll definitely be leaving a handy pile of sticks somewhere in the garden, for creatures to hide in.

The house has been warmed, and visited

House warming and birthday gifts

This was our first non-work weekend in the new house (and I’m back at work again next weekend) so we wanted to take the opportunity to invite a few people round for a little party. The button heart wreath above was one of the many lovely gifts that people brought for us, and the ceramic heart inside it was a birthday present from one of my oldest friends.

Please excuse the graininess – every light bulb in the house seems to be the lowest strength available, but it seems wasteful to change them before they’ve blown. Though we might take them all out and save them to use up in a bedside lamp, which doesn’t need to be as bright as a dining room!

It was lovely to be able to show people round, and have enough space for more than two people to come and visit us at the same time! Nobody had to sit on the floor if they didn’t want to, there was space to mingle, and it was lovely to have everyone just popping in and out over the course of the afternoon. I might even brave my hermit-like tendencies, and invite people round again.

Robin

This afternoon we found ourselves with a rather more unexpected visitor. We’d just eaten lunch (in a dining room! at a dining table!) with my parents, and retired to the living room for a coffee. Paul went back into the kitchen to put the kettle on, and then started waving madly at us through the glass door because he’d discovered that there was a robin in the kitchen!

We didn’t take a photo, because the poor thing was desperate to get out of the house and had started flying into the kitchen window. So we opened the back door and gently herded him out. He must have come in through the open bedroom window, and flown all the way through the house into the kitchen!

Originally we’d planned to trim back the shrubs outside the bedroom window, because they’re bigger than they need to be for privacy, and they block out a lot of light. However, we’d already discovered that a lot of birds live in one of the bushes in particular, having been woken up several times by a blackbird and a wren at startling volume very early in the morning. So we don’t really want to destroy anybody’s habitat… but we’re obviously going to have to be a lot more careful about the windows in future!