Month: September 2013

Antique Shop Bargain!

Ridged rolling pin "for oats", perfect for felting!

Today we popped into Fanny’s Antiques (in a side road near TGI Friday’s, Reading), and picked up a couple of lovely things.

The first lovely thing I can’t show you, and I have to forget about immediately, because it’s going to be my Christmas present. Suffice it to say that it’s a small piece of furniture, and sewing is involved. I’ll show you in December, once I’ve remembered to be surprised by it!

The second lovely thing is the rolling pin pictured above. Labelled as being “for oats”, it’s going to be absolutely perfect for working with felt! Half the price of buying one from Wingham Wool Work, too.

It turns out I’ve also saved myself the grand sum of £9.50 by not buying a fulling block – I discovered that a grooved wooden soap dish does the same job! One felting gadget that I do want to buy though is a bulb spray. That will allow me to use water that’s hotter than my hands are able to tolerate through the plastic bottle I’m using at the moment. It should also hopefully be a bit more controlled.

Once we’ve moved house, there’s a convenient-looking work surface next to the sink in the new kitchen, so I’m hoping I can get the felting stuff out while the sewing machines and fabric are still packed away. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do with my new rolling pin!

A Calming Walk

13/09/2013

This morning I was feeling particularly fibromyalgy (of course it’s a real word), and didn’t have the attention span or strength of body to carry on with my sewing. I did a few bits and bobs on the computer, but was gradually becoming more and more cross with myself for being ill. So it seemed sensible to get out, and go for a walk.

CAUTION: There is one picture of a spider in this post, a bit further down.

13/09/2013

It was a very slow walk (half a mile in an hour and a half), but I had to keep stopping to look at small things. This fuzzy fellow is the caterpillar of the Buff Tip Moth, and he had a lot of friends who were steadily devouring a very small oak tree.

13/09/2013

This is not an oak leaf (unhelpfully, I can’t remember what it is now), but I love the way you can see the cell structure from underneath. This is exactly the sort of thing I want to look at with my microscope, although I haven’t yet got around to either collecting a bunch of stuff to look at, or dragging my netbook around the lake with me.

13/09/2013

I don’t know what type of spider this is, because I’m sufficiently arachnophobic that I don’t want to have to look up lots of different pictures of spiders to find out. If anyone could tell me, that would be lovely! Despite the slightly gruesome nature of the spider wrapping up its lunch (and the scariness of the spider itself), I thought this was rather a magical picture, with the web framed by leaves and little flecks of light twinkling through from the background.

13/09/2013

One problem I am finding with this camera (Canon Powershot G12) is its general unwillingness to focus where I want it to unless it’s set entirely to automatic. Even then, it sometimes takes a bit of fiddling about. I usually take photos in Aperture Priority mode, because I like shots like this with a very shallow depth of field. Trying to combine that with macro shots though, argh, there were times when I could cheerfully have thrown the camera into the lake. And don’t even talk to me about the manual focus – that was even worse than repeatedly half-pressing the button and hoping for the best! So the vast majority of these photos were taken with the camera set to fully automatic, because I simply didn’t have the patience to fiddle.

13/09/2013

Once again, more unidentified insects. I saw yellow spots all over the top of the leaf, and pointed the camera underneath to see what I could find. This is another one where I should have brought the leaf home with me, to check it out under the microscope! But I didn’t really want whatever those insects are to hatch out in my Shed. Or die because I’d taken the leaf off the tree.

13/09/2013

I think this is a fragment of a pigeon’s egg. It’s very common to find them on the paths around the lake. There are A LOT of wood pigeons in the woods (unsurprisingly!), and as well as magpies and other predators finding the eggs tasty, pigeons will also push eggs out of the nest if they’re infertile. I like the way you can see the delicate cracks showing up in the membrane of this little piece.

13/09/2013

And finally, more insect-related weirdness. The fluffy spiky things on this dog rose are moss galls, or “Robin’s pincushions”. They’re caused by a wasp laying eggs into the bud of the rose, which causes the cellular structure of the plant to change. The same thing happens to oak trees, and I know that oak galls can be used for dyeing. Apparently you can use these rose galls too, after they’ve dried out and the wasp larvae have vacated them. Not sure I’d fancy trying to collect them though – all the galls on this plant were a very long way up!

I know the weather’s turned a bit wet, but think I need to make it my mission to get outdoors and take a lot more photos. I’ve neglected my camera a lot this year, mainly thanks to spending more time at work since the spring, and then being too tired or too busy to go wandering around in the woods. I’d also like to get some actual prints made, so that I can stick them into sketchbooks and use them as inspiration for other work. Time to get uploading to Photobox I think, unless anybody’s got a recommendation for somewhere different?

Surprise tomato!

Surprise tomato!

When we discovered that we were buying a new house, the first thing we needed to do to sell ours was to sort out the garden. A few weeks after our friend Dan had miraculously transformed it for us, Paul spotted a tomato plant growing in one of the borders. It was swiftly followed by another, on the other side of the garden!

It’s possible that they were seeded from fallen tomatoes grown in previous years, or more likely from the the partially-processed contents of the compost bin. Either way, we figured it was much too late in the year for tomatoes to develop, but we decided to allow the plants to grow in the flower borders anyway.

Imagine our surprise when Paul went out this evening and found this little tomato! It’s the only one so far, although there have been quite a few flowers, so perhaps we might see a couple more.

Birthday Dress – In Progress

Overdress - in progress

This is the back view of the prototype version of my 40th Birthday Dress. So far, I’m very glad that I made a prototype, and didn’t take the scissors straight to the gorgeous shot silk dupion that I’ve got waiting!

The style of the dress is exactly spot on. The open back designed to give a glimpse of the layer underneath, the ridiculous bow inspired by a 1971 Style pattern (more on this later), and a high round neck at the front, deliberately kept very plain, to show off a big necklace or a pretty scarf.

Overdress - in progress

Unfortunately, I forgot something important. (No, not the ironing. Shush.) You see those drag lines at the sides, underneath the bust? I forgot the all important part where fabric is flat but bodies are curved, and I didn’t leave quite enough breathing room at the top. Fortunately my dress form is somewhat more generously endowed than I am, so the dress does fit. But it is a bit tight, so I’ll need to re-draft the front pattern piece before I make another. (I blame the fact that my pattern drafting books are already packed for the move, so I had to make the pattern up as I went along.)

I’ve been adding a lot of “Lagenlook” inspired outfits to Pinterest lately (you can see the board here), and the point is to wear a lot of loose layers, often with plenty of frills and asymmetry thrown in for good measure. The basic silhouette of a Lagenlook outfit is fundamentally triangular. As I am also fundamentally triangular, this seems like a great look for me!

Overdress - in progress

The annoying thing is, I’m so utterly conditioned to the “right” shape for a woman being an hourglass, or at least having some semblance of waist definition, that my immediate thought on adding this belt to the dress form was, “that’s better”.

Except that it’s not better. It’s not better at all. It pretty much guarantees that I’ll have indigestion after an hour, be uncomfortable all day, and generally be distracted by my clothes instead of focussing on whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. None of which, however you look at it, can possibly be defined as “better”.

I think what I need to do now is take the belt away, make the next version of the dress much more wide and floaty, and try to step away from any and all forms of media that try to tell me that my body shape is fundamentally wrong.

(And work out how best to add the most ENORMOUS pockets to the front of the dress. Obviously.)

Speakeasy

I can’t tell you how excited I am to see these fabrics! I’ve been waiting literally years for these types of prints to be available in the UK, on sustainable fabrics. Once again, the Organic Textile Company have outdone themselves!

The prints and colourways are closely based on designs from a book of 1920s textile patterns, and they’re printed onto a handwoven organic cotton and bamboo blend. I absolutely love their other cotton/bamboo fabrics, so I can’t wait to get my hands on some of these!

The hardest part is going to be deciding which of the prints and colourways to choose. I think the centre print, “Roaring Twenties” in purple, is my absolute favourite, and I think it will go very nicely with some plain purple that I have in the Shed already.

Now all I need is for everyone to head over to the Inexplicable Emporium and buy a few things, so I can afford to buy enough of this gorgeous fabric to make some dresses, which I can then put back into the Emporium!

(Don’t forget coupon code “LIFEBEGINS”, for your 40% discount  throughout September…)

Birthday Sale in the Emporium!

Candles in glass jars

BIRTHDAY SALE!
From now until my birthday (September 15th), you can get 40% DISCOUNT in the Inexplicable Emporium on Etsy.

Sewing Kit

Bearing in mind that I’m moving house and don’t know when I’ll be able to re-stock, if you’d been thinking about buying any of my goodies for Christmas presents, now’s probably as good a time as any!

Harris Tweed Cufflinks Packaging

The code you need is “LIFEBEGINS”…

Diary Time Again.

It’s that time of year again. It’s September, there’s a faint hint of autumn in the morning air, children are going back to school, students coming back to campus, and it’s nearly my birthday. (40 this year. How did that come around so quickly?) That can only mean one thing – time for a new diary.

This, as you can see, is last year’s photo. For 2013 I bought a Llewellyn Witches’ Datebook and a Spell A Day Almanac… both of which have remained almost entirely unopened, and definitely unwritten. A lot of the information was the same across the two books, so I could have easily picked just one. Next year I’m quite tempted by the Herbal Almanac, but whether I’ll actually use it or not is another matter.

This year I have been mostly using my phone as a calendar, but I have to confess that it hasn’t been going that well. I don’t synchronise my phone with my computer very often, and I add appointments into both, so when I do eventually get around to making the phone and the computer try to speak to one another, the poor things end up very confused. (As do I, of course.) This has resulted in family members not receiving birthday cards, my work rota being on my phone twice over,  and lots of bits of paper with appointments scribbled on them, which is what I was trying to avoid by keeping everything on the phone in the first place!

We’ve got the birthday thing sorted out now – or at least we will have when we move house. There’s a handy space on the side of the new fridge, so I’m going to print out one giant list of everybody’s birthdays, and pop them inside a picture frame. With the aid of a whiteboard pen, we can then write on the glass and tick off each birthday as we buy a gift or send a card. Perfect.

Despite years of rigorous searching, I still haven’t managed to find the diary that works exactly as I need it to. One day I’ll get around to designing my own, but neither Blurb nor Lulu offer the format and size that I really want, which is spiral bound A6, or thereabouts.

Photobox, on the other hand, now offer this:

It’s a standard photo diary, roughly 6×4″, which is spiral bound. It doesn’t squash the two weekend days into one space, which is a pet peeve of mine given that I work on some weekends and need a bit of room to write down what I’m up to. I like that it has appointments, and that you can start it on any month you prefer. You don’t seem to be able to change the layout for the smallest size, and I don’t know that I actually want a photo for every single week… but I could very easily drop in some jpgs of pretty frames or speech bubbles, which would give me a space for writing notes.

I’m balking slightly at the cost… £11.99 plus another £3.99 for shipping seems like quite a lot of money for a very little diary. But then if you consider the cost of all the diaries I’ve bought and simply never used, £16 suddenly seems not too bad. Perhaps I’ll give it a go.

And then, of course, there’s the other kind of diary. I’ve been reading The New Diary by Tristine Rainer (albeit an out-dated edition) as part of Susannah Conway‘s Unravelling course, which has a lot of writing exercises and prompts for different ways of using your diary as a resource for creativity as well as personal clarity. Although I’ve been keeping an online journal since 2002 and a public blog since about 2006, I haven’t kept a paper diary just for myself since I was a teenager. (I stopped being a teenager in 1993. Ouch.) My favourite Barbara Sher book, What Do I Do When I Want To Do Everything?, recommends keeping some kind of planner which you can use to write down everything except for daily appointments. Thoughts, feelings, plans for the future, that brilliant idea that’s bound to be an overnight success… all the stuff I usually keep on bits of paper and discarded envelopes that later turn up all over the house. Now that we’re moving I think I have at least managed to corral them all into one box, but what I’ll do with them next, who knows.


Image © British Library

I don’t think I can quite aspire to the levels of creativity displayed in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks (which is what many diary-writing aficionados will recommend as inspiration), but I can certainly aim for variety in subject matter. Scattered across various folders and envelopes I currently have ideas for aromatherapy products, herbalism studies, the conservation of Natural History collections in museums, dyeing textiles with plant material, making shoes… sewing plans of many different kinds… the list seems endless. However, I have now bought a simple spiral bound A4 sketchpad, that I can write and draw in with a nice ink pen. Perhaps if I have one central place for writing down ALL THE THINGS, it’ll be easier to make sense of it all as I go along. Chances of me actually writing in it on any kind of regular basis? Who knows. I haven’t even finished the writing exercises for Unravelling yet, and the course ended yesterday! I’m full of good intentions at the moment though, as I always am at the beginning of the academic year. So many possibilities, so much to learn! We’ll see how long it lasts…

Raspberry Muffin

Raspberry Muffin Childry

Not the cakey kind, more’s the pity, but a shawl I’ve been knitting since I bought the yarn in May.

The pattern is Childry, from the Simply Knitting Handknit Christmas supplement 2012. I knitted one for my sister last year, and liked it so much that I wanted one for myself. This one’s a bit smaller than I would have liked, but the yarn’s a bit thicker, so there wasn’t quite as much yardage (just over 300 metres, rather than 460)  in the 100 grams.

The yarn is Jillybean‘s “Knot Another Granny Yarn”, in the Raspberry Muffin colourway. It’s handspun from Dorset Poll, Hebridean and Suffolk Mix, and then hand dyed, resulting in a totally unique skein of yarn each time. It’s a teensy bit itchy for my liking, so this will definitely be a scarf for wearing over the top of a jumper rather than next to the skin. It’s really warm though, so it’ll be perfect for keeping out the chill in winter.

I’d have liked the ruffle to be a bit longer, but even the little one here took up a third of the yarn. Knitting the row that triples the number of stitches is soul-destroying, so knowing that I still had, say half, of the shawl to knit from that point on… urgh. My hands hurt just thinking about it. A third was quite enough.

As it turned out, I could probably have squeezed just one more row onto the ruffle (making ooh, a whole 3mm difference!), but having run out of yarn whilst casting off my sister’s, I decided to err on the side of caution this time. When I tried the shawl on it was clear that it needed a fastening of some description, so I knitted a bit of icord with all of the remaining yarn. I thought it might look a bit twee with a little bow in front, but actually I quite like it. If it does look twee, please don’t tell me. I prefer to remain blissfully ignorant about these things!