photos – eternal magpie

#magpieinmypocket

Photograph copyright Rainbright Photography — Photograph © Rainbright Photography

Did you know that every dress goes out to you with a little something already in the pocket?

It’s a handy-sized book for writing down or drawing pictures of anything you might want to put in your pockets whilst out on an adventure!

Sienna has very carefully written “there was lots of fairies”.

I had no idea until Sarah (Rainbright Photography) and I ran our giveaway that fairies were such a popular thing to keep in your pockets!

If you haven’t got a dress yet, but you’d like to make a little book to keep in your pocket, you can find my short video tutorial over on YouTube.

You can also find the instructions in Miss Mouse’s Summer Magazine, which is available as a printed booklet, or as a digital download from Miss Mouse’s Etsy shop.

(If you don’t yet know who Miss Mouse is… you can find out here!)

If you’d like to, I’d love it if you wanted to share the contents of your pockets, or your little books! You can do that on social media using the hashtag #magpieinmypocket. Thank you!

Behind the scenes: photo shoot with Rainbright Photography (and a giveaway!)

behind the scenes with Rainbright Photography

A little while ago my friend Sarah and I ran a model call, so that we could take some photos of my dresses on an Actual Person rather than on a coathanger up a tree. After several weeks of waiting for the perfect evening weather, and some tense moments when the local council very inconsiderately mowed down our favourite meadow (how rude!), the day came around and we all met up at a local park.

image copyright Rainbright Photography — image © Rainbright Photography

I think we can agree that it went quite well!

I absolutely love Sarah’s work – as Rainbright Photography, she specialises in outdoor seasonal portraits of children and families. The way she captures the light, no matter the time of year, is absolutely magical.

These are just a few of Sarah’s images – I’ll share the rest over the next few weeks, as I pop them on social media and start changing over some of the pictures on the website. I’ve specifically picked out some of the photos featuring the lovely Sienna making good use of the pockets, and that’s because…

drum roll…

We’re having a GIVEAWAY, and you can win this dress!

I actually have two, in ages four and five. The way to enter is to pop over to my eternal magpie Facebook page and leave a comment letting me know what your little one would most like to keep in their pockets!
For an extra bonus entry, you can do the same thing on Sarah’s Rainbright Photography Facebook page too.

We’ll be choosing the winner on Saturday, so you’ve got until Friday night to get your comments in!

Meet Lucinda

Say hello to “Lucinda”, one of Pronuptia‘s finest wedding dresses of 1983.

I’d been looking on Ebay for a while for a stereotypically 1980s wedding dress, the bigger and the pouffier the better, but somehow I always seemed to end up being outbid by 15p at the very last minute. I had a look in charity shops, but everything they had was too nice, or too far out of my very limited budget.

So, I asked around on Facebook, and a photographer friend said he thought he might have something appropriate lurking around in the garage, from a project that had never come to fruition. He sent it over to me, and it turned out to be perfect!

It’s a perfect example of 1980s-does-Edwardian, and being a Pronuptia gown it’s really well made. Okay, yes, it’s really well made from 100% nylon (lovely!), but that means it’s survived a trip through the washing machine, and has come out looking great. And best of all, as you can see by the mannequin, the dress is an absolutely perfect fit. I couldn’t have asked for anything better!

There’s a little bit of damage to the bottom ruffle – a hole at the back, and a couple of places where the lace is coming away. There’s also some staining on the lining of the train, where the dress has obviously been wet at some stage… and there’s a mark on the front of the skirt, that might be wine, or might be gravy!

Clearly this dress has had one very good day in its life, but considering the dated style and the damage, I can’t say I feel too bad about making some slight alterations. Details will follow later, but what I will say is that this is for a photo project of my own, mainly involving messing about in the woods in a big white dress. After I’ve taken the scissors to it, that is.

(Oh, and if you fancy a bit of a giggle, Pronuptia have digitised 60 years’ worth of their catalogues, and made them available online!)

Walk in the woods.

My mind’s been full of bees, lately.

Busy. Buzzy. Noisy. Distracted.

The only thing for it was to go for a walk.

I borrowed Paul’s little Lumix camera, and made my way down to Oldpond Copse, the piece of woodland next to our old house. I’ve missed coming here.

It’s not far away – just a 15 minute walk from the new place – but that seems a lot, compared with being able to step out of the old house and be in a little field almost immediately. We do have a huge garden now, but that’s nowhere close to being the sanctuary I need it to be. We have a park too, but it’s small and surrounded by houses. I knew I missed the lake, but I hadn’t quite realised how much I needed this little patch of trees.

This is where we had our engagement photos taken. I think the photographer was a bit surprised when we took him to a gap in the hedge and led him down the steps, but the photos he took that day are the nicest ones we have. (Nicer than the wedding photos, even.)

I love the way that you can really feel alone here. Despite the dog-walkers, local walking club, “Erlegh Elfins” kindergarten, fishermen at the lake, and the countless other people that use this space, it’s a really good spot to go for thinking. Listening. Watching the birds and the squirrels. Getting to know the trees. Really looking, to see how it’s changed since you were last there.

The little stream was slow and shallow today. I was able to climb across it to capture this little feather. All of an inch deep, the water could barely be bothered to move.

I love all of the different elements in this one, all mixed up together. The earth underneath the water. The sky reflected below the feather. Everything slow, and gentle.

Even though I know that these steps lead up to a sports field, the light at the top always seems to make them feel magical. As though you could climb up, and come out in a different place every time. I can’t remember what the sign says, probably something about keeping your dog on a lead (which nobody does), or not riding your bike through the woodland. I like to think it says “Narnia” or “Wall” or maybe “Keep Out”, depending on who’s looking at it.

This was the only fungus I managed to capture in focus, but there were plenty of them around. There was a huge great chicken of the woods, sadly trampled underfoot, and lots of things I didn’t recognise – including this. It looks so beautiful on the trunk of this dead silver birch tree, as though it couldn’t possibly have grown anywhere but here.

The lake was busy with people today, so I didn’t stop for long. Just long enough to notice the fluffiest feather I think I’ve ever seen.

On my way back through the Real World, I noticed a stunning garden filled to bursting with dahlias – an absolute shock of colour in an otherwise nowhere street. I popped into the local shop on the way past (soon to be usurped by a horrible new Tesco that’s taking up residence in what used to be the local pub), and bought a knitting magazine full of potential Christmas gifts. I think that might take up the rest of my day now. A bit of laundry, a bit of cleaning, and a lot of knitting, to try and keep my head in the space that the copse has cleared for it.

Back again.

Hello! I seem to be getting into a very lazy habit of only updating the blog about once a fortnight. My excuses are that it’s too frustrating trying to post using the iPad, and it’s so much easier to update Instagram and Facebook. Probably best to follow me there, if you feel like keeping up with me on a more regular basis.

Here you can see me in a fantastically stereotypical Instagram shot – staring whimsically into space as I contemplate how I’m going to get out of this dress when I haven’t added the front placket yet.

I was originally going to make a dress, then I changed my mind and decided to make a shirt. Thanks to a slight maths error (okay, the fact that I didn’t measure my hips properly) the shirt didn’t fit, so I decided to chop off the bottom eight inches and make it into a dress after all. But because I was cobbling together two patterns, I hadn’t quite worked out how I was going to get in and out of the thing. My task for today is to cut into the skirt and add a placket, so I’ve got room for buttons below the waist.

I have quite a few buttonholes in my future – this petticoat needs eight of them. (I just need to find eight matching lingerie buttons from my stash.) The pattern is Butterick 3263, and I made the slip to test the fit of the bodice before I embark on the combinations. Just as well I did, as the petticoat didn’t fit me at all! I took in two inches at the centre back bodice, half an inch at each side, an inch out of each shoulder, and added a dart at the centre back skirt to accommodate my sway back. I’m now slightly paranoid that I’ve made it too tight, but I won’t find out until the buttons are in place. (Cue the traditional cursing of my sewing machine that refuses to make buttonholes unless I’m standing in the sewing machine shop complaining to Sue about it – when of course it makes them perfectly. Git.)

In an attempt to be more organised, and to try and keep both my pattern and fabric stashes under control, I’ve started work on a new system. I’ve printed out a little picture and the fabric details for each of the patterns I sew most often, and glued them down to the pages in a small Filofax that was sitting empty in a drawer. I plan to add swatches for each garment as I make them, so that I can see what I’ve got already and where any gaps might be. The second section will be swatches cut from my fabric stash, so that when I go fabric shopping I can see what I’ve got at home, and make sure I’m not duplicating things. This will also allow me to match up the patterns with the swatches, and hopefully shrink the stash a little bit by actually sewing something from it!

Section three, which you can see poking out on the right, is swatches from clothes that are already in my wardrobe. (These were cut from inexplicable horizontal loops on the back of my jeans.) Having these with me will mean that I can buy fabric (or wool) to match clothes that I have already, thereby creating Actual Outfits rather than a wardrobe full of lovely clothes that bear no relation to one another. (Currently I have nine pairs of smart trousers, and no tops at all to go with them. I’m very bored with black t-shirts already.) I’m also contemplating knitting tiny swatches to match my cardigans, though I think that might be a step too far into madness. Perhaps just sticking in a few strands of yarn would do just as well.

Speaking of madness… the other day I made this little doll face. I found her a bit fiddly (hence the slightly squiffy eyes!), so I enlarged the pattern, thinking I’d try making a doll on a slightly larger scale. Except that when I really looked at the photocopied pieces, I realised that “slightly larger” is actually going to turn out about three feet tall! Do I really want to make a doll at that kind of size? Well, I’ve got a big enough piece of felt, so why not?! We’ll see how long it takes for me to get bored of stuffing all the pieces. (I predict: Not Very.)

In Other News…

I’ve been clearing out my pattern stash into the Etsy shop.
There are a few vintage patterns that turned out not to fit me, a few that I bought and then changed my mind about, and a few that are cut out to sizes that I now can’t fit into. More to come over the next week or so.

My zipped pouches were reviewed over at Blonde Ambition.
Thank you Katie, for the lovely review!

The Vintage Haberdashery Mystery Boxes have disappeared from Etsy…
…but I do still have one left. Let me know if you’d like it, and I can pop the listing back up just for you. Otherwise it’ll sit on my shelf feeling lonely, until I can find a good home for it.

And now? Buttonholes. Lots of buttonholes.

(And hoping that it doesn’t rain on the four loads of washing currently drying in the garden, because I’ve got no room for all that laundry in the house if the weather decides to chuck it down!)

Garden, 6am

I’ve been awake since about 4:30 in the morning, something that’s increasingly common now that I’m not taking sleeping tablets to control the fibromyalgia. I wake up (this morning thanks to the entire dawn chorus taking place in the forsythia outside the bedroom window), and I don’t go back to sleep again. Today, after having a bit of a grumble about Nature on facebook, I decided to go outside and have a bit of a look at it.

This wild corner is in the top right of the picture above. The garden’s about 30 metres (120 feet) long, and this is standing right at the back (underneath the blackthorn tree), looking towards the house. It might look like an overgrown mess, but this is my favourite part of the garden at the moment. We’re letting it run completely wild, with just a little attempted management of the overgrown lawn grass. I need to look up when you’re actually supposed to mow a meadow, because that’s what I want this to become.

Who’s been sleeping in my bed?! We haven’t seen any evidence of foxes in the garden at all, but this squashed patch of long grass is there every morning, which suggests somebody’s been sleeping here. Could be a fox, could be a cat, could be a party of hedgehogs. Who knows? Whoever it is, I’m pleased we’ve got company.

The tiny apple tree (not even five feet tall and only a couple of years old) is absolutely bursting with braeburns. Last year we harvested them too soon, worried about losing them in the storms. This year it’s going to be even harder to wait, having watched them grow all year!

The tiny pear tree (ditto) is also looking great. The pears had all gone before we moved in, so we don’t know what they’re going to be like, or quite when they’ll be ripe. And who knew that pears grow upside down?!

The enormous hypericum is just starting to come into flower, along with some of the other long-neglected shrubs. I can’t wait to see it in full bloom, it’s going to be fantastic.

Is this a type of geranium? I’m not sure. I haven’t got around to identifying anything that’s growing in the wild patch. Whatever it is, it’s all over the place at the moment, along with lots of campions and the last of the garlic mustard. The bees are loving it, even at this time of the morning, and so am I.

Yep, it’s definitely spring!

A couple of days ago we looked out of the kitchen window to be greeted by this – the blackthorn (sloe) tree suddenly in full blossom at the far end of the garden!

I love the delicate little flowers – such a contrast to the vehement spikiness of the tree itself.

The pear tree’s waking up as well – as is the apple, although it was apparently too shy to be photographed this morning. The apple buds are tiny, but I’m hopeful for some nice braeburns. We didn’t see any pears at all last year, though they might have come and gone before we moved in.

I’m not sure what this is, but we’ve got a border full of it, and it’s beautiful! My Mum thinks it’s the “weed” variety of Oxalis, and she’s very keen for us to dig a bit up and save it in a pot for her. It might be technically a weed, but it was flowering in November when my parents first came to visit the new house, which as far as we’re concerned makes it a very valuable plant!

I just love the way it collects the water, in the centres and around the edges of the leaves. I really want to see whether I can create something that looks like this – maybe with felt and glass beads.

As I was walking home this afternoon, thinking about posting these photos, it started to rain, just the tiniest bit. I came around the corner by the church and was greeted by this absolutely glorious rainbow – I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one so strong!

I case you’re wondering, I have been making things, but I’ve been stuck in the busy corner of my work rota again, so I haven’t had much time to do both the making and the blogging. Hopefully this will result in quite a few making-things posts for you next week.

Should’ve worn wellies.

It turns out that when you go for a walk on a flood plain, it might be a good idea to wear wellies. Particularly if it’s been raining SINCE FOREVER.

I set out at about half past three in the afternoon, which looked to all intents and purposes like a beautiful autumn day. Blue skies, no wind or rain, beautiful golden leaves. Just gorgeous.

You can see why photographers call the period just before sunset the “golden hour”.

Walking around the trees, with the sun so low in the sky behind them, was almost magical.

Even the pylons managed to look pretty. Although I did have to find a different way around… this was rather deep!

See? Just gorgeous. One of these days I’m going to put on my most ethereal-looking outfit (or make one), and get Paul to take some silly photos of me hiding behind trees. Why not?

This is usually a field. I’m fairly certain that fields don’t normally flow.

I’m sure there used to be a footpath around here somewhere…

This tree isn’t usually in the middle of the river. The river usually lives about twenty feet away. I’m very glad this beauty survived the storms though, many others weren’t so lucky.

Hello Snail.

Today I had rather a long wait for the bus home from work (and there aren’t any buses to my new house on a Sunday, which is going to be awkward), so I decided to play around with the camera again while I was waiting. Hello snail!

Expecting my camera to be all “no, I’m not focussing anywhere you want, hahaha”, I was pleasantly surprised when it decided to prove me wrong.

(Yes, I realise my camera is inanimate. I don’t think that prevents it from having moods, or trying to thwart me at every possible opportunity.)

This little bit of lichen is about a centimetre across. About the same size as the snail’s shell, in fact. And today, my camera had no problem at all taking this picture.

Or this one. In low light, and in the rain, no less.

Goodbye snail.

Playing with Kuler

This is a screenshot from the Adobe Kuler app on my phone.

I’d read about it on the Spoonflower blog, back in August. They sometimes run design challenges requiring a limited colour palette, and this particular one was run in conjunction with Adobe.

You point Kuler at a photo, and it picks out a selection of compatible colours for you. (You can also start from scratch, with a colour wheel, but that’s not really the part I’m interested in.) You can choose from five pre-set moods, or you can choose your own set of colours directly from the image.

I was thinking about the photographs I stuck in a scrapbook the other week, and wondered whether pasting the colour charts into the empty space left by a square image on a 6×4″ print would be a worthwhile thing to do.

Looking at this image, I’m not sure. Sticking all five colour charts together like this makes it harder to see the subtle differences between them, and I think I much prefer the phone screenshot, where you can just see the one.

I do wish there was a better way of saving the colour chart alongside the original photo. The ones from my phone are screenshots taken before I pressed the tick to save the colours. Once you’ve done that, the photo goes away, and you’re left with just the chart.

From the website you can download the colour charts as .ase files which you can import into Photoshop’s swatch panel, which is very useful, and it will also show you the rgb and hex codes for the individual colours. But again, once you’ve chosen your colours and clicked save, the original image is lost. Screenshots it is then, I suppose!

Mind you, as evidenced by the shield bug above, the original photo doesn’t have to be well-composed or even slightly in focus in order for the app to work! You can also use the phone’s camera to pick colours from life, without having to use a saved image.

All of this is making me yearn for a better camera/phone hybrid though. My iPhone is a 3gs, which is quite old now, so the camera’s not all that great. The one I keep seeing advertised is the Samsung Galaxy S4, which runs on Android. If all the apps I currently use on my phone (not that many, it has to be said) could be run on this, then I might be inclined to make the switch. Not that I can afford it right now… but for a truly compact camera, that can take quick snaps and upload them on the fly, this might be the way forward for me.

(Although even just typing that sentence is making me miss my SLR. I am nothing if not fickle.)

Category: photos

#magpieinmypocket

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Behind the scenes: photo shoot with Rainbright Photography (and a giveaway!)

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Meet Lucinda

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Walk in the woods.

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Back again.

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Garden, 6am

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Yep, it’s definitely spring!

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Should’ve worn wellies.

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Hello Snail.

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Playing with Kuler

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