New starts...

Today is a very important day. It could be because in a month's time it will be my birthday.. Good reason, but no that's not it. Or because I have fed my addiction to Harry Potter and feel satisfied that I have seen the Deathly Hollows Part I film the best one so far, but no... It may be because my Christmas present number 2 is well on its way (it is much more advanced than the picture suggests).

No, no, no... Today is the day when the builder start ripping out our new house. Gone will be the hot air heating system, gone will be the 70s kitchen and gone will be the walls downstairs (and the bathroom, and the purple/lime green colour scheme, and the artex ceiling).

Gone will be the corridor (behind the right-hand side wall is the kitchen that will be no more)..

And we are hoping that light will come into the living room.. M is looking particularly tall, it is clearly a bad picture, he can fit no problem in the house...

This is really exciting today, but not sure how long I will last... I hope I will be able to post progress soon...

Home Inspiration 12

Another very clever website - the Victoria and Albert Museum Patchwork Pattern Maker. At the site, you can upload a photo and turn it into your own quilt pattern! You can also look around the gallery and see what others have done. Print out your pattern, choose your fabric and you are ready to go.

There is one pattern from the gallery that really stood out for me. Here is the original picture.

Here is the patchwork pattern version (which in fact I prefer to the original picture):

Pretty cool, right! I am wondering if you could not use the pattern for cross-stitch too... Here is another nice pattern (well I think).

Free software + easy to use + more possible crafts = a very happy creative me!

And one Christmas present blocking...

Not so long go I discussed my Autumn project, the shallowtail, and the lovely yarn I was using. Here are new pictures of how I got on!



I knew I did not have enough yarn, probably from the start, but add a left over skein from M's scarf. It adds a bit of drama I think... right up my Grandma's street.


I have made a fw changes, made the budding lace repeat longer (17 repeats), made te lily of the valley border smaller (6 rows of nupps instead of 5 and 5), and made the lace border one row longer. You may be able to see what I mean below. I love the colours!

Home Inspiration 11

I am sure you have all looked (bought?) some of Caroline McGrath posters. I thought that was such a clever idea - so new, so beautiful!

All the interior design magazines I read (and believe me I read many) featured the prints. Can you have too much of a good thing? Well I am ashamed that the novely worn off a bit. It is still great, but it felt that everyone had the print..

However I found out a very cool way to have my unique word cloud. Wordle explains that it is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide.

The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends

Here are some of display on the website

All I need now is to find my favourite text (I am considering the song my parents wrote for my wedding - yes, they decided to sing in front of all the guests, and boy did I cry!). What text would you choose?

Autumn projects

I do like Autumn usually, but today it is really cold, rainy and .. miserable. And I am not sure whether I really like it.

I bought some handspun, hand-dye yarn on Folksy (the UK equivalent of Etsy) a month or so ago. I have trying to find the right project and decided to finally get on with the Swallowtail and join the other 7778 knitters out there. I am currently struggling a bit with the nupps, and my progess has slowed down a bit. This is a Xmas present for my grandma, so plenty of time still... It is a great pattern though, very interesting, and quite rewarding (all that lace pattern forming under your fingers). Here is a (really poor quality - must stop taking picture with my blackberry) picture of the pattern and yarn.

You will see on the picture my best homemade soup (as in the only one I did this year).. pumkin soup. It is really tasty, and very very easy to do (again apologies for bad picture).

The recipe is from the BBC Food website (it is one of the few pumkin soup recipes without curry powder). I used organic vegetable stock cube and it is all worth it, as a lot of the flavour comes from the stock. It is really filling. I added the coutrons the first time, but honestly it was too much (even for M, and we are talking about my 6'2 husband who is constantly hungry!). Do try it!

Home Inspiration 10

This post is really just about inspiration as this designer is in South Africa...

South African company REcreate specialises in taking old luggage, milk bottles, typewriters and other back-of-the-basement items into unique pieces of furniture.

Designer Katie Thompson is the brains behind RECreate. Even though she is not the first person to take a crack at the art of recycling, Katie Thompson definitely has a knack for turning so-called “junk” into household gems.

Some of my favourites are below:

I cannot wait to go to my nearest boot sale...

Very excited!

Yes she is back and yes I made M watch the whole episode of Kirstie's Homemade Home. And... she got Erika Knight on the show as well! I got very very excited suddenly pointing out to the books and then to the TV, and then to the books and then to the TV, and trying to get M as excited as I was. He wasn't. Oh well his loss!

So here we are my Tuesday evenings will not be the same again, Kirstie's Homemade Home is back!

I am leaving you with a picture taken on my way home.. St Paul's by night.