blowing my own …

Sometimes you just have to, right?

Slippers on happy feet in Australia, ordered through our etsy shop:

and cheerful red mitts warming the hands of a budding novelist, as he slaves over his keyboard late into the Cape winter night:

In other news, I have a pal over in Omaha, Nebraska (where? hell, I don’t know, one of those big blocky-looking states over in the middle of the US sort of, a very veeeeery long way from here…) who has just started her own etsy shop, so have a look at YarnChick40 when you get a moment. She’s got some nice stuff going there, and I think I might have to order myself the pattern for the ipad cover. 

Back soon x

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even the longest journey…

…starts with a single step.

Confucious? Neil Armstrong? One of the chaps who worked on the pyramids? I don’t know who said it first, but I think it’s helpful to keep repeating it to myself as a kind of self-encouraging mantra as I face the mountain of mess that is currently my home. I decided to start in the kitchen. Just one corner of it, actually. Didn’t want to freak myself out too much right at the outset.

This corner is where I have been chucking some of my mosaic stuff – tools, mirror, glass, tiles, beads, etc. It got to be like this :

but now it looks like this:

One crate has tins and glass jars for recycling (either by me or Oasis, we’ll see) and the other has pretty much all the mosaic stuff stacked inside. I have nothing against black plastic crates but, as I stood admiring my effort, some other crap  stuff jumped out at me from a different corner and before I knew it, one crate got flowered.

Well, at least I’ve taken the first of what will be many many steps.  (They don’t all have to be in the same week, right?)

Back soon x

another stool sample

{Sorry, I love that pun}.

So, a couple of weeks ago I was standing at my sink doing the washing-up. It was a Monday morning, quite early, and everyone was putting their rubbish bins out on the pavement because Monday’s the day the rubbish men come to Rosebank. I see the woman from the house across the road dumping her black bags and then she chucks out a piece of furniture!!! I was in my flip-flops and over the road before you could say “Other people’s junk”.

Turns out that it was a stool – was originally once a chair but the back disappeared – that had been in her great grand-mother’s house back on the farm.  I don’t which farm, or where, nor am I particularly good pals with this neighbour, but I do know that I can’t bring myself to relieve somebody of something that reminds them of their family history. No, not even me. Are you sure? Yes. Sigh.

         

That’s what it looked like. I said I would clean and sand it down and maybe give it another coat of paint. I also decided to make a round cushion for it. Now it looks like this:

      

As you can see, I got two free models – Jessie, and part of Alex.

I did give it another coat of paint, and tidied it up very nicely underneath, but I like the distressed look so I sanded it down all over again.  For the cushion, I couldn’t decide which fabric looked nicer so I used both! The orange is a shweshwe cotton that I love, and that you can get in all different colours now. The cushion also gave me the opportunity to try something I’ve had on the back burner in my head: crocheting an edge on something fabric. It’s hardly original, you’ve probably all been doing it for years, but Janette’s post about her apron (here) and the useful tip about working a row of chain stitch first  (here) via Ellen, finally got me going. My crocheted shells ended up being a bit tight, which is why they’ve flipped up and stayed flipped, but I still like the effect.

Liesl was getting rid of it because she said it was cluttering up their garage so perhaps it means less to her than it would to someone else (me!), but I said I’d do it for her and I have. Now all I have to do is take it back across the road. But what’s the rush? Maybe later — I’ve gotten quite fond of it.

To be continued…

[hello] baby Bunting

How did that nursery rhyme go?

Bye, baby Bunting,
Daddy’s gone a-hunting,
Gone to get a rabbit skin
To wrap the baby Bunting in.

Not so nice if you’re a rabbit. Anyway, I made a string of star bunting to decorate our front door yesterday, to welcome my long-lost daughter home. She’s been overseas for 10 months, and I wanted her to know she’d been missed!

My pictures really don’t show the bunting to its best advantage, so I’ve included a pic of the flower ball I hung outside for extra decoration – cupcake cases with fabric flowers stuck on a huge polystyrene ball painted pink! Fun to make – and much quicker than crocheting bunting. heh

To be continued…