Warming my heart

 
(Lifted from my old blog, some links may not work)



The great thing about having a two and a half year old early riser is that I get to see the best part of the day and I have extra time to do things like take photos in the garden.  My photography skills are pretty poor but even so you can see how delicious the Montana clematis looked on Monday morning.


 Now some would gasp in horror at a lawn that was predominately daisies rather than grass.  Me? I'd prefer to have all daisies and no grass at all.  I often think of testing out a patch to see if we could have a chamomile lawn.  Apparently they don't need mowing.  Now that would be great, Mr Cuckoo wouldn't have to spend 2 hours a week mowing and getting sneezey and grumpy. However our two boys would be very sad as it's a job they love to do with Daddy.

Look at this box......


I know, I know no where near as pretty as looking at flowers in the early morning sunshine but I have been dreaming about the contents of this box for so long.  Dreaming about all the things I could make if I had a Brother innovis 900.  However so far all I have made is curtains and cushions but now the boring jobs are over I can start to indulge myself.

Ah look, here he is.  Introducing the lovely Brian.  Yup, I've named my sewing machine.  I'm certain I'm not the only one.  Goodness knows why I think of my sewing machine as a male and where did I get Brian from?!
               (v bad shot)

Look how untidy I am.  I am such a muddle maker, everything I do creates a ginormous mess. Fortunately I am one of those "Can't. Stand. It. Any. Longer. Gotta. Tidy. Up." types. So the messiness is always in waves.  Chaos flowing into calm flowing into chaos.  A bit like my up and down mental state!
That's an old, manky pine table I bought when I was 21.  I used the very last bit of my student overdraft to buy it.  I've never regretted that although it was a silly thing to do as I couldn't buy petrol for a few days and so was stuck out in the sticks!  I've recently covered it in oilcloth as my fabrics were catching on it.  I'm such a cliche these days with my love of Cath Kidston and drinking tea from Emma Bridgewater pottery.  I even wear a pinny as an accessory.  What do I care though? I'm loving every minute of my floral Country Living life. To the left you can see a pinny I made out of Amy Butler fabric for my GW(see post, not sure I've done the link to my own blog properly), it was 2 months late for her birthday but she was gracious about it because that's the kind of girl she is.  In the foreground there are my scissors with possibly the best, most handy thing I have made to date.  It's a little strawberry pin cushion (Heather Bailey) and I can't tell you how often it is in the perfect place at the perfect time.  It's so irritating to have to traipse all over the house to get your pin cushion when you only need on teeny tiny little pin.  Then what have we got, a roll of fabric waiting to be turned in to curtains and some knitting needles waiting for me to learnt to knit.  I have since finished the curtains but I'm a long way off furthering my knitting abilities.  I can manage the basic stitches but I seem to increase stitches accidentally and end up with a piece shaped like a pair of knickers rather than a scarf.  
I can't decide if I like the purple paisley on the machine or not.  Anyway, soon I am going to make myself a lovely big pin cushion using the free pattern from Anna Maria Horner.  I've seen some other blog gals have one and it looks so great, perfect size, so of course I have to have one, a great big flower pin cushion to complement my little strawberry.  Anna Maria's is so wacky and deliriously gorgeous, I have chosen some rather tame fabric by comparison but I know already that I shall love it forever as it wont be fighting for attention.  If it were shouting at me all the time I wouldn't have the pleasure of "re-noticing" it and therefore appreciating it all over again.  Besides blue is my favourite colour.
Here's my fabric selection.  Wouldn't this make a lovely patchwork quilt motif?


I took this photo at dusk which is why it looks poop but I wanted to get going.
Right, I'd love to spend more time tweaking but I must attend to the little Cuckoos, they are running wild. Feral little beasts. I also need to work out how to make my photo's smaller, they are all about 2.48 MB and apparently they need to be 50KB.  It's all total blah blah blahhhh to me, I don't understand but one day, me and computers, we're going to be such buddies.
Final thought.  I love my shadow, when the sun is low it looks like a perfect, elegant version of myself.  When the sun is high I look like a squat little hobbit with stunted movements and it humours me.