Hot Christmas?

I've just got back from a week in Cape Town and did not feel Christmassy at all. Once. The whole time I was there, which was strange as I've been feeling Christmassy since mid October! There were Christmas decorations everywhere, so it wasn't that, it was purely because Christmas should be cold, and so to me it felt like July or August so ages away from Christmas.

This was the Christmas tree at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town. Beautiful, and very traditional, but it's not right that the people standing next to it are in sundresses and shorts and T-shirts!!

I've only spent one Christmas away from home, and that was when I was in Namibia in 2009. We went to the beach, we drank cider, and Father Christmas skydived into the bar on the beach, It was weird. It didn't feel the slightest bit like Christmas, more that we were just acting out Christmas. 

Christmas in Swakopmund

So although I was sad when I got back yesterday, and it was drizzly and horrible, I am now very much back in the wrapped up warm mulled wine Christmas spirit! Yay!

I Love To Wear...

I'm quite fussy about my clothes. Not that anyone would think it given the bright, colourful array of bright patterns that I do wear, but I am definitely not a shopaholic, and often when I do go out shopping, I come home with nothing, as everything I find is just not quite right.

My two main things I focus on when shopping are: I don't want to be wearing the same thing as anyone else, and also I hate clothes which look cheap, so am very fussy about the sort of fabrics I buy.

My one exception to the first rule is that I have loved some of the recent collections by Designers for H&M. So whilst this often means I see someone else wearing the same outfit, it does mean I get some beautifully designed clothes, from some of my favourite designers, at a price I can afford.

I remember lovingly looking at the entire Isabel Marant Etoile collection in Liberty's when I first moved to London, wondering if I'd ever get a job that was well paid enough to afford even just one item, and had the same feeling in the Marni outlet shop in Bicester Village.

So I was very, very excited to finally get my hands on a pair of Isabel Marant quilted sneakers. They are beautiful, so beautiful I can't take them off! And very festive at the same time. And hopefully as they were in the Kids Boys range not quite so many people will have them....?

Double Pointed Knitting = Argh

This is not my knitting. This is what I though of double pointed knitting. Even though I really wanted to learn, and the concept seemed quite simple, I was terrified of the thought of Double Pointed Knitting. 

As someone who is only a fairly recent knitter, grasping increasing and decreasing seemed like a massive achievement to me, enabling me to follow more difficult patterns and make shapes. So I've been happily knitting away, knitting hats, elephants, anything I take my fancy to really. But all the time aware of the fact that I have a beautiful set of shiny new unwrapped bamboo double pointed knitting needles sitting next to me on the shelf in my living room. Which given the size of my living room (2.25m wide) means that they are never very far away from me. 

So last night I took a deep breath, I googled, I got out my fabulous retro 'Good Housekeeping Guide to Knitting', I you-tubed and went for it. I tried to knit a flat circle on my double points. The first attempt was awful. I didn't even have a change to take a photo of my congealed mess before it fell from the needles. Fail. But I tried a different wool and started again, and after a few slipped stitches (the middle is quite messy) I got there. Below is my attempt. Not bad. I'll see how I get on with an actual pattern. So watch this space. 

Love Elephant

I love elephants! I love how wise they look, how gentle they are, even though they're so large, how they always look like they've got a twinkle in their eye, and especially how they set an example for ageing gracefully - I mean you're never going to have more wrinkles than an elephant, and they're still beautiful!

So after the success of my elephant mobiles, and my love heart mobiles, I decided to make a mini love elephant mobile. Using an array of soft cream, peachy pinks and a vivid red felt, mixed with some dainty prints, here is my new Love Elephant Mobile:

Chunky Knitted Cushions & Other Wool Based Creations

Earlier in the summer I was involved in a lot of knitting and creating for the Baby Boden Autumn Catalogue. A bit late, as Winter has always been launched, but here are some images of in the making and final images.

Firstly my chunky knitted cushions. Sumptuous, rich and textured, these look fabulous against cute squishy babies.

I also got busy with some textured wool felt making a stuffed foxes head. Like he'd been killed and stuffed only cute looking and fuzzy. I completely made up the pattern, snipping and stitching as I went, but now I'm sad that I didn't make a pattern as I won't be able to make a similar one again!

Lastly, I bought layers of yellow, green and blue felt cut out some roof tile shapes to layer up to make a wonderful, colourful roof for my playhouse. This was made out of a farmyard scene fabric, with navy tape to make the windows, and so the roof matches the colours of the ducks and background in the fabric! Fabulous!

As our house is so small, it was pretty difficult to find a good space to make this, and so my bed was the only option.This meant a clever feat of hanging it from the ceiling whilst sleeping as again, there was nowhere else to put it, but it all worked out very well in the end!

49 Days Till Christmas...That Makes It Christmas Shoebox Time!

So after a few weeks of hunting for the perfect shoebox sized presents, and a little bit of knitting my boxes are finished and ready to drop off! Handily there is a drop off point in Westfield so it's just an excuse to visit and do some more of my non shoebox Christmas shopping while I'm there.

Here are the finished boxes, all festive looking. I can't wait to imagine the smiles these will hopefully bring someone on Christmas Day!

A Knitted Bobble Hat & Other Lovely Christmas Presents

It's the exciting time of year again for Christmas Shoeboxes and this year I've been even more excited than usual about doing them, and for 2 main reasons. The first is my discovery that the Operation Christmas Child website has knitting patterns what you can make to add to your boxes, and the second is my discovery of a fun shop called Tiger.

I was so pleased with my first hat I knitted from one of the patterns on their website that I just had to knit another one. A more girly coloured one, and with a bobble too! I love it!

Tiger is my other exciting new discovery - http://www.tigerstores.co.uk/ and I just can't believe how many cool things they have in their. I bought these awesome wild animal finger puppets for one of my girl shoeboxes, along with some skipping ropes, cats cradle, books, pens for my other boxes. 

So here are two of my almost finished boxes, I'm very excited to finish them all off and post them soon. 

Time To Wrap Up Warm

I'm sitting writing this all cosy in my little living room listening to the faint patter of raindrops overhead, waiting for this epic storm which has been promised to start blowing its way around, and thinking about all the quilts I made earlier in the year. At the time, around May or June, it felt very strange to be patching together the pieces of fabric, and stocking up on weighty wadding, but now that the catalogues have come out, seeing the quilts along side all of the padded winter jackets makes me feel very cosy indeed.

So here are some pictures. The first was actually a baby blanket I made about a year ago, which was just adapted to become a horse blanket (it's all about reusing and recycling!) and the second was a patchwork quilt but with long thin strips, and made almost in 2 halves, which is really different from any other quilts I've made before and actually refreshingly nice to sew together.

Getting Cake Creative...

When I was a child, my Mum used to be renowned for making the most amazing, creative birthday cakes. This was due in part to her brilliant cake book: The Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book, which my auntie must have sent over to her from Australia.

So as it was my nieces 4th birthday, and my nephews 1st birthday me and mum got creative to make them some pretty awesome birthday cakes. 

For my nephew, we settled on the classic number 1 shaped cake, covered in blue icing, and brightly coloured sweets (we settled on skittles in the end), and my nephew certainly seemed very happy with the result! 

Now for my niece as she's now 4, and knows what she wants, this was a lot more pressure to make a truly spectacular cake. We went for the swimming pool idea (featured in this cookbook with green jelly as the water), as she likes swimming, and you can use chocolate fingers all around the edge which are also a favourite of hers. 

Sadly, Waitrose let us down by not having any green or blue jelly, or anything similar we thought we could use. So with our basket laden full of skittles, chocolate fingers, jelly sweets for rings, and then the rest of the party food, we came up with the genius idea of whipped cream. Who doesn't love cream on a cake, and whipping it would make great waves to make it look like water. The only questions was how well would the food colouring take to it? Having never dyed cream before I was slightly worried, but thankfully adding a bit of blue and green colouring worked perfectly and the cake looked AMAZING!!

So here are the final pictures, it was not only a lot of fun but my niece and nephew were very very happy and so it was a very successful mission!

Knitting & Other Holiday Activities

I decided recently that I work far too hard, and as my lieu days earned so far this year seemed to agree with me, and I was already lacking in sunshine, me and my boyfriend decided to take a last minute holiday for a large dose of wine and sunshine!

Now I am terrible at sitting still and just sunbathing whilst on holiday, but as long as I have a variety of activities to entertain me, I am perfectly happy to spend days on end in the blistering sunshine, snorkelling, swimming, reading and of course knitting. With the odd walk or explore in between.

So I packed my entire beautiful set of bamboo knitting needles, just in case I needed all of the sizes, and had 2 main projects that I needed to complete whilst away. I wanted to make some more hexagons to contribute towards my long in the future planned blanket, and I wanted to make a hat for my Christmas Shoebox. 

My hexagons are being made out of the tail end of balls of merino wool I have lying around, and my hat is made from the ends of 3 balls of chunky wool, along with 7mm and 8mm needles  - I love chunky knitting!

So all in all a successful holiday. I also managed plenty of reading, swimming and drinking wine, sometimes combining all 3....what a multitasker!!

The Broad Beans Are Sleeping In Their Blankety Beds

Autumn has definitely set in. Even though the sun has still been doing its best to shine through the London London smog, there is definitely a chill in the air, and there are plenty of goldeny orange leave on the floor.

Although the lovely British berries are slowly declining from the supermarket shelves, there are plenty of earthy root vegetables available, and I got very excited when I saw these massive Broad Beans in Sainsburys recently. I got especially excited when I opened them up to discover just how fluffy the insides of the cases were and just how large the beans themselves were. Mmmmmm

Whilst shelling these, to add them into dinner (an exciting combination of singapore noodles and bubble and squeak) I couldn't help but think of the Autumn song we used to love in school assemblies: Cauliflower's fluffy, and cabbages green:

Cauliflowers fluffy and cabbages green, 

Strawberries sweeter than any I’ve seen. 

Beetroot purple and onions white, 

All grow steadily day and night. 

The apples are ripe, and the plums are red, 

The broadbeans are sleeping in the blankety bed. 

Blackberries are juicy and rhubarb sour, 

Marrows fatt’ning, hour by hour. 

Gooseberries hairy and lettuces fat, 

Radishes round and runner beans flat. 

The apples are ripe, and the plums are red, 

The broadbeans are sleeping in the blankety bed. 

Orangey carrots and turnips cream, 

Reddening tomatoes that used to be green. 

Brown potatoes in little heaps, 

Down in the darkness where the celery sleeps. 

The apples are ripe, and the plums are red, 

The broadbeans are sleeping in the blankety bed, yeah!

Nautically Nice

On my various summer holidays, I ended up in Lymington, a gorgeous place in the New Forest, full of very quaint little shops. One of the shops: The Forest Mill Shop http://www.theforestmillshop.co.uk/ (website coming soon) has the most beautiful selection of seaside inspired fabrics. They were all gorgeously think cotton blends and although I knew I had to buy some for some sort of crafting, it was a very hard decision to decide which prints and patterns to go for!!

I settled for these three designs, all with the same colours but with beautifully different patterns and set about making some cushions. Oh and a doorstop. 

I absolutely love my finished cushions and door stop, every time I look at them they remind me of happy English Summer Holidays :)

Beach Art

Entertaining myself on the beach near Lymington earlier in the summer....it's amazing what you can do with some seaweed, shells and drift wood!

Autumnal Seaside Adventures & More Beautiful Beach Huts

One of the more confusing parts of my jobs is mixing up my seasons. In order for the catalogues to launch in the correct seasons, we have to shoot them 6 months before, which means shooting Spring in Autumn, Summer in Winter, Autumn in Spring, and Winter in Summer. Confusing.

So off we went to Dorset last weekend to shoot Spring but clearly the weather did not get the 'Spring' memo and it was decidedly Autumnal! Now I do love being on the beach in the bitter cold, when you're all wrapped up warm with the salty sea air blowing in your face, making your cheeks pink and stinging, but I do not enjoy being in said conditions, with torrential rain. Not so fun!

Lovely sunshine in Studland, Dorset

An essential for an English summer holiday

Very choppy sea. There was a very large onshore wind which made the ferry crossing to Mudeford Sandbank very bumpy!

Little ferry to Mudeford Sandbank

Beach Huts looking lovely in the sunshine

Safely tucked away inside a beach hut waiting for the rain to pass

The rain was blowing horizontally so the beach huts shielded parts of the sand - you can see a clear line here of wet and dry sand!

A rainbow over the Isle of Wight

My favourite beach hut! Gorgeous stripy blinds, a lovely weathered look and an amazing display in the windows.