Raspberry ripple chevron picnic mat

I thought I was immune to the chevron craze, but this post over at Treefall Design finally gave me a hankering after something (anything!) chevron-y. With no chevron fabric in stock at any of my favourite online fabric shops I headed off to Ikea for stripy fabric with the idea that I could make my own. Of course, I was far from the first to have that very idea. Dana from MADE has a great tutorial on how to do it, and if the yellow fabric had been in stock in my local Ikea I think I would have ended up making exactly the same cushion. However all I could get my hands on was a much wider cerise and white stripe. I pieced it without much of an idea about what to make with the resulting patchwork fabric, thinking perhaps of a large tote or beach bag, but when it was done it cried out to be laid flat. I settled on a small picnic mat, using some leftover polyester for a waterproof backing as I did for the one I made last year. It was surprisingly fun to put together, and I can't look at the finished mat without thinking of raspberry ripple ice cream! I think I'd like to make a few more of these.

Pacman Macbook sleeve

I originally intended to make this for my husband as a Christmas present, but that proved to be too ambitious and he had to wait until March for it.

This is the second time I've used the fantastic Laptop Sleeve Tutorial, by amyalamode, and once again I'm really pleased with the results.

The question everyone asks, though, is where is Pac Man?

I don't know! He's not there. In fact thought it might have been a good idea to try and find some Pac Man buttons, but perhaps that would have made it a little too childish. I quite like the simple black buttons with the turquoise accent.

Bread, glorious bread

I'm completely astonished that I've managed to live for 34 years without knowing it's possible to make bread as easily as in this recipe for cold-rise breakfast bread rolls by Anne's Food. No kneading (well I did a little, just to get a more even texture) but best of all no bother about finding a warm enough place to let the dough rise and no stress when hasn't doubled in size in the time the flour-packet recipe insists it should. In this recipe, you simply leave the dough to rise in the fridge overnight, ready to bake first thing in the morning, and the best bit is the slow rise gives an even better flavour. As I didn't have any fresh yeast, I just replaced the 10g specified in the recipe with 5g of dried active yeast, used lukewarm water and dissolved the honey in it before adding the yeast and leaving to froth up a bit before mixing with the other ingredients and following the rest of the recipe.

Delicious! I'm going to struggle not to make these every single day.

Hello!

Well here I am again, out of winter hibernation! I've been busy working on our house for the past few months, and have struggled to fit in time for other projects. But that's just about finished now, which means a little bit more free time, and personally I find there's no better inspiration to be creative than a good dose of spring sunshine, and colour that you can almost taste.

I can't remember if I've shared this before, but is the 'sky' wall in El's room, complete with wall stickers from Nouvelles Images. As a sidenote, I've found these low-tack stickers to be a little too low-tack for my painted walls. I'm not a particular fan of stickers and would have painted the tree as a mural if we weren't planning to move soon. I do love the graphic style of these stickers.

Autumn (?) colour...

I took these photos on our little country walk on Sunday afternoon, when the air was still warm, the sky was blue and the oak trees didn't seem to think it was autumn. (Or perhaps it is still too early for them? I really should know!)

Well, since the weekend, autumn has well and truly hit with a vengeance! In fact it feels more like winter. We have the worst winds here, truly, I'm sure I would be much more enthusiastic about getting outdoors if they weren't so bad. For now I think I'll just use them as an excuse to stay indoors and make soup.

Back in the sewing seat...

I have a new sewing machine! My little sewing nook is relatively tidy for the first time in months, too, which means I've been inspired to get back to it, so hopefully I'll have some new projects to share here soon. First I thought I'd better post some photos of the hobby horses I made for the girls' birthdays last month. I used this pattern for K's horse. She asked for her horse to be green, so I used some lovely vintage style quilting cotton from Fabric Rehab together with some multicoloured merino yarn I originally bought for doll-making.

Once I'd collected together all the bits needed for the pattern, the sewing, stuffing and assembling was quite straightforward, and the pattern uses a clever method incorporating cable ties to fix the horse's head to the handle nice and securely. Ki is rather fond of him. She loves to comb his hair and use his handle as a balancing beam when she'd not riding him. Hmm.

El, on the other hand, told me in no uncertain terms that she did NOT want her horse to be a stupid colour like green. Horses are brown, or black, or ideally as white as pure snow. 

Bearing in mind that a pure white horse was likely to become a grubby grey horse within a few days of her company, I was pleased to find some zebra-pattern fur at my local fabric shop, and steer her towards that. The size of the print meant a bigger head was needed, so I drafted this pattern myself.

The only black yarn I could find locally was some floppy acrylic stuff, so he had to have his hair braided.

Now I just need to work out what to do with the zebra fabric I have left over. And with 94 cable ties.

Current Work-in-progress and a thrifty find

There are only so many baby clothes you can fit into a memory box, and yet some hold too many memories to part with. So I've spent the past couple of evenings sorting through stacks of knit rompers and bodysuits and turning them into this:

And even though it's painful to cut into some of those cute itty-bitty clothes, there's something quite satisfying about a stack of neat 4 1/2" squares. I don't have enough for two quilts, so I think I'm going to turn them into two super-soft pillow covers. Pillows are very popular in this house, especially with the nearly-two year old...  

Meanwhile, I thought I'd share these lovely bowls I spotted a few weeks ago in a charity shop window.

Usually the charity shops pickings are pretty poor around here, but I was rather pleased with this set of a large and six small glass dessert bowls for £10.

Not exactly cheap, but they are old (the ticket said 1930s although I'm not sure they are quite so old), they are in perfect condition, and I love the combination of frosted and clear green glass, especially on a sunny day.