Boast Post

I have a backlog of finished projects I want to share with you, and I figured the best way would be in one big, long, self-indulgent post. Don’t feel too impressed, though: it might look like I turned out a whole lot of of projects at once, but some of these are months old. I just never got around to telling you about them.

Here are some presents I gave to my friend at her baby shower:

This is a monkey hat, from Mamachee’s most excellent pattern.  Just because.

And this is Flora Rabbit, made using Greedy For Colour’s fabulous pattern. You may remember this is the pattern I used as a base for my Peter Rabbit George the Public Domain Bunny creation last Christmas.  I put a little bell inside so that it made a nice noise when you shook it.  Do you know how hard it is to make a bell ring from within a stuffed toy?  Of course, you can’t put it directly into the stuffing – it won’t ring.  But I discovered my usual trick of putting it within a Kinder Surprise plastic egg (I usually put beans or rice in to make a shaker, I haven’t tried a bell before) also didn’t work, because it sealed and there was no way for the sound to escape (or something.  What am I?  A physicist?)  In the end, I made a contraption from half an egg constructed in such a way that the stuffing didn’t enter it and the sound could still get out.  When my friend opened it and politely thanked me, I proclaimed “SHAKE IT!  SHAKE IT!  IT RINGS!  IT RINGS!” with a manic look in my eye.  She shook it.  It rang.  She was impressed.  But I suspect she was more concerned for my general wellbeing as I wrung my hands together and muttered to myself “itrings…itRINGS..itrings…ohappyday…happydaaay…”

Anyway,

Here’s a present I gave to a lovely young couple I know who got married recently.  They were kind enough to invite me to the Mass and put on a lovely afternoon tea in the parish hall afterwards.

I made this tea-cosy from an alpaca/lambswool blend which I’d originally bought to make a jacket for my niece, before deciding that it was too hairy for a newborn.  I’ve since been using up this stash in various ways, including the rabbit-who-shall-not-be-named.  The pattern is one of my own devising, but it’s based on Rheatheylia’s Divine Hat,  which is another lovely pattern that’s fun to work with.  I had another go at this pattern for my mother-in-law, using yarn from her mother’s stash.  But, as this yarn was a cotton blend, it wasn’t nearly as stretchy and took a lot of muscle to put onto the pot!  So it works fine, so long as you don’t ever want to drink tea or anything…

I used the same shell-stitch to make little sleeves for the mugs.  They look straightforward, but it took a surprising amount of jiggery-pokery to straighten out the edges (so they weren’t diagonal, don’t you know).

I used some gorgeous vintage buttons from Mr Knightley’s Nan’s stash.  It gives me such satisfaction to use such lovely buttons, but I also get a bit of a pang to part with them!

The bride has a two-year-old son, and it’s important he wasn’t left out, so I had fun making this:

I still have a whole heap of this rainbow yarn left over and any suggestions of what I can make with it would be greatly appreciated!

I’m a little embarrassed about this one.  If you go back far enough, somewhere at the start of my blog, I mentioned I was working on some bunting for Matilda’s room.  I was so excited by the little granny flags that I took pictures of my work in progress and even made them into my blog’s banner photo.

Then I kind of lost interest in the project and forgot about it for, like, a year.

I finally managed to get it finished in time for Matilda’s birthday party.  Here it is:

The light’s a little dodgy, but you get the idea:

Matilda’s birthday party had a ‘night at the movies’ theme.  Here’s what we did for popcorn:

And here’s the cake:

While I’m at it, here’s the cake from Mr Knightley’s birthday party.  The theme was Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (he turned 42):

I think that has exhausted everything I have to skite about at the moment.  When you read enough of my ‘fail’ posts, you will understand that sometimes I need winning moments like these to boast about to balance it all out.  If you have read all the way to the end of this post, you are a good and patient friend and I thank you ❤ ❤ ❤

 

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Beautiful Parties Magazine Fail – Part One

So Matilda turned eight last week.  My baby girl is now officially a tween (ugh! I hate that word!).  And this year is a party year

As we have spent a good deal of Matilda’s lifetime rebuilding our house, this would be our first chance to have a proper “home party”.  And I really wanted to make it special.   Matilda and I could decide on a theme together and then I would hit Pinterest with great vigour!

So when Matilda suggested that she would most like a party in the evening, when she and her friends could eat pizza and watch a DVD, I felt a little crestfallen: it was a great idea, but it all sounded so very grown up.  Had my baby girl outgrown cupcakes and Pass the Parcel?

Matilda must have seen the expression on my face because she put her hand on my knee.  “Don’t worry Mummy,” she said soothingly, “you can still put up bunting if you want.”

I soon cheered up when I started to think about it.  The girls could wear their pyjamas and bring their favourite soft toy.  We could call it a ‘star light’ party and put up fairy lights and pretty candle lanterns and have star-shaped glitter everything!

In the week leading up to the party, I set to work getting ready.  I shopped, I made a big batch of gingerbread stars for the girls to decorate (I cut the star shapes and put them on the tray, Harry cut them and put them in his mouth); I baked a cake (Nigella Lawson’s Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake, because I was trying to channel Nigella, don’t you see?), I poured jelly into my lovely vintage-Tupperware jelly mould (ditto).  And I cleaned like you wouldn’t believe.

You see, Other Mothers would be coming to my house for the first time.  And many of these Other Mothers had not already formed (bad) impressions of how I keep house.  Yes, I know: vanity, thy name is Kate…

I have been known in the past to write out a full running sheet for my kids’ parties and I had every intention of doing the same for this one, but in the end I ran out of time and had to content myself with a sketchy timetable.  They would decorate biscuits when they arrived, then snuggle down and watch a movie with snacks and cosy blankets, eat pizza in the intermission, watch the rest of the movie, sing Happy Birthday and eat cake (and jelly!) and then go home with their lolly bags, happy and contented and full of good cheer.

I had been a little stuck on what to do for the birthday cake.  So I asked my friend, Jack Sprout (from Beautiful Parties Magazine) for advice.  And, oh, her face just lit up as her brain fired off one beautiful, creative idea after the other.  And her enthusiasm was infectious.  In a frenzy of inventive zeal, we decided on a bed-shaped cake with royal icing (the type you knead and roll out) for the cover and a tim tam for a pillow.  Then Jack almost fell over and couldn’t talk – what if I put a little crochet bedcover on top????

We both went home to think about what to do about the bed head (I deal with serious issues in my line of work).  Biscuit stick bed posts? A block of chocolate? Cardboard?  Then Jack called me on the phone: “this is probably a little over-the-top, but what about gingerbread?”

Yes, Jack, I thought, that is a little over-the-top.  I will not be making gingerbread. And I went out and bought a packet of bedpost-shaped biscuit sticks.

But I couldn’t get the idea of a cute storybook bed heads out of my own head.  With little cut-out hearts.  And then I figured I’d be making gingerbread stars anyway, and Jack had loaned me her very-cute biscuit cutters, I might as well make a bed head as well…

Incidentally, I used this excellent and very simple recipe from The Green Dragonfly.

This is the only picture I took on the night of the party and it’s not a very good one.  I’m really cross at myself for not taking any more pictures, which is why I’m probably going to be spending more time writing about this party than would be interesting to read about.

It doesn’t look as beautiful as it did in my mind.  I made a mess of the icing (how are you supposed to evenly dye that stuff?), the gingerbread got a little wonky, and I never made the tiny string of bunting I’d planned to hang between the bed posts (it would have looked so sweet!), but I did remember to put tiny teddies on the bed (after I took the photo, alas!) and Matilda was properly delighted with the whole rigmarole.

On the day of the party, we worked like crazy.  I strung up some fairy lights (from the Christmas tree) whilst Harry and Christopher Robin stuck star-shaped decorations (post-it notes) all over the house.  Matilda put lollies into little paper bags, Christopher Robin stuck star stickers on the little paper bags and Harry took the lollies out of the little paper bags and ate them.  I carefully vacuumed and put down a table cloth with the star biscuits, cachous beads and little tubes of ‘writing icing’.  I put the DVD (Disney’s Brave) into the DVD player.  Then we all put on our pyjamas (Matilda had a pretty new pair especially for the occasion).

And the little girls began to arrive.

I’m going to put an intermission in here as this is already a long post and we have a long way to go yet (oh boy, do we have a long way to go!)

But the scene is set, at least.

Mmmm…Happy Place!

Ugh.  It’s raining outside and hot and muggy inside.  Annie doesn’t want to sleep and Harry and Christopher Robin are diligently trying to destroy each other.  Today Harry found a container of leftover baked beans in the fridge and promptly opened them and delivered them to his baby sister – who loves baked beans, but more as a body lotion and shampoo than an actual foodstuff.  He waited patiently whilst I mopped the floor and gave Annie a bath (it was like baby soup!) and then tipped a cup of milk over Annie (and the freshly-mopped floor).

I REALLY want a COFFEE right now!

Time to go to my happy place.

When we were on holiday in January, we stopped and had a coffee at this utterly charming teahouse in Airey’s Inlet.  It’s called Willows Tea House and is right next door to the Split Point Lighthouse.

It was hard to take too many photos without looking like a total loony, but in the end I couldn’t help myself.

Oooh!  Let’s have a closer look at that stool!

Here’s our table number:

And here’s the key to the toilet (at this point, Mr Knightley politely suggested that I might, indeed, be totally bonkers):

OK, I’m almost done, I promise!

Here’s the most beautiful one of all:

O Coffee!  Sweet Coffee!  How I long for thee!

Thank you for coming to the virtual café with me.  I really think I’m feeling a little better now.  I’m just going to go back and have another look at that glorious bunting!

Mmmmm…Bunting!

 

Today was a yuck day.  I’ve been feeling all sick in the stomach and the children have been all feral: watering the washing, emptying tissue boxes, scattering all manner of foodstuffs across the floor and then industriously walking them throughout the house, Harry has resisted all forms of clothing and Christopher Robin has resisted all forms of obedient behaviour.  We were late for school, we forgot half a dozen different forms we were supposed to return and Matilda’s hair was one enormous knot.  Annie was cranky all morning, and then when I finally got her to sleep, Harry decided to break into her room, climb into her cot and ride her like a pony.  And after that, he decided that a productive use of his time would be to pull up and destroy all the pea plants we’d been growing.  There is nothing for dinner and if there was I couldn’t be bothered cooking it.  Everything is a disaster and all I want to do is sleep.

At times like this, there is only one thing to do:  take photographs of bunting.

I’m still fairly new to Blog World, but I’ve just cottoned on to something called “Work-in-Progress Wednesday” and I thought I’d give it a go.

I’m still getting the hang of taking decent photos.  I took my first lot in the shade and the colours were all wrong.  But when I put everything in the sun, I had shadows to contend with!

So these little flags are on their way to becoming a string of bunting for Matilda’s room.  They’re made of cotton yarn which I bought years ago to make a blanket but never did.  I used the excellent granny bunting pattern from Hook Knit Spin and was first inspired by Lucy of Attic 24′s creation.  Lucy never did a “ta-da” post for her gorgeous bunting, but it creeps into the background of her pictures for me to gasp at.  You can get a glimpse of it in this post.

So, I’ve still got a while to go before it’s done, but it’s nice, portable work.  Good for swimming lessons and netball games.

OK, must stop hiding from my children (poor Mr Knightley – I practically pelted him with preschoolers the minute he walked in the door!).  I’ll keep you posted on all the bunting love!