Christmas?? Shh!!

Wow, this year is going so fast and my diary is fast running out of pages...with school and pre-school and nursery and work and a so-called social life, my diary is a necessary part of my world if I am ever to know what I am doing, when, where and with who. This week every time I get it out of my bag when someone asks me if I can do something, help take pre-school to a Christingle service, go for Christmas lunch with school Mums, or fit in some extra work, I flick through the few pages that are left of this year and think hmm busy till about January then Nic ;)

Busy is good, I like busy, I work best under pressure. In my final year at Uni, I lived with Tom and Jen (both who have stopped reading my blog, I think?) anyway Jen was a good girl and got her work done way before midnight on the night before hand-in. Tom and I would be at the 24hr Spar stocking up on Red Bull at 2am because your best academic thoughts occur at about 3am, don't they ;)

Lou is going to be Mary in the Pre-school nativity. I'm not sure pre-school are ready for her though. I *think* the idea is that she sits nicely next to Joseph and looks lovingly at baby Jesus (her teacher had to tell her last week that he was called Jesus, she thought maybe baby Lucy would be a better name!) , well she keeps telling me of all of the thing she is planning on saying while she is on the stage. ....I think I'll have the video camera handy.

Jack came home tonight and is going to be a Shepherd in his school nativity and he does actually have to say something, he's not so keen on that as an idea though and thinks maybe he could just hold the bit of paper up that says what he needs to learn and let the audience read it themselves.

I love my individual little people :)

What I'm not loving at the moment is the lack of good light for photographing my bags and things. Everytime I take a pic, its rubbish. It doesn't matter what time of day it is, where I take it and with how many lights blazing down on it. I didn't realise just *how* much worse my photos were until I was looking at old pics tonight.

Here is one that I took in the summer in the garden;


here's one taken today, and its one of the best too :(


This bag is for sale on my etsy shop at the moment with a matching zippy box bag. I made it for a knitting bag but it would make an ace evening bag for a party or a wedding or something so I am going to make some more and get some more similar material and make some more like it with maybe a few alterations, internal pockets and the like.......

In other shop news, I have decided that I am going to call this....


....my 'Lucy bag'. I have been trying to come up with names for each different type of bag I make and I was telling my Auntie about this bag the other day and said 'you know, the Lucy bag' and it just stuck then. I designed it for Lou in the first place so it seems fitting that I name it after my little Loopy monster. I guess I need to get designing a boy bag now though don't I?

I have actually managed to do some knitting recently. I finished my first Knit-a-long (KAL) this week. I did the WoollyWormhead mystery beret KAL on Ravelry and made myself this...


Unfortunately for me but fortunately for the best (hat) dressed pre-schooler in the UK, it fitted L just fine, while it was too short for me. Here she is on the way to school as soon as I had finished it, the ends are tucked up inside the hat because I didn't have time to sew the ends in!

Don't worry, J isn't missing out on all of the new hat business. I've been instructed to make him a new hat out of the yarn that I had started knitting a pair of woolly trousers for Lou in about two years ago before she decided to potty train overnight. Here he is last night trying to convince me that he could just wear the body of the half knitted trousers like that for a hat!


Well I'd better go, I've spent too long in front of the computer tonight.