Spring!

This week has felt positively spring like. With that in mind and ignoring the old misery-guts who was on the radio this morning, waking me up to tell me that we would have frost and possibly snow next week, I have been busy admiring all things spring like.

Just look at my snowdrops.....


and have you ever looked at the flower, turning the head up? I haven't and got quite a shock when I saw how pretty it was.


My purple sprouting broccoli is both purple and sprouting. I'm impressed as all other attempts have been thwarted by slugs and snails or caterpillars. I'm even more impressed because mine is purple. Somehow my Grandads' has ended up all white, leaving a rather confused old man!


And look at this...

Its a drumstick primula only it seems to have forgotten to grow its drumstick so the flower is stuck in the crown of the plant rather than on a stick for all to see.

Spring seems to be rubbing off on my sewing too. First we have spring lambs....well organic sheep at any rate....


then pretty spring flowers. This material is some Cath Kidston that I have had for a few years. It's now discontinued and I haven't got much left so I am going to have to save myself a bag made with this before it's too late.


Lastly, pirate monkeys....well I'm sure they have some connection with spring ;)


I have linked the shops to buy the bags on the photos so if you want to have a closer look, click the pics :)

The Stone Soup Challenge

The Stone Soup Challenge is a grassroots movement founded by artist Laura Bray.
The goal of the challenge is for artists and crafters to help one another by promising to use a portion of their monthly profits to invest in a fellow artist's shop. To join us in helping artists everywhere and to read more about the challenge, please go to this post.

Remember! If we all contribute a little to the pot of Stone Soup, we will all feast.

Look at the feet, look at the feet!

After at least a year, I have finally finished a pair of socks for me. They are made from Opal rainforest in the Rosa die Susse colourway, infact, it has taken me so long to finish them, it seems that the colour is no longer available!!

Anyway, I finished them yesterday afternoon and immediately put them on. Happy feet!

Now, yesterday was supposed to be a fun day but due to children not wanting to tidy their room, it was instead, very fraught. I am no OCD-er when it comes to tidiness of house, far from it, but I do hate mess and I do hate having to tidy other peoples mess up because they can't be bothered to do it.

I feel J and L have now reached the age where they can be expected to tidy their room so they will. Unfortunately, they have other ideas; J tells me that he thinks that tidying is boring and its so easy to get things out but not to tidy them away and 101 other reasons why he shouldn't be made to do the tidying while L swings from Little Miss Tidy to the little girl who sits cross legged on the top bunk, admiring the view and Mummy getting more and more stressed as she enters the room for the 50th time to find the room messier than when she left.

By about 4pm, I was loosing the plot. Should I just abandon the tidying up? But then they will suss that they don't need to tidy up; just hang on long enough and Mummy will crumble or do I scoop all of the things up into black bags and tell them they are going out with the bins on Monday morning? Well I did that on Friday night and it didn't exactly work, did it, so they can stay in there and tidy up, we have all day, it would seem.

Walking (or maybe stomping) down the stairs, I looked at my feet, with new socks on, and I was no longer stressed; pretty feet, funky socks, clever me!

I told MrNicsknots when I got downstairs and he laughed and started looking for the number of the loony bin then I made the mistake of telling my sister who guessed what I was going to say, so surely its not such a mad idea? only then she laughed and questioned my sanity.

Pah, I don't care, I think I might need lots more pairs of funky socks though, to get me through a few more years of child wrangling.....

What a week!

Its been half term this week. I think I might be one of the minority of parents who enjoy their children being off school so I had been looking forward to it for ages; no school run, no having to watch the clock all of the time, no grumpy, tired children. Fun! Only one quick glance around the house would suggest slightly manic too; why is there a plant pot on the bathroom window sill? Do we really need stones, shells *and* sand in the corner of the bedroom?

Our week started well. I was just about to start thinking about packing for a few days on Anglesey when I got a message on Twitter to say that one of my bags was on Plaincraft and in the top 5. I had to admit that I had never heard of Plaincraft but after some investigation, it turns out that it is an ace website to promote all things handmade, the idea being that you submit some of your items then people rate you, free advertising, a chance to see what lovely stuff people are making, everyone's a winner, baby :) so thanks to that, I had a small flurry of orders on Sunday night when I should have been packing and ended up posting some of my bags from Anglesey, rather than Lincolnshire on Monday afternoon.

Mr Nicsknots had to stay at home and work so it was just the three of us on our road trip. I woke J and L up at 5am. So funny, L woke up and wanted to know why I was waking her up in the middle of the night and J just refused to get up for 10minutes. Does it make me a bad person if I say that I got a certain amount of entertainment out of waking children up who, for the last 5yrs have been waking me up too early in the morning?

We had loads of fun in Anglesey, it was great to catch up with my friend, although work got a little bit in the way but we still managed to have catch-up chats. J, L and I spent most of our time on the beach, building sand castles...yes it is February, yes we were in Wales and yes, the locals definitely did think we were mad but the sun was shining....


We got home from our travels on Wednesday afternoon. I unpacked the car and sorted kids out (chucked them out in the back garden to get rid of all of the energy from being sat in the car for 4hrs) then checked my emails to find a mail from someone who I had made a needle roll for, thanking me and telling me that she had seen my rolls in Yarn Forward magazine!! Cue me dashing out of the house as soon as Mr Nicsknots came home to go and find a copy of the mag. Normally our Tesco stocks it but of course not this week, or the other Tesco, or Sainsburys or Asda....

Thursday morning J and L were at Yogabugs so I dropped them off then nipped to town to find a copy of the illusive magazine and found it in Whsmiths.

Look, see, in the 'Things we like' section....they like Nicsknots!!



I'm so excited!! I was a bit worried because my website looks like my 5yr old has made it at the moment but I picked J and L up from yoga then spent an hour or so making it look a bit better. Its still nothing special and I want to do more with it but at least I'm not embarrassed when someone asks what my website is. Its here.

Well everyone is back from swimming and I need to go and serve up tea, I hope you've all had a good week.

Crafty people making money for Comic Relief...

I know what you are thinking; 'what's occurring, why is Nic posting so soon after her last post. Is she ill?'

Well actually, no. I'm just stopping by, en route to tackling the great ironing mountain to let you know about the Crafteroo Comic Relief shop on Folksy.

Crafteroo is a lovely forum, set up by crafters, for crafters so that they can all go and have a chat, help each other, admire each others work. They really are a friendly bunch and I am finding myself drawn there but, you know how your afternoon gets sucked up by forums, I'm trying to be tough with myself ;)

Anyway, they decided that they would like to raise some money for Comic Relief so lots of the members are putting things into the shop for people to by, all proceeds going to Comic Releif. Do go and have a look, there really are some lovely things for sale in there.

The week the UK stood still....well the South and a bit of the West ...

But not the north!! We had a bit of snow on Monday, enough to justify wellies and waterproof trousers for the walk to school but really, it wasn't the worst snow we had seen in 18yrs, even if the south had already been brought to a standstill. The council must have been expecting great things though because while I was sewing at lunchtime, I looked out of the window to see this.....

A gritter!! Well, not one of the proper machine things but a truck, full of grit with a man sitting on the top of said pile, chucking grit on the road, at cars. passing people, you get the idea. When we lived in Wales, I used to joke that the only reason we got the gritter up our road was because there were a couple of council workers living near us; after all why would they come up a little residential road and grit that, leaving other main roads as slippery as anything. Who knows why they gritted our road on Monday. Maybe it was so that all of the people who sit around the other end of our road on benefits could get their cars out of the drive and go and sign on ;)

By 3pm the snow had all gone and by the time I went to the gym at 7, we stood more chance of being flooded than snowed in.

Thursday brought more snow though and this time it made more of a go of it. After taking the kids to school, I couldn't get the car back up the slight slope that is our drive. Not impressed! I have never got stuck in snow before but after five minutes, I gave up and went to have a cup of tea and a rant about how ironic it was that a car from the lands of snow and ice couldn't make it up my drive when there was a bit of snow. While having my cup of tea and gazing out of the window, I watched some workmen in their double wheeled van try to get up the lane beside my house. After a few minutes of slipping, sliding, wheel spins and swearing, they gave it up as a bad job so I felt vindicated, maybe my car wasn't such a wimp afterall ;)

The snow is all gone again and we all feel short changed. No days off school or work here.