The story of our relationship....

We are trying to get organised for our holidays. When I say we, I mean, I do the things, dh asks if something has been done while staying in bed until lunchtime and on his computer killing aliens until 4am.

At the weekend we went to get inflatable camping mattresses for J and L. They have these wonderful Readybed things;
A great idea but oh so noisy and I had decided a few months back that I could not face 10nights listening to squeaking air beds so we bought these...
Now, when I mentioned buying myself one a few months back, I was told that I was a wuss and there was nothing wrong with the thin foam mats that we have had since camping as teenagers.

Anyway, while I was in the Lakes last month I bought myself a thin inflatable mattress, comfier than the foam mats but by no means comfy. Remember how dh laughed and told me I was a wuss?

Well at the weekend, he bought himself this...

Now you can't really tell from this photo but it is a deluxe mattress, 5cms thick (over twice the thickness of mine), comes with a fleece lined stuff sack that you can use as a pillow (although he says that he is still taking his pillow with him) and is definitely designed for wusses.

Why is this the story of our relatonship? Well when I was a poor just out of uni girl, I was working at a certain outdoors shop and got the chance to get some top of the range sleeping bags for just about cost price so I ordered two, one each, paid for them and had no money. One never appeared, some problem with distribution or something. Anyway, dh claimed the one that did arrive, even though I had paid for both and really loved his Arctic expedition spec sleeping bag while I was left with a cheapy nearly 2 season sleeping bag, too poor to buy a new one.

In fact when we went camping with J, 9months old, I was left shivering, sharing my bag with J while dh woke up in the morning, claiming he was soooo hot in the night but did he give the bag up to his pregnant fiancee and child? Oooh no, of course not!!

I though private schools were supposed to turn boys into gentlemen? It didn't work here!

The Knitting Goddess on The Plinth!

Have you heard about all of the mad people who are taking their turn to stand on The Forth Plinth in Trafalger Square this summer?

No? Well, read all about it here. If you do know what is going on, you might not know that one of the people becoming a living sculpture for an hour is Joy McMillan, otherwise known as The Knitting Goddess.

On Thursday 6th August, Joy, will be taking her turn between 3am and 4am GMT. You will be able to watch this live at the official One & Other website. I will be on holiday in a tent in the middle of France somewhere but I'm hoping someone will have pics that I can look at when I get home though.

To mark this momentous occasion, Joy will be creating a special, one-off sock yarn celebrating the London Underground, featuring the colours of the many London tube lines which will make a fab, colourful pair of self-striping socks! During her hour on the plinth, Joy will be re-skeining 10 skeins of this yarn. These skeins will then be added to other London- and yarn-related goodies to form 10 very special raffle packages.

All proceeds of the raffle go toward The Mirasol Project. To buy raffle tickets and to read more about Joy and her quest, look at her blog here.

I read about this over the weekend and thought it was an ace idea. Trust knitters to come up with a way of making money for a good cause while raising the profile of knitting on a plinth however meters above Trafalger Square. So I got looking and found some ace material and made these to go towards the raffle.

A dpn roll and matching sock knitting project bag, made from material with landmarks of London, including Nelson on his plinth.

I have a very small amount of this material left. I will be making another bag and a notions purse later this week and will donate 40% of the sale price to the project as well.

Thursday already?

Wow, doesn't the week go quickly when you're not at school? Jack and Lou are now masters in the art of Magnext...this seems to be the child of Magnetix which I thought was pretty good but this is supposidly faster, stronger, better, etc. Whatever, we've had some impressive structures built and I've managed to get sewing done.

Quite a lot of my things have been customs this week so I don't have much to show but I have added some more bits to my neglected Etsy shop and gone over 100 followers which made me smile.



I've also come up with a great time-saving application that needs to be made for Etsy. It would check and alter where needed, all of my listing to make sure that they stay in line with my UK shops. Depending on where the £/$ are, my prices can end up quite cheap and postage, almost free!

In my loss of days, I have also neglected to post about the wonderful Coriandr Express seller, Ruby Spirit Designs. Her spot on the train officially finished yesterday but I want to mention her here because I love her work.



She is also offering 10% off in her shop until the end of July so hop on over and see what takes your fancy. I love so many of her bracelets. The colour combinations are wonderful and the necklaces are so delicate.

Right, I have to go. I think children are trying to make their way through the ceiling....

Loopy Lou.

Last week was the last week at preschool for Looby. She starts school in September and can't wait. She is crackers.

This afternoon next door had got someone around to cut up some paving slabs with a noisy saw. I was making tea, J and L were in the lounge playing fairly loudly then it all went quiet. I went upstairs and found Lou standing on the top of her radiator, shouting the noisy man out of her window;

L: 'I said, can you make a little bit less noise please!!'

Man outside, sounding completely confused that he was getting harrassed by a small child: 'Sorry, I'll try'

L: 'Thanks'

And she gets down from the window!! It's the first day of the summer holidays today. My plan is to work in the mornings then play in the afternoons meaning that J and L can faff around with Michael in the mornings while I sew and do boring paperwork (*cough* tax credits form anyone??) . Today has gone well, I've done quite a bit of sewing. While I was finishing off a bag, I was thinking about taking some new photos of current bags.

I asked Lou if she knew where the red necklace that I bought her was. No, why would I want it? I told her that I wanted it to take photos of it with my bag. She decided that since I wanted something red she would go and hunt out three toys cars and a handful of lego. All red.

In the end, we settled for this:

I think it looks lots better.

Lulled...

I always think that I can tell what type of day it is going to be if we can get ready for school and be at school with no arguing.

Yesterday was a nightmare. Sunday night I had had about three hours sleep due to Lou waking up and coming to see me about 4 times then my charming dh deciding that 4 am was a good time to come to bed. Yes, he is still alive but living very much on borrowed time, saved only by going food shopping on Sunday and putting a load of washing in the machine yesterday. Anyway by 3pm, I couldn't make my mind up if the ear ache, sore throat, bad stomach, cracking headache and overall dizziness were due to sheer exhaustion or swine flu or something equally bad so I was in bed by 8pm, hoping for the former.

This morning I was up at 7 with J. He was happy and we had a lovely breakfast chatting together then he helped me unload the dishwasher whilst telling me what he wanted for tea, what he was going to do at school. Perfect. We woke Lou up and all got ready for school. The day was going well. We got out of the house with no shouting and early. The sun was shining. Woo. Then Lucy ran down the road. Stopped about an inch away from the road and pulled faces at a man in his BMW. Hmm. Said man waves his fist at me while Lou cheerfully smiles at him and skips towards me.

We walked to school, Lucys wrist firmly in my hand as she would not hold my hand and I didn't fancy another leap at the road. At school we deposited J, went outside and I promptly skidded over in some mud outside the door. In front of other Mums. Keep smiling, don't let the buggers get you down, that's the motto isn't it?

After dropping Lou off at pre-school, I start off home, marching along, now with no kamakaze children, attempting to throw themselves off the kerb, navigating around the mums with prams, grateful that I didn't have to play that game anymore. Then I fell off the kerb. Into the path of another bloke in a BMW. More shouting and general agressiveness ensues, like I meant to fall off the kerb. Please, give me a break!

Trying to make a quick getaway, pretend that I didn't launch myself into the road, not unlike my 4yr old minutes earlier, my flip flop breaks so that the bit that goes between your toes is no longer attatched to the shoe so after skooting around the pram mums, I now have to half limp, half shuffle up the road, trying to walk faster than them, not looking like a drunk. Which I am not but really, if I was, something gin-like would be looking like a good idea when I got home.

Tomorrow has to be better, right?

We have a winner!

Thanks to some heavy publicity from, I think, a certain lovely lady north of the border who makes the most beautiful babies, we have reached 108 members on my Facebook page so I now have a shiny, easy to remember URL, www.facebook.com/nicsknots and it means giveaway time.

I asked J to choose a number between 1 and 108 after we had eaten our 'there is no food in the cupboards because Mummy is refusing to go shopping today so we will eat random stuff found around the fridge and garden' tea. He chose 99 so the 99th person on my members list won.

Not having done a give-away before and due to my 'God, maybe no-one likes my stuff' paranoia today, instead of offering the winner a bag that she may hate, I have given her £5 off in my Folksy shop and free postage. That means she could have a free 'Lucy' bag like the lovely cupcakes from this morning.

Keep joining and keep a look out in my group. I have been thinking up other fun things for there too.

It's all about the cupcakes!

There seems to be a cupcake trend all over the place at the moment. Here at Nicsknots, I have been eyeing up cupcake fabric for a few months now, then not buying but then, within the space of a week, a couple of my wonderful customers all ganged up on me and asked for customs with cupcakes, forcing me to buy some material...it's such a shame ;)

These are a couple of drawstring bags I made earlier in the week. My customer wanted one but I made one in either fabric so that she could choose which colour she liked, thinking I'd keep the one she didn't want put the other in the shop but she couldn't decide which she liked so she had both. I'll be getting some more of this fabric in the week and will have some of these in the shop soon.


The next bag is made with some ace pink cup cake material. Perfect for the little girl in your life....

I do have some of these left. You can buy them from Folksy and Misi.


Have you noticed the widget in the sidebar over there for my Nicsknots Facebook page? At the moment, it has a stupidly long url, impossible to remember, but if I want a nice and easy to remember address, I need 100 fans. I have 92 so if you fancy keeping up-to-date with Nicsknots via Facebook and another chance of winning a Nicsknots bag, join now!! Once I reach 100 fans I will give a bag away. Maybe even a cupcake one :)

The sun is shining here, after monsoon week, so I am going to go and make the most of the good weather and tackle the jungle that is my garden at the moment. Enjoy the weekend!

'Busy doing nothing'

# We're busy doing nothing, working all day through,
we're trying to find lots of things not to do.
We're busy going nowhere, isn't it such a crime ?
we'd like to be unhappy but we never do have the time #

Not me, I hasten to add, I have been really busy this week but my darling husband started his summer holidays on Monday. He is a college lecturer so he now enjoys a 6 week holiday with a week somewhere in the middle of that 'working from home'.

I can safely say, he is enjoying himself, busy doing nothing. Since Saturday he has read all of the Harry Potter books, broken and mended his computer, stayed up till stupid o'clock watching rubbish films....you get the idea.

I think there must be a high divorce or at least arguement rate for people married to teachers and lecturers. For 10 months of the year we don't see them then for 2 months in the summer, they are here. All. Day. Long. And don't forget, because they are on holiday, they can't help around the house or do any of the jobs they have been promising to do since their last holidays.

I thought we had stooped to an all-time low on Tuesday when I asked if he would make lunch while I was working. Anyone would think I had asked for him to make an a la carte meal when I asked if I could have coleslaw on my sandwich which arrived without a plate but yesterday he went climbing in the morning while I took J and L to school and got on with work. At lunch I went to take some cards to a friend then two different meetings at school for J and L before picking them up and coming home. At tea, I was asked where I had 'swanned off to' for the afternoon!! Oh how I laughed. Its a good job I have a good sense of humour and endless patience.

Sense of humour was also needed when I went to get Js passport photo taken. Remember the windy seats that they used to have in the booths? Well they don't have them now. They have a bench then the camera is supposed to be moveable so that even if you are little, the photo will be ok. Well lets look at the evidence shall we?


Yes, its quite tricky to get a 5yr old to sit still, look at the camera, not smile or any of the other things that mean that the photo will be regected by the wonders that are the Passport Office at the same time as fielding the 4yr old sister who wants to know what is happening in the booth so climbs in and sits on the floor while the photo is being taken. Next stop the photo shop to get some better pics....


Better. Not good. This was the best of 6 that were taken. Lets hope that they don't come back with something wrong with them. I might loose my patience if they do!

On Saturday J was 6. He had a great weekend. On Sunday he went bowling with his little friends from school. Here he is with Lou before we went.



Right, I'd better go and get Looby while M kills things on his computer.....

Love, light and peas...

That is the name of the shop that is currently the VIP on the Coriandr Express. What a great name!

Love, light and peas is actually a 22yr old called Lottie who lives in South Wales. Lottie has CFS so spends her days knitting and playing with reclaimed materials.

I love the stationary in Lotties shop. She uses recycled paper from all sort of things from old exam papers to Spanish text books. Go and take a look....

Bloggers block..

Sorry, I left you on Monday with a giveaway, have had loads of new and old people commenting on the blog then I disappeared. I've got a severe case of bloggers block at the moment. There is loads I want to blog about but I am short on time then when I have the time, I can't think of what to say!!

So I thought I might tell you part of the reason I asked people what they would do if they won my bag in the giveaway below, ease myself back into the blogging lark gently.

See, here is the thing, I *know* these bags are ace for loads of things as well as for keeping your knitting in, in fact I'll be honest, these days I rarely have time for knitting, but I think others might need to be shown how ace they are for other things so I took a few pics of a bag I made for my little sis today.

She is going on holiday soon so she needs ......

...a pretty bag full of

travel sized bath stuff. Loads of room inside for all the things for holiday time then when she gets home, it would make an ace make-up bag.

So, now you know, you don't need to be a knitter to need a drawstring bag ;)

July Stone Soup giveaway....

Remember a few months ago when I posted about joining in The Stone Soup Challenge, hosted byLaura Bray? Well I have found some lovely people through the challenge and have bought some great things from fellow artisans.

This month I am hosting the monthly give-away. I am offering this drawstring bag in my strictly limited edition print.



All you have to do is comment on this post, telling me what you would use this bag for if you won it. I will draw the winner at random on 31st July.



If you want a second chance to enter the contest, go to one of my shops then come back and tell me which thing is your fav. Good luck everyone :D