Unprepared

Organisation isn't my strong point at the moment. Well it is, but it isn't too. Some parts of our lives are really organised and prepared to the point that I drive M mad. Others aren't!

This morning I went around to my friends house. The kids were all playing in the playroom and we were talking about the impending return (and start for the little ones) to school. We marvelled at the prepared Mums, the ones who have had uniform bought since June and have pre-washed it and lovingly ironed it while sticking name labels on. I realised yesterday that I have no PE kit for Lou and everywhere seems to have sold out in her size. Whoops. I feel its good to have a friend as disorganised as yourself. It helps you to feel better about yourself, that you can stand up to smug-organised-mum.

Today I am taking J and L on a last quick getaway before the start of school....as well as the rest of the country, it would seem. I stupidly forgot that it was bank holiday weekend while the rest of the world remembered and booked themselves up for a place on the Great British Motorway system. I've just looked at the traffic while waiting for them to come home from swimming; delays, delays, speed limits due to road works and just as we think we can smell our bed for the weekend; high winds on the Britannia Bridge on Angelsey means that there are 30mph speed limits in place. I'll be looking forward to that when I hit that part of the world at some point tonight.

While I am away, take a sneaky peak at the material I have out for sewing next week, an eclectic mix, some may say autumnal and look what I listed last night so maybe I'm not that unprepared after all!




Have a good weekend. I should be back on Monday with some exciting plans for September invloving charities, butterflies, cupcakes, cards and bags.

Mis-heard?

I have to admit, I love listening to children when they are learning to talk and some of the mis-pronounced words they come out with. I know some people get cross but sometimes, I don't correct them because the new words are much better than the normal one. Like square words. There is no such thing as a swear word in our house anymore, nope, they are square words. It seems to work.

Today we went to town for our usual Thursday afternoon jaunt. As we drove into the car park, J started reading a sign;

J 'Lower level parking; parent and child and dismembered parking. We're not dismembered are we Mummy?'
Me Sniggering 'No, darling, we're not dismembered'
J 'Good, because I don't think it sounds very nice and you have to have a yellow chair. I don't want yellow, I want purple'

Its back to school next Thursday for J. I am going to miss having him around during the day.

Another reason why I love my customers...

Sometimes, making things in your home then selling online is quite a lonely existence. Love them or hate them, work-mates are quite useful things to keep you sane and if the only thing to keep you company between 930 and 1030 every weekday morning is Jeremy Kyle, you may gibve up on man-kind and find yourself in the loony bin. Thanks to the wonder that is the Internet, at least I can feel part of the real world and feel that some of my fellow crafty people are a bit like work mates and some even friends.

Quite often, I sell something and don't hear from the customer. That's cool but it makes the emails that customers do send, telling me how they love their bag, even more special. Yesterday I blogged about my 100th sale on Folksy and mentioned that I hadn't taken a photo of the bag that I made before I posted it. Well the lovely Sally sent me an email this afternoon with a photo of her bag, which she likes lots.....


Woohoo for happy customers :D

100!

This week I reached the magical '100 sales' on my Folksy shop. I never thought that this would be possible and am sooooo happy. Thank you everyone who has bought things from my shop over the past 11 months on Folksy and here's to the next 100 sales ;)

A more organised person would maybe have taken a photo of the 100th sale before it got wrapped up. I even thought about doing it but then promptly forgot, only to remember when I got to the post office.

It was, in fact, a custom order for a customer who had bought one of these a couple of weeks before and decided that she wanted a dpn roll to match.


I made her a little Lucy tote to match so now she has the whole set. Some fabrics I can't imagine in certain designs and I'd never thought of doing Lucy bags with pirate monkeys but they looked cool so maybe a few will find their way to my shop.

Things are slowly returning back to normal here at Nicsknots HQ after the summer holidays. J and L still have a week and a bit left before they go back to school and Mr Nicsknots is back at work today, although its 8.20 and he still hasn't got up so maybe he has forgotten? Better go and wake him up.

Simply Knitting!!

You'll all fed up of holiday stories now, aren't you?I have to admit that I wish I had written things down while we were away; the kids were hilarious but then we got home and I know I have forgotten some of the little gems but that's life, eh?

While we were driving down France, playing spot the sunflower field, my phone rang a few times. The first three times, when I picked it up, the person hung up so by the time the phone rang again, I was getting ready for no-one to be there but it was Simply Knitting magazine, they wanted to know when I was back from my hols. After the initial wooo, we carried on with our hols and the fighting over who saw the sunflower field first (who said that I had competitive children?)

We got home Saturday morning, 330am. 330pm we were at my Grandparents house. Grandma and I were chatting while J and L played hide and seek in the garden and M and Grandad talked man things; woodwork and bikes, I think. Just as I was about to leave and round-up children and men-folk, Gran remembered she had to show me Simply Knitting. I have stopped buying knitting mags; I don't have time to read them no mind knit anything out of them but Gran still gets SK so I always read hers when I go round. I thought she was just going to show me a pattern she liked or maybe a bit about Woolfest as she started flicking through the magazine but no, she turned to this.....

5 of the best small knitting bags! My little tiddler drawstring bag. Now bare in mind, I hadn't slept properly for about 30hrs, that put a very big smile on my face!!

Creepy-crawlys

J and L are renowned for their love of animals, big and small. When we were driving to our camp-site, J was worried that his Aunt would do a good enough job of looking after his rabbits so it comes as no surprise that they found themselves some new pets while we were en France.

While various adults were getting more and more distressed about the growing size of the grasshoppers we kept finding and demanding for them to be removed from their tent, J and L scooped them up, transferred them to our tent and decided to keep them as pets

They played with their new pets for almost an hour, transferring them from hand to hand, to head, in Lous case and when it was lunch-time and I told them that they had to put their grasshoppers outside, so that they could enjoy a bit of hopping around, they weren't impressed. Lunch was eaten as quickly as possible though so that they could go and scout the grass for their new friends!

The next day this beast was waiting for his lunch, standing next to a saucepan on the cooker....

We have a winner!

Remember way back at the beginning of July, we had the Stone Soup Challenge give-away? Well I didn't have time to announce the winner before we went on holiday but today I can announce that Turtle won!! Well done Turtle.

I was trying to be clever this morning and embed the random number generator that I used into the blog but it didn't work so you will have to believe me that it was a totally random number choice. Thanks to everyone who entered. It was lovely to see all of the comments from new people. I know lots of people read my blog but so few comment so it was nice to get lots of comments for a change :)

Now more catch-up. My computer seems to be a bit slow since I got back, its having issues with opening attatchments and generally not doing what I want it to do so I need to sort that out.

A tale of chickens, dogs and small children.....

We're back! We had a great time and all have sun tans and various biking related injuries to show for it. Nothing serious of course, just the usual scraped knees and elbows that happen when children follow their Daddy...

The lane that led from our camp-site had a fence that ran along-side. During the first days we were there, there were chickens who got talked at by children on the way to and from town:

All was well until one night we went into town. As we walked back up the path, children were running in front of us, laughing and playing until Lou got to the place where the chickens lived. Only there were no chickens, only barking dogs. Lou looked at the dogs then towards us with a look of terror on her face.


'Mummy, why have the dogs eaten the chickens?'

Of course the chickens hadn't been eaten, they had a friendly relationship with the hounds but the look of terror on her face.

I'll be back tomorrow with more tales.