Knitting needle rolls galore!!

Sometimes, when looking at my shops, you wouldn't believe that I started off Nicsknots by making knitting needle rolls. They tend to sell out quite quickly then I don't get around to re-stocking. Silly girl!

Well, last night, I re-stocked my Folksy shop with a few rolls and will be adding some more over the next few days.

I've also learnt how to make mosaics this morning ;)

The Fairy Detectives

I had a great post for today but then something occured that I just couldn't leave out so todays post will have to wait while I tell you about my darling son.

We've been making the most of the good weather today; out in the garden nice and early and sorting the veggie patch out. After lunch we all went back out again, M to cut the hedge in the front while I did some (long overdue) weeding. J and L were playing in and out of the garden and had a teddy bears picnic on the bit of grass outside our neighbours house.

When it was time to bring everything in, J managed to drag the rug through every piece of muck and dirt between the grass and kitchen then left it in a pile on the floor. I came in and asked him to sweep the mess up and he set to work. Ten minutes later I went back in to make sure that he was ok because it had all gone quiet.

Now I can hear you all holding your breath here; quiet, children. The two don't mix. I walked into the hall to find that he had removed everything off the floor (you know, all school bags and shoes that I had been asking them to move for days) and the carpet, which had previously been properly fitted, all rumpled up.

When I asked him what he had been doing (you know, while I was slowly banging my head on the wall and wanting to run away), he calmly replied that he had had to clean underneath the carpet because the fairy detectives are coming tonight and they check to make sure your house is tidy, even under the carpets.....

The week that wasn't..

I haven't blogged for more than a week. Sorry if you have missed me. I have been so busy, mainly keeping my head down and trying to cross as many thing as possible off my ever growing list of things I need to get done.

I think I feel like I am getting there, if we ignore all of the house things that need doing so I'm back.

I've been taking photos of my needle rolls today. I have been meaning to re-do them for a while but I got an email from a magazine wanting some so I thought I ought to get my finger out.


The reason why I have been putting it off is that taking photos of the rolls is a bit of a nightmare. To start with I appear to have lost all of my knitting needles...potentially they could all be stuck in the half-finished projects I have kicking around the house though. Anyway, I have to use the various free needles that I have kicking around the place from magazines that have given them away over the last year or so, as you can see from the bright colours and glitter in the rolls.


The next problem is that I generally take photos using a roll of lining paper as a backdrop. This is plenty big enough for my bags and dpn rolls but for the larger rolls, it's a bit small.


I'll but uploading them onto my shop over the weekend.



I have some amazing news for you. This week I have done some knitting.I know that months ago this was a bit of a knitting blog but then I got busy and didn't have time to do any. The last time I did any amount of knitting was at Woolfest in June. Anyway, I knitted for a while on Tuesday night and made this....


Not only have I knitted, this is the start of Christmas presents and it is made using stash yarn!!

It is a Lutin, kind of a doll/blanket thingy for babies. My only problem is that the pattern is in French and has a chart. I read French but not knitting terminology and I don't read knitting charts well so goodness only knows what it will look like when it is finished!!

Grumpy? Never!!

I'll admit, I am a grumpy cow-bag today.I went to bed last night at 10 with a head-ache. I woke up this morning with an even worse head-ache. J decided that he wouldn't get ready for school; listening to music, playing on the computer and just sitting naked on his floor, refusing to get dressed was the order of the day which really helped me when every time I moved my head, I thought I might pass out.

Since I've come home from school, the day hasn't got much better but I am attempting to snap out of grumpy-dom and get on so I have been remembering the entertaining things that have happened this week,

Yesterday was football training at school for J. It was his second week and as we were walking to school, we were talking about it and what the people who ran it were called. He couldn't remember to start with then he said;

'He's called God, Mummy.'

I tried to convince him that I was fairly sure that the trainer wouldn't be called God but he was sure;

'No Mummy, he *is* called God. Not God up in the sky of course, that would be silly! Its a different God who teaches us football. The other God in the sky is far too small to do that and anyway, he's busy doing other thing!'
Ahh of course. Silly me!

Lou and I went to pick Jack up from football after school. We were a bit early so they were all still playing when we got there. I was scanning the pitch to see him playing when I saw a blond, curly haired boy skipping up the pitch. Actual skipping, from one end to the other, behind the rest of the boys chasing the ball. With a great big smile on his face, there was J!! I am a bad Mummy because I couldn't help laughing at the sight. Obviously he didn't see me because he was in a world of his own, skipping around!

National Cupcake Week!!

What a wonderful week. Someone has decided that this week should be 'National Cupcake Week'. I'm not complaining because surely that means that we can eat as many as we like and not feel guilty, right?

Well I'm doing my little bit for cupcake week too. This week I will be donating £1 from the sale of my cupcake bags to The Children's Hospice UK.

The Children's Hospice are a wonderful charity that I have known about for a long time. It helps many families in very sad and difficult positions. Their vision is 'for every child and young person who is not expected to reach adulthood - and their family - to have awareness of, and access to, the highest standards of care and support in the location of their choosing.'

The fortnight that we spent in Bristol Children's hospital paediatric intensive care unit when J was born opened my eyes to all of the poorly children there are and their families who are doing their best to make their children's lives, however long or short, as happy as possible. I have been wanting to do something for a while now and my work as an independent Phoenix card seller has pushed me to get organised and do something.

So, if you want to 'celebrate' Cupcake week, here are a few of the bags I have for you. If you click on the photos, you should get sent to my shop.

I wonder who she takes after...

Thanks for all of the comments last night. Especially Moxie. Yep, your bank manager has rung today and is forwarding my wages to me as I type so that's it, problem solved now ;)

School day 1 passed without a hitch from little Miss. As soon as she had her uniform on, Lou transformed into a calm and sensible little girl. As I mentioned to her teacher at school, if that was all she needed, I would have given her the uniform about two years ago.

Here she is with her big bro, J, who loves her just a little bit!!

When I picked her up from school this afternoon, she told me that she had been playing all day and hadn't had time to do any work but it was ok, she would be learning to read tomorrow.

As I was reading stories tonight, I remembered when I started school. I am the oldest of four and had been so excited about starting school and most importantly, learning to read. Apparently I came home on my first day, disgusted that I hadn't been taught to read OR write and had had to play all day. The next day, my teacher sat me in the wendy house in the morning and told me I was to stay in there all day. I was confused and a bit annoyed about the whole thing until she told me that my Aunt had told her about me complaining that all I had done was play so I could play all that day as well while the others did work. I'm fairly sure the whole episode back-fired on the teacher though because then no-one wanted to work and they all wanted to be in the play house.

I'm fairly sure that's the only resemblance there is between me and Lou. I'm much more laid back than her ;)

Over to you, guys...

Tomorrow, my baby (well if you can call a nearly 5yr old, highly independent little girl a baby!) starts school. She has been looking forward to it for over a year. Having a birthday right at the start of September, she missed starting last year by 9 days, in fact if she hadn't been so lazy and been born 15 days late, then she would already have been at school for a year now.

While I have been looking forward to more time to get on with my sewing and have been adding things onto my ever growing list of 'things I will do when Lou starts school' list, everyone around me has been busy trying to find me a 'proper' job. Everywhere I look, people are sending my links to random jobs, suggesting that I should apply for that ideal job that they saw in the paper, hinting that basically I need to get off my bum and do something useful and it's all getting a bit boring.

I quite enjoy my job, even if I spend some of my time pulling my hair out while trying to work out new patterns, and could cry when its gone midnight and I still have paperwork to do but its flexible which is crucial for me.

I've started selling Phoenix cards over the last few months and am really looking forward to having a bit more time to devote to this side of business. All of the cards are designed by UK illustrators and printed in the UK. The cards are lovely, great quality and the value is superb; each card is just £1.20 and if you buy 10 or more at a time, that price goes down to £1. I got my Christmas card samples on Friday and I am spoilt for choice but one that I think will go well with all of my woolly friends is this.....


This pack of 10 cards costs just £4. If you are interested in these or any cards, let me know :)

Yesterday, we went to my Grandparents 50th wedding anniversary. As is the way at these events, I saw older relatives who I haven't seen for years, some claimed they had never seen me but most were united in their ideas that as soon as children go to school, Mummy should go out to work and that sewing isn't really a proper job. I think they are all fairly sure that I am going to become a lady who lunches and have a social diary to make anyone jealous.

So while I was appreciating the irony of 'no-iron' clothes this afternoon and tackling the ironing pile, I devised a cunning plan. Basically you all need to buy everything out of my shops so that I have no time to socialise and will spend my time 24/7 working. As the Meerkats would say; simples ;)

Pleats part deux

So maybe I was a bit bolshy with bag progress last night. After I blogged about how I was about to start on *the* bag; it would be fab, it would be ace, it would be ........ crap!

Here is where I feel it all started going wrong; instead of keeping the pattern pieces to the prototype bag that actually worked and starting from scratch, I decided to write all over that with what I wanted to do on the new bag (which was daft to start with), I then cut the pieces up to make a new pattern.....


...leaving me with no pattern when it transpired that I had forgotten how to make the bag of my dreams...
I went to bed, almost blind and trying to work out why the fabric was doing what it was doing and why on earth I couldn't work out how to mend it. So for another night I dreamt about bags, curves and angles and woke up convinced that I *must* have the answer to my problems. Only I didn't. It still wouldn't work and I was now left with cut up bits of pattern, random lumps of material that I had cut off in a desperate attempt to make it work and not a lot of patience so the man who tried to sell me life insurance had a fun conversation with me when he rang up in a bid to save me money.

After lunch I gave up on my initial idea and took a step back. I made new pattern pieces then resorted to tracing around the front of my bag at the right position to get the back with the right angles and preyed to the sewing goddess....


then still cut bits off to make it how I wanted it to look and it ended up, rather miraculously, looking like this....

Pleats

We're back. We had an ace weekend. I'd like to think that everyone had listened to the news on Friday and decided that going anywhere was a bad idea because I have never seen the motorways as clear as they were. We managed to find my friends house who, according to Lou, lives on a farm in the middle of NOWHERE. They spent the last 15 minutes of the journey asking me if we were lost, what would happen if we did get lost and various other helpful comments when you are driving down pitch-black lanes with a print-out from Google maps, counting tenths of a mile to work out when we turn down the next lane.

So we had fun, were on the beach in the wind and rain at 9am on Saturday morning with two energetic children who had been up since 6ish and two not so energetic not children who had maybe stayed up too late and drunk too much red wine. Unfortunately we didn't learn that night either so when we got home on Sunday night, I handed children to their Daddy and crawled into my bed.

This week has been manic. I've had lots of orders. Don't stop ordering, please don't, but you have caught me by surprise so I have been sewing like a mad girl. Today I have caught up though and even managed to start on the design of a new bag.


A while back I stopped making tote/hand/big knitting bags. People were buying them. Slowly. I didn't like the way they looked though and couldn't get good photos so they went after too many attempts at photos and me throwing bags at the window and going off for a sulk. This has been annoying me for ages because it is something that I want in my range, its also what I get asked about quite a lot. People generally ask if I have made my hand-bag then say that they want me to make them one so I sell quite a few off-line. On-line, its all about photos but I am ignoring that hurdle until I have made a bag then will talk nicely to my friend and hope we can sort something out.

So the bag? Well I went to bed last night and dreamt bags...sad but true. This morning I woke up with an idea but when I started thinking it through, I didn't know if it would work. Now I'm thinking maybe it will. It's going to feature pleats which I have never sewn in my life so that was a bit of a learning curve this morning while I had Lou asking me to do the voice of Swiper and Jack complaining that he could only draw stick people.

Right, that was just practise material. Now I'm onto version #2 with nice material and this is going to be *bright*