celebrate

It seems my resolve to blog more has gone out the window along with my resolve to eat less home baking and  finding time to exercise more all that slackness aside, earlier this week I celebrated a my birthday.I must say  the best thing about having a birthday at this time of year is the bouquets I receive from my Nana's garden. Isn't it just lovely? I had a birthday and was a wee bit spoilt, with some thoughtful gifts and Indian takeaways for dinner, yum!

I had some great thrift finds this week ( nice to have some birthday money up my sleeve for some guilt-free thrift shopping), some green ceramics for my shelves (they are mostly covered by cards in this photo unfortunately) and a cute wooden bowl and I think this is a dibber? yeah? A thing for planting seeds? Even if that isn't what it is, it's what I'm going to use it for. I do feel a bit bad about getting it all muddy though.

floral

I used to think that florals were a bit stuffy and dare I say it "granny" like. But my tastes have changed a bit over the years and I'm a bit kinder to florals these days. At this time of year it's hard to escape flowers and the images of them. I finally found a stool to recover at the thrift store. I was going to paint the legs of the stool white but in the interest of time and budget constraints, I'm learning to like the unpainted legs. I've had this needlepoint for quite a while (thrifted of course) and unfortunately it wasn't quite big enough to cover the stool. So I added a bit of denim on one end. Now I just have to find the perfect spot for it.

The weather was nice and sunny today, making me want to get out and get stuck into the garden. There are definite signs of that burst of Spring growth starting, not long now till the garden comes out of hibernation.

Happy weekend!

worldwide

I had no intentions of being away this long, but illness and other stuff has meant my time in this space has been scant lately. It doesn't mean that I haven't been busy, so I do have lots to share and hopefully I'll get around to taking some photos to show you what I've been up to.

One little addition to our home is this map, it was free in an issue of Frankie recently. We have a number of relatives and friends in far flung (and not so far flung) places and it's kind of an abstract idea to little ones. We get lots of questions about exactly where these people are and how far away from us they are. I mounted it on some foam board and popped it in a frame without glass so we can change pins around as people move and add in some if need be. I added a couple of hooks underneath with a sting line so we can peg up the postcards as they arrive in the letterbox. It's all quite exciting to a 5 year old and we anxiously await the next postcards!

sprung

It really seems like Spring has arrived! mr A and I spent the day with my Nana (Granny) to my kids. We walked home in the sun with some treats from her garden, freesia's and mr A wouldn't let go of the swede that he dug up with her. A perfect way to get in to Spring.

notes of crochet

I was gifted a single size crochet bedspread, it's really like a super sized doily. It's seen better days and it's probably a "cutter", someone has already been cutting it. But I really don't feel like I can cut it up. I think I'm going to try and fix it - crazy you say? Well yes super crazy! But I don't intend to stick to the pattern, I thought I could go through my doily collection and patch it with them and add some crochet of my own where patching won't work. It seems a giant task but here's the thing - there are NO crochet machines. So someone has sat there and crocheted this bedspread in superfine crochet cotton and it seems fitting to spend some time to fix it. Whenever you see crochet tops in a chain store (or any clothes store for that matter) it's been crocheted by a person ( there are no machines to crochet unlike knitting), I'm almost 100% sure that the person who crocheted it was paid VERY little to do so and that their working conditions weren't what you or I would expect. That is why I never buy any "chain store" crochet clothes, I just see some poor person crocheting their heart out to fill an order for some country far away. It's something to think about.

I was mentioned by a couple of lovely ladies on their blogs recently, Hanna from craftykin wrote a lovely post about some necklaces that I made for her and her sisters. Also Dee gave me a little mention about one of my necklaces here.  Thank you both!

Happy weekend!

as a wee note: I've searched for "crochet machines" on the internet and it seems that there are some, however when you go and look at what the machines can produce - it's actually knitting!  or a "crochet-like" trim.