Jenerally Speaking,

April Afternooning

 We spent an hour or two out in the garden this afternoon. After a dull and rainy morning, the sun came out while we were all napping after lunch. Little R has been a miserable git fractious today, so once I'd finally convinced him that wearing pants really was a sensible suggestion (!), I encouraged him out into the fresh air. We had some gardening jobs to attend to. 

As soon as he saw me get the compost out, he was calling for the "cooper" (We'll get the 's' sound at the start of words one day. For the word "stick" that's becoming increasingly important!), which lives in a big tub of pig poo. As he carefully filled the pots for me he kept checking: "Dis pig poo? No, dis are mud, aren't it, Mummy?" (I adore his muddling of is/are - it sounds so cute.)

 Et voila. Five strawberry plants (well, seven actually, I think, some are sharing) potted up and Little R's pea plant planted, with a runner  bean sowed in each of the other three corners. I felt quite proficient. And Little R did an excellent job helping me. He cried when we'd finished watering, but then he cried at most things today!

Then Little R was happy to play with his Duplo and bubbles so I had time to pootle about taking photos of how lovely our garden looks at this time of year. Forget-me-not time is the best, in our garden.

This little pot which I put together last year survived the winter and the "pom pom" flowers look set to flower soon.

And I treated myself this spring to six little plants which are cheering up two other pots on the patio. These little white blooms are cute...

... and these yellow ones are so bright - I love them.

Even the rocket seeds that I found in a box somewhere, out of date, and threw hastily into the pot we grew carrots in last year have germinated and are starting to get that rocketty shape. Shame about the bare strip in the middle where Little R grabbed a handful of soil and teeny-tiny delicate seedlings a couple of weeks ago!

To my surprise, the potatoes are already peeping through the earth. We might have squeezed too many into each sack this year - could get crowded in there!

The apple tree is COVERED in blossom, which also keeps flying around the garden. Little R was grabbing handfuls. It's a nice thought that by the time there are apples on the tree, there'll also be a new person in our family. (It'd be really nice if we got to EAT the apples this year, so perhaps Little R could restrain from biting into them while they're still hanging on the tree, causing them to rot before they have a chance to ripen?)

Colourful hand-knitted socks hanging in the sun. Is there anything lovelier? Shame I didn't notice my anorak had fallen off the line into the flowerbed until AFTER I'd taken the photo!

I enjoyed watching this fella tucking into Little R's toast crusts. I also loved zooming in on him from the other side of the lawn. I do love my our camera. 

And I do love this little person too, even though he woke up at 4am and has been challenging pretty much all day. He was really enjoying his Duplo train and characters this afternoon. Now his toys are all stored in his "big boy bedroom", we choose one or two things to bring down for a day or two, and he's able to really focus on those items and get creative with them. Much better than when there was lots of in the lounge and he used to flit from one thing to another. All his toys chat to him and one another now, which is hilarious to listen to. Especially when they're imitating our conversations, with one asking to "watch CDs" and the other giving reasons why they're not going to do that. 

The rabbit was enjoying herself as usual. I wish she didn't enjoy herself so much around my gladioli patches. Well, ex-gladioli patches. Maybe they'll get the chance to grow to full height next year. Sigh.

The tree at the end of our garden (but in the garden behind ours) is in full leaf, in the glorious lime colour you get at this time of year. My FAVOURITE colour. 

Our twisted willow. £7 from Sainsburys a few years ago, if I remember correctly. Maybe even less. Shame it's insisting on growing at a dodgy angle no matter how many times I stake it. 

And while I was drinking in all this colourful visual beauty around (and listening to Little R blowing himself bubbles and then chasing them round the garden, shrieking exuberantly), our friendly blackbird and flown up to another huge tree in the old police house garden to serenade us. 

Happy April.

Patchwork Chair Cover #3

 Another project has finally been crossed off my to-do list! Little R moved from his high chair to a booster seat on a kitchen chair several months ago. Since we only upcycled one... two kitchen chairs for ourselves three years ago, this required us to sweet-talk Grandpa into sanding another down and varnishing it for us. Rachel didn't have the time and I can't go attacking a chair in the garage with a sander and varnish while pregnant. That'd be a tad irresponsible! 

Happily, Grandpa was kind enough to oblige and the only step that I needed to do was to create a patchwork cover for the seat. This I managed to do over the Easter weekend at Mum's, while I was on my big finish-my-WIPs-mission (I nearly finished his Roman blind, made a start on his curtain tie backs and DID finish his monster bottomed trousers and some knitted cotton dishcloths, so I did quite well!). 

Step one was the hardest of all; drawing a diagram to decide how to lay out the patches. I found this not unduly taxing when I made the first two covers. But back then, I wasn't pregnant. I'm really finding the left side of my brain has genuinely packed up and gone on holiday this pregnancy. I'm much more intellectually hampered than I was when I was pregnant with Little R. My vocabulary is limited - I often pause partway through a sentence trying to recall a really quite basic word. Often I have to abandon the search for that word and explain myself a different way. Or kind people rescue me by suggesting what I might mean! I can barely remember any of my pin codes, which has caused some heart-stopping moments in shop queues. And I'm clumsy as heck. I literally cannot carry an object from A to B without launching it into the air or dropping it onto the floor. I'm just generally feeling pretty stupid. So this nearly reduced me to tears. I eventually managed to plan out the seat cover, but while cutting and stitching the fabrics found a glaring error whereby several centimetres had gone missing. Luckily my blagging skills are still in tact!

As I carefully measured and cut the pieces of fabric, I laid out the fabric on top of the seat (which I'd cleverly taken to Essex with me). 

 It looked fairly complicated. And rumpled. 

 So I gave all the fabric a wee press. Much better. 

 Mum walked in, raised her eyebrows and asked how on earth I was going to join those parts together. But that's actually the easy part. You just look for two pieces that join together and sew those together. Then another pair. Or a three. Each time I'd sewed a seam, I nipped over to the ironing board to press it flat.  

Gradually, you join together the twos and threes until you have an entire section.

And before too long, I had the entire cover in one piece. That was when we discovered that due to my calculation boob, it was a bit too small to attach, so Mum had the clever idea of sewing some bias binding all the way around the outside. Genius.

I said the planning was the hardest part. But the most infuriating, rage-inducing part was, as usual, attaching the cover to the chair. For some reason, whoever produced these simple kitchen chairs decided to make the seats from mahogany, or possibly diamond. It is an absolute %$*&^@# to try to get a staple into. Mum's stapler wasn't up to the task. We tried tacks, but they were huge, and were in danger of ripping the fabric, causing fraying So we use some upholstery tacks that Mum usefully happened to have. 

Even those kept bending over sideways. It was a nightmare. I was trying to hold the tacks in place with some pliers, Rachel was trying to hammer them in straight and without bending them, and we were both striving not to swear in front of our toddler. It was a CHALLENGE. 

We eventually got it attached by hook and crook. Looks bloomin' smashing underneath, doesn't it!?!

We could only get three of the four screws back into place to reattach the seat to the chair base, because one of the screw holes had been covered by multiple layers of fabric. Ah well, three will have to be enough!

Little R is happy with it, and it looks very cute, so I'm very pleased we persevered through the difficulties. 

I'm happy with the fabric choices too. I didn't have enough of the fabrics I'd used on our chairs to do a chair which completely matched, but I got some lovely foxy themed fat quarters from my good friend Mandy for my birthday. They go really well with the shades of green and brown I've used on our adult chairs, and bring in some orange, which features in our kitchen too. 

See? Little R's is more childish and colourful than ours, but they clearly belong together. 

Three beautiful kitchen chairs. Aah. Job well blagged. 

(But already, I'm dreading trying to fit the fourth cover on the next chair, when this Little Baby is big enough to require his or her own chair! I must invest in an uber-powerful stapler by then. Or a nail gun.)

Cloud ragtag toy

I like this little toy design - I've made four of them now, for various babies born in the last couple of years. The first two I made for Christmas 2013, and didn't ever get around to writing up, because I made SO much that winter. So this time round, I made sure I got some photos as I was working on these two happy little clouds. 

You start with four cute cloud shapes cut from squidgeable, soft, white fleece and some rainbow coloured ribbons with various textures and patterns. And a couple of other ribbons for the hanging tags. 

Hand stitch some friendly looking faces...

... and then position and pin the ribbons. This bit make my brain squint somewhat, because I struggle to imagine how it's going to end up once it's sewed and turned through. 

Can you see why that would fox my poor pregnant brain? My spatial visualising skills aren't strong at the best of times and this just looks WRONG. But it's not!

Then you stitch around, with a short stitch length, to ensure it's not going to come apart at the seams. I do a double line of stitching long the ribbon edge to make sure the ribbons don't pull out when they are tugged and chewed.

Then, so that the curved edges sit nicely when it's turned through, you have to cut little snips inwards, perpendicular to the stitching, to release the tension. 

You should probably aim not to do THAT, either. Sigh.

It's also important to not sew the WHOLE way around the cloud, otherwise turning it inside out to stuff will prove challenging, to say the least. The final step is to stuff and invisibly hand-stitch the bit you left. 

You're going to have to imagine how cute these little guys looks once stuffed, because disappointingly, I forgot to take one final photo! I really should make one for MY baby. I made Little R a round ragtag toy when he was little, but a bit too late for him to REALLY benefit from it. And clouds are cuter, I think!

Monster bottomed trousers!

"Raaaah!" That is the sound effect Little R was making this morning as he tore around the house in his exciting new trousers. I saw them shared on Facebook and Pinterest and decided to make some for the Littlest One. Mum located me a pattern online -  on the  Tales of the Wandering Lady blog, so as soon as I had a moment, I dug through my box of doubleknit yarns to choose some suitably androgynous colours (I have two yarn boxes under the bed - "doubleknit" and "other").

 

 

Within a few days I was enjoying my circular knitting and making good progress. I couldn't help but suspect, though, that this 6 - 18 months size might prove a little large for our baby during its first winter. For a start, I make pretty small babies, and for a second, they were ENORMOUS!

 

 

But they were looking great! I'd even made the mouth!

 

 

The project was picked up and put down when I had moments, and after I started on the legs, I tried them on Little R and decided that they'd certainly have to be for him. Over the Easter weekend, we were at my Mum's and I dragged down with me various projects that needed completing. Among them were these trousers, only requiring the ribbed bottom of the legs and then the final touches...

 

The teeth!

 

 

Look at that! A full mouth of gappy teeth... rather like our wee boy.

 

 

This morning I finally got round to dressing Little R in these trousers. I spent some time rifling through his t-shirt collection to find some that would match. It seemed appropriate to have one monster on the front... 

 

 

... and another on his rear!

 

 

They're undeniably cute, and the best part is Little R LOVED wearing them. I used a mirror to show him the face on his bottom and he chuckled merrily, then whizzed off roaring and giggling. 

 

 

"Raaaaah!"

 

Easter Crafting

NB: This post was written on Monday, but held back to avoid spoiling surprises for people!

We've enjoyed an excellent day of Easter crafting today. After a busy morning painting an Easter egg at toddlers and playing in the hall garden for the first time this year, then a delicious post-lunch nap for both of us, Little R and I collected together the ingredients we'd need to create some chocolate cornflake cakes. Well, I collected together the ingredients. Meanwhile, Little R swiftly removed the chocolate from the paper wrapper and proferred it keenly with a persuasive smile, requesting that I "take cover off Mummy."

After quality control testing said chocolate, Little R carefully stirred together the melting bits. The smell was pretty divine. This whole cooking session was a great exercise in patience, as he kept asking "we eat it now?" but accepted my instructions to wait!

Mmm... I do love cornflakes. I much prefer those to rice crispies in a cake. And Little R adores cornflakes, so I was pretty sure this'd be a "cake" he'd eat. He still does NOT approve of the texture of cake at all. 

And I was right! See how he's scoffing his chosen sample cake in the background? He chose that cake as I was spooning the cornflake mixture out, and waited so patiently for me to finish poking the M&M's (the Co-op, can you believe it, did not stock mini-eggs!!) on top of all the others. It helped that I permitted him to eat any cornflakes that missed a cupcake case. He was very polite about it - he'd point to each spilt crumb, ask "I eat dis one?" and await permission. 

They didn't look too bad, I thought!

They looked even cuter once they were cosied up in a tin:

Once they were popped into the fridge (with half of Little R's tester - it was too rich for him to want to finish!), we continued with our crafting!

I located some card and we chose yellow paint, which we then sponged onto Little R's wriggly, giggly feet. I did this with him facing fowards on my lap, so I could aim his feet carefully at the card. It was hard getting the ears to point straight up since he's a little pigeon toed. We worked hard just to prevent the ears from pointing towards each other at the top!

I painted the faces under the ears and once they were dry, Little R chose the colours for the noses and eyes. I was in charge of drawing the noses, whiskers and mouths and he was in charge of positioning the eyes. I love how individual and quirky they've ended up, despite the fact that Little R chose purple for EVERY bunny!

(Something very weird happened when I took the photos though - all the card is various shades of pink or lilac, and yet some are appearing blue-green!)

I'm in love... with fabric wet wipes!

I warn you now, this is a bit of a gushy post. I'm in love. Head over heels and 100% delighted with a new investment in our household. These little babies:

What are they? They are our fabric wet wipes. We (ok, Rachel) did some research and chose Cheeky Wipes, and I am extremely pleased with her choice. These fabric wet wipes have been really thought about. Every little detail has been planned to perfection. Let me take you through how they work. 

There are two plastic tubs, with chirpily coloured lids (they even match our nursery - hurrah!). The smaller tub for "fresh wipes" fits conveniently into the larger "mucky wipes" box, so if you were transporting them somewhere, say on holiday, you could fit everything you needed into that lime-lidded tub. Literally, everything, because you could put all the wipes and the oil blends into the smaller tub first. See? They've thought it through!

These are the oils. Lavender and chamomile scented for your clean wipes, then lemon and tea tree for the grubby ones. I wish I could squeeze the scents down the broadband cables for you to enjoy, because they are LURVELY. And my pregnant nose is very fussy about what smells it can accept!

They're simple to prepare. You put a bit of water and a few drops of oil into your "fresh wipes" tub. Then you pop in some wet wipes and press them down so they get wet through. Flip them upside down and repeat, to be sure they've all got soaked. How many you put in will depend on how many you expect to get through in a day or so. 

And there you have them: your deliciously fragrant, readily moistened wet wipes, ready to use. I cannot resist the urge to give them a good sniff before I use them. Our wipes themselves are a mixture or terry and bamboo, but various options are available. If you want patterned fabric or wild colours, they do them!

I'm finding ours lovely - we've used them on muddy hands, sticky faces and even pooey bottoms. Having some "friction", they clean muck off more efficiently, yet feel soft and gentle. They leave your skin free of that disposable wet wipe residue and smelling delightful. 

So where do you put the wipes then? Straight into your "mucky" tub, which you'll have pre-loaded with water and that fresh smelling, naturally anti-bacterial and anti-fungal oil. Clever, no?

This tub, which I took down to empty into the laundry this morning, had all kinds of grim muck in it, but the only smell which wafted up to my nostrils was the lemon and tea tree. It smelt nummy. 

But eek! Surely you don't have to TOUCH those grubby wipes? Nope! They've thought of that too. See how the mesh washing back hooks neatly inside the tub?

All you have to do is unhook it, pull the drawstring and lift the bag out. I drained the water down the sink, then held the tub underneath as I transfered the wet bag to the washing machine. No contact with any suspicious brown marks!

One of the best things is the fact that my entire load of laundry now emerges smelling sweetly of the various oils that have soaked into the wet wipes.

Now, you may be thinking that this is all very well, but the most important thing about disposable wet wipes is that you can take them anywhere with you. Nobody wants to be the Mama who has gone out for even a brief trip out WITHOUT wet wipes!

Not to fret! Here are my two out-and-about waterproof bags. Again, one for fresh, one for mucky. Before you head out, you just check you've got some damp wipes tucked into your fresh bag. Use, and place into the mucky bag. They are GREAT for out and about. They clean dodgy restaurant high chairs much better than your average disposable wet wipe! And you can clean MORE with one wipe. 

Again, you don't have to touch anything grim when you get home. I haven't had anything disgusting enough yet to make use of this feature (I've just been tipping the wipes out into my mucky tub until washday), but the mesh bag within the mucky back ZIPS RIGHT OUT. That's the part that nearly made me squeal outloud with joy. Ok. I DID squeal with joy. I'm pregnant. I'm allowed to get excited about these things! It's just so well designed.

I'm completely sold on them. I'm devastated, frankly, that I hadn't heard about them before Little R was born. Thinking of all the wet wipes we've chucked into landfill makes me shudder. And I have a HUGE binliner in my garage, over-flowing with empty wet wipe packs that I collect (not just our own, half the village gives them to me!), to send onto charity to be melted down. Because I canNOT bear the idea of all that plastic being buried. 

Cheeky Wipes have done a FANTASTIC job, taking the guilt out of wiping my toddler's face (and ears, and neck, and hair - why DOES he have to wipe his garlic bread there?!). Yes, I could have made some flannels myself, and I actually tried, but without the handy, well-designed bags and tubs and pre-blended oils, all I had was a stale-smelling flannel in a plastic bag. It was an epic fail. I am so grateful that a company out there has taken the responsibility of making them out of my hands. They're not even paying me to gush like this!

I just LOVE my wet wipes. THIS is the kind of stuff you should be told about in your Bounty pack - not disposable nappes and wet wipes and dodgy lotions to smear all over your children!