Feeling Thrifty

Feeling a little bit chuffed today, all is going well so far. Aside from the fact I managed a perfect transfer of a sleeping toddler from car to house giving me an hour of free time... Yay! I am feeling really rather thrifty at the moment......

Thrifty moment #1:

Today, on the way home from the school run, I picked up these lovely peonies, half price at the supermarket, as well as these rather tasty raspberries, also a tiny bit reduced. We grow all manner of fruit on our allotment but no raspberries so far this year, so this is a bit of a treat. The verdict from the little people was... very yummy!

Thrifty moment #2:

Right now, as I write this, I'm enjoying a cold glass of homemade elderflower cordial. Also yummy!!

This was our first time making elderflower cordial and it is delicious. A big hit with Little Lady, although Little Man refers to it as 'pond water!' Apart from the sugar, citric acid and lemons it's almost free....

Thrifty moment #3:

Last night I started to make this little beauty! It's called Sophie's Garden by Dedri Uys, a free pattern that can be found here on Ravelry. I am using a 4.5mm hook and Drops Love You 5 100% cotton yarn that's currently selling at Wool Warehouse for only 80p a ball. Bargainous! 

Thrifty moment #4: 

We have also just about finished doing up the front garden...

All the materials used to make the planters, bar the paint, were recycled from our back garden when we took out the decking to lay turf. We even filled them with free top soil found on freecycle. We reused the Scottish cobbles from the back yard too.  The olive tree was also transplanted from the back garden, although the jury's out as to whether or not it will survive. It's looking a bit bare. 

Thrifty moment #5 

The plants are from various places including some transplanted from the allotment, car boot sales, donations from relatives and a recent Sunday afternoon outing to a local fair where you could purchase a large tray of near on 40 plants for only £5! Beyond bargainous!!

I am feeling very chuffed with my little front yard. It has given me lots of pleasure so far, watering  not so much, but I do enjoy the pottering about, dead heading, adding in something new, getting excited about a new flower popping open and generally admiring.

Thank you for coming by. I do hope you have enjoyed your visit and feel inspired to enjoy something thrifty too.  

Sarah

x

Playtime

This week is May half term... Yay!! Time has flown since Easter and it doesn't seem like five minutes since we were waving good by to the last holiday and here we are again. That doesn't mean to say that this term has been easy. Work has been hectic, we have Little Man's 4th birthday and lots going on at home as well. So this week will mostly be spent enjoying time together at home and getting a few jobs done too.

I am currently in the middle of working on lots of little projects and also starting some rather big ones.

I have been working on making a little cot blanket for my darling baby girl. The lucky little thing was given a gorgeous wooded push-along pram for her birthday months back and I was determined to make her a bit of crochet to keep her dollies warm. Far too quickly time whizzed by and the little cot blanket went on the to do list at the back of my mind. Last weekend I finally started it and here we are.

While making the little cot blanket I have given myself a short break from working on my v-stitch stripe blanket (need to think of a more exciting name for this blanket, perhaps retro blanket or rainbow blanket). Loving these colours and the fun of mixing and matching up the different colour combinations. I really love how neat it feels too. Granny square blankets are wonderful but they are high maintenance when it comes to those loose ends.

The garden is coming along too. This is our first year of living in this house and we had to make some very drastic changes to the backyard. I inherited this summerhouse and my lovely Hubby has painted it ready for me to decorate the inside now. I am really keen to push on with this now as the Spring is rapidly turning into Summer and I want to be in there making and enjoying the space soon. 

I have been working on the playhouse too this week. We bought this little lovely on ebay for just £40 when Little Man was 18 months old and it lived in our old garden before we moved it here. So far it has been used for toy storage more than play but I have always had plans for it. I am desperate to make this a lovely fun playhouse now before my Little Man becomes to old for playing house.

While we're down at the bottom of the garden I might introduce you to Dinosaur Land. Yes, you read it right! Tucked away in between the summerhouse and the playhouse we are creating at bit of a sensory-come-small world play area. Under a newly planted Maple tree we have a sandpit and an area of rough ground where we have added a collection of slate chippings, pebbles and shells with larger pieces of slate and rock to create Dinosaur land. We also have a large planter with herbs growing for the little people to feel, smell, taste, use in their play kitchen, make dens for fairies to live in, that kind of thing. We have a large blackboard and I am planning to add a secret garden window using a perspex mirror behind some trellis with a clematis or honeysuckle growing up it. I would also like to create a bug hotel if I can too. The little people are rather fond of this area of the garden. It's not huge but big enough to escape into and explore with those amazing imaginations they have for play and discovery. 

And not forgetting the other full time job I have at this time of year. The Allotment! We have had it for 4 years now. It lives near our old house which a short 15 minute drive away from us. Not ideal but it gives us so much enjoyment. It's a lovely outdoor space for our little people to get muddy in and learn so much about life, how things grow, where food comes from, how nature works to help our veg grow and so on. But it is also extremely hard work. Neither me nor my Hubby can bring ourselves to let all the hard work go. My lovely Hubby and I have a good system going at the moment where he does the digging (quicker that I can) and I do the planning and planting. We are always behind but we get good results nonetheless. Here is a pic from last year... it has changed quite a bit since this photo. Will have to take some more pics soon.

  I found this photo on my phone and I think it really sums up just how lovely it is at our allotment...

So this week has been spent working on a few of these jobs and hopefully with a trip to the seaside and a visit or two from some friends before the week is spent.

Thank you for popping by. Hope you have a lovely half term too, Sarah xxxxxxxxx

Textiles in Focus

On the last Sunday of the half term holidays I had a day out with my Mum to the Textiles in Focus fair at Cottenham Village College, near Cambridge.

This was a three day textile fair with an exhibition from textile groups Tin Hut Textiles and Eastern Regional Textile Forum, lectures, demonstrations, workshops and traders stalls including Art Van Go. 

We had a wonderful day out, saw lots, spent too much and treated ourselves to a workshop with artist Mary McIntosh. She demonstrated how to use procion dyes with Manutex paste to create a background fabric for a future project. Procion dyes are the same dyes I used several weeks back to  experiment with Cram Jar Dyeing. See here Trying New Things

Mary showed us how to mix the dyes with Manutex to create an ink that can be used for many different purposes including screen printing and gelli printing. In this workshop we were using the inks with sponge rollers to paint onto the surface of the fabric. She demonstrated this and another method using a small square of lino to scrape the inks across the surface of the fabric to give a different effect. She showed us how to achieve a wide spectrum of colours using just six different colours of procion dyes; warm primary colours and cold primary colours. She also added black so we could dull down the colours to achieve more darker and more subtle shades.

This was my attempt. I like the brights...

I tried to work into it slowly, considering the colours and placement carefully but really I couldn't wait. I added colour after colour, layering them up to create this abstract impression of the image I was working from.

This was my image which bares no relation to the colours and composition on my fabric. I think I prefer mine anyway.

Mary suggested adding more Manutex paste to the inks to give a more diluted lighter shade of colour. I also mixed quite a bit of black into the blue tones to try and create a moody sky. 

These were the palettes. We mixed the colours directly on the palette using the sponge roller. I liked this as you could quite easily have several colours on your roller at any point making for lovely patterns and marks on the fabric.

The palettes were rather beautiful as well. 

When our pieces were complete and ready to dry they needed to be carefully wrapped up in a bin liner and left to dry out in a hot place, like an airing cupboard, for a week. After this time the fabric needs to be washed in a washing machine to remove the Manutex. I used a very small amount of Metapex in a cup inside my machine drum to help remove the Manutex.

Ta-dah.....

Well it doesn't appear to have faded much after washing which is nice. In fact it doesn't look that different really. So I took an arty shot with some daffs to jazz it up a bit :)

 

And some close ups too...

So many ideas!! We left the workshop buzzing with ideas and thoughts of new possibilities. Love it when that happens. Now I think I will have to do a bit of research and have a think about what to do with this lovely piece of fabric. At the moment I'm thinking about flowers and gardens very much inspired by Mary McIntosh who had printed the names of each flower in her garden in lines across her painted fabric. I like the idea of drawing collections of flowers, insects and birds using machine embroidery. Or perhaps laid out in a nature table style, things collected, found and treasured. We shall have to wait and see.

Here is a link to the artist Mary McIntosh who uses this technique among others in her own work.

Thanks for coming by, come again soon xxxxxxx