A breath of fresh air

My Mathilde blouse

For a while now I have been thinking about taking up sewing again. I say again as I loved GCSE Textiles which I chose over Home Economics. I think over the years our home economy has benefited more from what I knew about fabric than what I might have known about food, but that's for another day. I had a fantastic teacher. Mrs Plummer was a designer and an artist and motivated us all to do our best and to develop an understanding and love for fabric, for cutting it up and sewing it all back together. As a result, there were several years when at least one item of clothing I wore every day was handmade. Believe it or not we still exchange Christmas cards and she sends me photos of her latest artwork. I love hearing about what she has been doing - it's 24 years since I was in her class! In the years since, I have sewn less and less clothing and more and more curtains and then, when there are only so many curtains you can hang, my trusty machine was retired for a while. Recentl...

Shade Card Ripple - Ta Dah!

This is the blanket I made - it is based on the ripple pattern made famous by Lucy from Attic 24 . It fits a double bed perfectly. I used a 3.5mm crochet hook and one of each of the colours from Jamieson's double knitting (25g) shade card. I used around 409 ch to start with and around 220 rows. This is the blanket Mum made. She used the second half of each ball once I had completed the rows on my blanket. Again a 3.5mm hook was used, but this time she used a chevron crochet pattern from The Gebtle Art of Knitting by Jane Brocket . She started with 360 ch and the same number of rows. It fits a sofa or a single bed beautifully. What do you think? We loved sharing this project - it gave us a lot of pleasure and many happy hooky hours! There's about 1200g of leftovers - all wound into magic balls and waiting for the next project...

Flowers for a wedding

Almost a year ago, I was busy planning flowers for a very special wedding. My cousin’s daughter, Claire, was getting married and there were to be flowers. Lots of them. I was excited to catch her vision of what she wanted, but also anxious as this was only my second experience of planning and arranging wedding flowers. I worked closely with one of my cousins who, like me, had handled flowers before as we planned out our strategy, which was thwarted once by the coronavirus-COVID19 restrictions (the wedding date had to be moved from July to September) and was shadowed by an increasing number of cases and the potential of further last-minute changes right up to the last few days before the big day. Thankfully everything worked out the day proceeded as planned and was beautiful – but back to the flowers… First up there was the floral arch. Providing the backdrop to the ceremony, this was to be colourful and bright and was to use silk flowers as it had to be transported to the venue thr...

Stitches Galore

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