Alive and kicking

Hellooo!

I'm still alive in case anyone was worried.... and I know one lovely lady was because she emailed me to check. Thanks Sherri.

I'd love to be able to tell you that I've been away exploring some foreign land with no means of communication other than a carrier pigeon.... but that would be an out and out lie! I've just been really, really busy at work and as my job involves me spending the day writing, I've just not had the energy to come home and write some more. Instead, I've been coming home, dead heading a few flowers, cooking tea, having a cuddle with Maddie while watching Hollyoaks (badly acted English soap - it's rubbish but I love that it doesn't use any brain cells to watch it!), read a little bit, perhaps watched a film and then gone to bed. Nope, nothing exciting lately!

Oh, except I got caught in a storm and a bit of a flash flood the other day when I was out walking the dogs! We were soaked to the skin the lot of us and poor Maddie was so scared by the thunder that she ran straight up stairs and hid under our bed shaking like a leaf in autumn! Running through the rain, dodging bolts of lightning, that was kind of fun!

I also had a little trip out to the fabric shop last weekend and got a load of fabric for a few projects I'm working on...

1) The "Lavender" bunting for my friends wedding. Do you like my new Cath Kidston sewing goodies that I got for my birthday?

2) A pair of curtains for the kitchen window. I don't think you can really tell from this photo, but that is two separate pieces of fabric plus some sage green ribbon to bring it all together... watch this space! I absolutely LOVE that floral!

3) Cushion covers for the living room. The dog in the striped top looks like our Maddie.

4) Red quilt for the attic bedroom. I've been collecting red fabrics for ages for this quilt  but you never seem to get nice red fabrics here. I want lovely bright reds like these but you only ever seem to get deep reds. The floral below is left over from a dress I made about 4 years ago! If anyone has any red scraps they'd like to donate, let me know!

Anyway, that's it from me, for now. I promise I will try and get back into the swing of things soon. These projects should give me something to talk about for a while at least!

Good night, God bless x

Handmade bunting... my favourite thing to do

One of my favourite thing to do (and I have no idea why!) is to hand sew bunting! Metres and metres of the stuff! I love the Country Fete look when it is strewn all over the place. There is something really therapeutic about sitting in front of the telly with lots of squares or triangles and making them into lovely decorations to hang around the house or to decorate a wedding, christening or birthday party.

When I got married, we had a proper traditional English wedding in this church....

With this view....

So I decided that I wanted to have a real village fete style to my reception. 

I wanted lovely wild flowers like lavender, rosemary, hydrangea, freesia, sweet peas, roses. Not in proper arrangements, just simply put in old glass jars and vases and scattered with no pattern all around the room. I did the same with candles in lots of different coloured glass containers. My local charity shop loved me - I absolutely cleaned them out of their glass ware!

I wanted butterflies - on everything! I hand punched butterfly confetti using an old book of love poems, I had little feather butterflies in my bouquet (which I designed myself), butterflies on the invitations (which Paul and I designed, printed and hand tied with pink ribbon ourselves!) in the church, in the flowers, on the buttoneires. I designed my own cake, complete with butterflies! I even got up early on the morning of the wedding to make little butterfly hair grips for my hair!

And to complete the look, I wanted handmade bunting to go around all of the tables. I spent months. Seriously. Months. Hand sewing 100 metres of bunting! But, it was so worth it! The end look was amazing. I was so pleased when I saw the finished hall with all of my hundreds of hours of designing,  sewing, printing, punching, arranging.... the whole thing was beautiful. Because everything was handmade, our wedding hardly cost us anything but we got so many comments about how nice all the decorations were and a lot of people said it was the nicest wedding they'd been to!

More recently, I designed some personalised bunting for my gorgeous little Nephew Charlie for his christening which was on Valentines Day. I decided to go with a heart theme and appliqued a heart to the square on either end and then I did little hanging fabric hearts to hang on the ends. I appliqued his name and zig-zagged all around the edges in lovely red thread. I also bought some little red heart buttons for some extra detail but in the end I thought it looked better without. I got loads of comments on this one at the christening.

I've been thinking about my Etsy store a lot lately, I haven't put anything in it for a long time, I kind of gave up! But I'm thinking (as per the list) that I'll give it a second chance - this time selling stuff I really enjoy making - like my bunting and confetti. I think I will also add a shop page to my blog so people can buy straight from me if they want to. I really love doing the personalised bunting. My friend is getting married this summer (her new name is going to be Lavender - isn't that gorgeous?) so I think I'm going to do one for her in all different shades of lavender and hang some little hand tied lavender bouquets on either end.

So, to get myself back into practice, I was thinking I might do a little giveaway on here! Watch this space for details!