10 things

• Graham and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary.  We went camping again - and Olivia insisted on doing a photo shoot of us snuggling up on a bench together.  She took close to 400 photos, just by holding the button down on my phone camera and telling us to smile.  There was just one I liked.  We took an anniversary selfie instead, which I am much happier with.  Sorry, Olivia!

 

• The children and I went to Brick Lane, ate pakoras in the sunshine as we wandered around, and came home with a huge bag of bagels for the weekend.

 

• Cam likes his bagels with kippers for breakfast.  I like mine with avocado.

 

• I did my first parkrun in my new running club t-shirt this morning.  Rumours that I chose this club because I find the shade of blue on their shirt particularly pleasing, are entirely false.

• We have a new dishwasher.  It is so quiet, it purrs.
• Olivia sewed herself a top.  This is the first time she has done any dressmaking, and I was so impressed with the results.  She did everything herself, and all I did was explain some unfamiliar terms on the pattern.  The pattern is the Oliver + S Ice Cream Dress/Top, in the age 12 size.  It comes out quite short on her - she is a couple of months shy of turning 12, but is very tall.  She is keen to make another, and add a few centimetres onto the length.

 

• I did some dressmaking too, and made myself a new dress - another Lisette Portfolio dress.  It has a seagull ribbon trim on the hem, which I bought in Whitby, and contrast fabric inside the pockets.  It may be my most favourite dress I've ever made for myself - or it may just be that whatever I've made most recently is my favourite.

 

• I am keen to make more clothes while I am still on my long summer holiday.  Perhaps the Lisette Diplomat Dress, which I have the pattern for, but have not yet made.  Or maybe this Everyday Skirt?
• My sister and her two small girls came for a visit.  The littlest cousin was completely unfazed by the two big teenagers thrusting their cameras at her every time she smiled, did something cute, or moved.

 

• I made 22 raspberry madeleines yesterday afternoon.  There are only five left this afternoon.

    

A top in blue voile

As well as the children's exams, I am also starting a new placement and embarking on the nerve wracking process of job hunting at the moment.  

On a day off on Monday I decided the best thing I could do to create some calm and light relief in my week was to embark on some sewing.  Inspired by all the beautiful clothes appearing in my Instagram feed for Me Made May (and especially those put up by Liesl and Suse), I cut into my precious piece of Anna Maria Horner's Little Folks voile and made myself another Lisette market dress tunic.  I wear both the ones I made earlier in the year constantly; they look so good with trousers and a cardi or a scarf.

The voile is sumptuous - soft, drapey, feminine and luxurious.  It is also surprisingly non-sweary to sew with.  It feels as though it should slither all over my table, but it doesn't.  Pleasingly I also found a length of narrow velvet ribbon which my grandmother had given me, in exactly the right shade of yellow to match the centre of the flowers on the fabric, so I hemmed the top with that.

A happy few hours sewing, and a luxurious-feeling new blue top.  I just wish it was easier to find a place in my house to take full length photos of myself (and a clean mirror!).

10 things

•        Olivia lost her Oyster card, which she needs to travel home from school by herself on the tube.  It is the third time she's lost it since the beginning of term.

•        I lost my patience.  "Just. Stop. Losing. Stuff!" I yelled.

•         How do you teach a child to be less scatty and forgetful?  I'm not sure you can.

•         When her replacement card came through I really just wanted to staple it onto her in some way so she won't ever lose it again.  What I actually did was make a long ribbon lanyard to attach it to her school bag instead.  While not completely Olivia-proof, I am hoping it will make it harder to lose again.  Her house keys are already attached to a long ribbon lanyard in her bag.  If she carries on losing things, then eventually everything that is important will be attached to her with ribbons.

•         We are friends again now.  She raided my button jar the other night and made this delicious bracelet.  Her mind is more often on aesthetic pleasures such as ballet, drawing, making and reading, rather than on practical things like Not. Losing. Stuff.

•         I bought a Nike running skirt, after months of the wanties.  I ran for the first time in it yesterday, and loved it.  I hate getting hot when I run, and the knee length running tights I was wearing before were far too hot.  The skirt looks cute, and I feel much faster and more free when I'm wearing it.

•         I made a white chocolate and orange loaf cake from a recipe I found on this blog by Ruby, one of the contestants in this year's Great British Bake Off.  It is utterly divine.

 

•      I am essay writing again.  Paper everywhere, and my head full of statistics and policies and care plans. I am distracting myself by thinking up cakes to bake.

•         When I am not reading NICE Clinical Guidelines, I am reading Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel, which is amazing but harrowing.  She gave a fascinating interview on Radio 4's Book Club this week.

•         I went to Sweatshop, they measured my feet, analysed my gait and I chose my free pair of running shoes.  They are bright blue.  I love them.

Grey, colour and curry

The weather has been so miserable here for the last week or more.  I love cold weather, I like the rain, I really love a good, sharp wind, and can even appreciate sunshine because it makes for great photos, but mild, dreary, grey and a bit drizzly?  Rubbish.

This was the grey sky seen from South Woodford tube platform at 9 o'clock this morning.

Someone once described living under these blank white skies as like living inside a Tupperware box.  I think it was either Bill Bryson or Paul Theroux - I wish I could remember who, because that describes it perfectly.

So I have been adding colour where I can.

I made this rainbow apron for the shop.

I really love the tea towel that makes this simple apron.  I bought it as part of a set when I was in France last year, and the lovely old lady who sold them to me explained that they used to belong to her Grandmother (which must make them at least a hundred years old?)  The linen is still really thick and sumptuous all these years later.

I wanted to keep the apron as simple as possible, to let the tea towel have the glory.  So I just added some straps and a pocket made from calico and ribbon.

And then I made another apron - in the same reversible style as the purple one in my last post - with some sunny Cath Kidston fabric and this pretty, vintage crinoline lady as a pocket.

And now I need to crack on and sew some more of these reversible aprons, because both the crinoline lady apron and the purple apron were snapped up within minutes of me listing them - woohoo!  This is very exciting, not least because I now need to buy more fabric.  Yup.  Amazing.  G doesn't belive me, but it's true.  I still have shelves and shelves of the lovely stuff, but very little of it is solid.  Too much patterned fabric in an apron can be too much of a good thing, so I'm off to the fabric shop tomorrow.

The final injection of colour into my week has come from this magnificent new book that arrived today.

The cover is eye-popping, and my photo above (taken in the grey afternoon light today) does not do it justice.  I love these beautiful, swirling, Indian designs, and always wish I could draw them myself.  Inside, there are more delights to brighten up the day.  This recipe is first on my list to make.

I was talking to Anna about curry recipes earlier this week.  The only other two curry cookbooks I have are The Ultimate Curry Bible, also by Madhur Jaffrey, and Cooking Like Mummyji by Vicky Bhogal.  The big curry bible I do use from time to time, although it does intimidate me somewhat.  Vicky Bhogal's book is one of my top cookbooks of all time, and I have made so many dishes from it, as well as learning some good techniques.  I really love her modern, light, quick take on authentic British Asian food.  And this is what the new Curry Easy book does so well too.  What Asian recipe books do you love?

It's time to get out the turmeric, chillies, aubergines, peppers and ginger and create some bright colours in the kitchen I think.

If it is packed away tidily, it is not rubbish

I came back from Switzerland with loads of nice maps, exotic-looking train tickets, timetables, brochures and postcards that I had accumulated while I was away.

I didn't need this pile of paper once I was home, but at the same time it was so evocative of our trip that I could not bear to throw it away.  It sat on my desk for a week - a tottering pile of redundant Swiss information.

And after a while I decided that if it all had a nice folder to live in, it could be stored on a shelf and would no longer need to be described as rubbish.  A paper folder might be seen as temporary over time, but surely a custom-made fabric folder would attach some kind of posterity to these souvenirs?

So this week I made myself a folder to store all these sentimental bits of information in.

There are two large pockets (18cm by 18cm) for postcards, timetables and maps.  And there is one smaller pocket (10cm by 10cm) for train and bus tickets.  The pockets are all lined, and have thick interfacing in them as well so that they stay nice and stiff and do not sag under the weight of the paper. 

I sewed the pockets onto a rectangle of quilting weight cotton (46cm by 30cm).  Then I cut a matching rectangle of leftover quilt wadding and final rectangle of quilting cotton and made a quilt sandwich with them.  I sewed through all the layers along the spine of the folder and then enclosed all the raw edges with binding.  To stop the folder from falling open I added velcro tabs to each corner.

For the front I knew I wanted a label.  I started embroidering Switzerland and the date onto some scrap calico, and then realised I would have to embroider a flag as well.  The Swiss love their flags as the Americans do, and Swiss flags were fluttering from almost every shop, restaurant and house that we saw.  Happily the Swiss flag is much easier to embroider than the American one.

The Swiss use a great deal of black in their designs and crafting so I added a black flourish in as well.  I stitched the label onto the front of the folder, and then added underneath a very short length of some Swiss ribbon that I had brought back with me.  I love this ribbon and how it uses such typical Swiss colours and Alpine flowers.  They use this ribbon on all kinds of traditional clothes, as well as bags, dog leads and cow bell harnesses.  I even saw a bicycle saddle decorated with it.

So the folder is done, and now sits on my shelves making me feel very organised in a Swiss sort of way.  And whenever I want to reminisce about some of the walks we did, I now know exactly where to find that map.

  

A strawberry top

There are plenty of good online patterns and tutorials for clothes for babies and toddlers, and many of the sewing books I own have some lovely clothes patterns for this age too, but I find that there are not many patterns for older children - pre-teens and teenagers. (The exception to this is Oliver + S whose current patterns go up to age 8, and whose new spring-summer patterns are going to go up to age 12).

I really want to make O a wardrobe of pretty summer dressees, skirts and tops this year - and I particularly want to make some of her school summer dresses, because the ones I buy never fit her properly and always look so sack-like and unflattering.

So I decided to go old-school and buy some traditional dress patterns.  I bought a few but the one I've made first is Simplicity 2986.  As always with traditional paper patterns from the big manufacturers, you have to work hard to think past the strange fabrics and trims and odd sketches they always put on the front of the packet, and imagine your own version made with fabrics you like.

This pattern is very versatile:

• it makes a dress or a top,
• in five sizes,
• with two choices of yoke - a square or round neck
• and two choices of sleeve - a little capped sleeve or straight elbow-length one
• it is positively begging for embellishment with ribbon, buttons, ricrac or ruffles.

For the first version, I've made O a top, with the square yoke and capped sleeves.

The yoke is where most of the pretty detail in this pattern lies.  There are pintucks on the front of the yoke, and the front and the back of the top are then gathered to fit the yoke.  Gathers and pintucks require concentration and patience, but aren't difficult, and look much more impressive than the skill required would suggest.

The capped sleeves are the only other part of the design that requires a little fiddling and patience.  I've made gathered capped sleeves before on dolls' clothes, and that was much worse because of the tiny scale required for dolls' clothes.  The way I tackle sleeves is to pin carefully, then tack everything together by hand (with bright contrasting thread) and only then machine sew it all together before snipping out the tacking stitches.

I finished the hem with ribbon, which is a marvellous technique I discovered on the Oliver + S Lazy Days Skirt pattern.

Because this was a first attempt at this top - almost a muslin version - I just used whatever fabric I had to hand.  This is a strawberry printed cotton from Cath Kidston, and is not particularly suitable for dressmaking because it is a little thick and stiff. 

It looks so sweet though, and O does love her strawberries.  The school dress regulation gingham fabric is on order from Doughtys and I think it will drape better than this quilting weight cotton because it is a thinner fabric with a little bit of polyester mixed in.  When I've  saved up some money (ie. fed the children on nothing but jacket potatoes for a week) I will be ordering a whole pile of the Anna Maria Horner voile fabrics from Etsy to make some more summer tops for both O and me.

In the meantime though, both O and I are delighted with this little strawberry top.  The sun has come out just in time to enjoy it properly!

Ten things

• The embroidery hoop is back.  I stitched this lovely little ball of yarn for part of a friend's birthday present.  The pattern is from Sublime Stitching and I just love all her patterns.

• I finished a very good book today.  I started the book yesterday and raced through it in almost one greedy sitting.  The main characters' path to love is close enough to mine and G's to be spooky and slightly confusing.  I was so absorbed in the story that I started to feel that it was our story - just slightly distorted.
• But in the end I realised it wasn't our story at all, and I don't want our ending to be like the book's thank you very much.  So do go and read the book if you haven't already - it is very good.  You must be intrigued enough now!
• I have been revisiting some old, favourite sewing projects and making more of the same.  I've made another bath mat and another letter satchel from Amanda Blake Soule's Handmade Home, and I've made some zip-up pouches from Amy Karol's Bend The Rules Sewing.
• And another project has been revisited.  The beautiful, expensive ribbon that I bought on my trip to Sussex at half-term (and the last time I wrote Ten Things) is now on my denim skirt, and looking very fine indeed.

• It is British Pie Week this week, so go and make yourself a pie!  You know you want to.  I made a very good chicken, celery and leek pie, with a crunchy breadcrumb topping, on Tuesday.
• I've been doing ballet hair again.  I just can't take enough pictures of her like this.

She looks so elegant.

• Helen, over at Angharad Handmade sent me a link to this article about an exhibition of lists which is currently on at The Smithsonian in Washington DC.  I may have to move to Washington DC.  Check out Picasso's list and the wonderful illustrated packing list by Adolf Konrad.
• I made a very chocolately chocolate cake at the weekend.  And I will always love my sister for giving me the recipe.  My sister has many wonderful qualities, but her chocolate-cake-making skills are among some of her finest.

Arctic Mum tagged me for this list.  If you haven't already read her blog, do go and have a look.  I have a cousin who also spends a great deal of time in Norway - working above the arctic circle tracking lynxes - and the photos he emails back, and Arctic Mum's blog, both really make me want to go and explore the country. 

Mind you, not right now.  The temperatures are nicely up here in London, and there are daffs to be admired on the mantelpiece.  It finally feels as though spring has sprung!