The Tidy Fairy

"That's a nice outfit," I said
"I'm The Tidy Fairy, " replied O. "Except I'm dusting becuase I like that better than tidying."
"The Tidy Fairy?"
"Yeah - you know. The one who tidies our bedrooms."

And at that point I realised that 6 year olds don't really get sarcasm.

I won't be saying 'Who do you think tidied your room? The tidy fairy?' any more. I want some credit around here.

Adding to lists

The Isle of Wight is my new favourite place to go on holiday. I have added it to my list of Places I love to visit the most in the UK. We spent a happy five days walking along cliff tops and beaches, taking photos of seaweed, rocks, stones, birds, waves and views. It was warm and sunny, with just the right amount of mist and mystery in the early mornings.

I've added to a few other lists as well.

A favourite list of mine at the moment is Things I am Going To Do When I am Retired. At the moment this list mainly consists of loose travel plans involving long distance hikes, but it is growing rapidly and by the time I am retired (at least thirty years away) I will need a great deal of energy to work my way through it. This week I added Walking around the Isle of Wight Coast to that list. The Isle of Wight is a walker's paradise with hundreds of marked trails, views around every turn and plenty of tea rooms and pubs for mid-walk refreshment.

My Best Smells list has two new additions to it: seaweed and espresso-made-by-G-to-cheer-me-up. My children claim to hate the smell of seaweed - how can this be? It is the essence of a seaside walk. This week I took deep lung-filling breaths as I walked along the empty beaches. Espresso-made-by-G-to-cheer-me-up smells even better than normal coffee does, which is already pretty good. Coffee made with kindness and love (in the face of grouchiness and scowls) is a wonderful thing indeed.

My Things I Can Knit list is coming along nicely too. I finished some mittens for C before we left for our holiday, and while we were away I knitted myself this hat. I love it - mainly because I knitted it, but also because its comfy, looks pretty funky, and ACTUALLY FITS. For any of you out there who also have oddly sized heads, knitting your own hats is the way to go. No more weird red stripes and indentations on my forehead when I take off my hat - hoorah!

14th February

In this house, 14th February is all about birthday love rather than romantic love.

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But this year, somebody is hedging her bets with a reversible Valentine/Birthday note.

Vintage

My brother-in-law was clearing the loft at the house where his parents have lived for the past thirty-five years. He wanted to know if C would like some old copies of The Beano that he had found tucked away.

As every pre-teen child must know, The Beano has recently celebrated its 70th birthday. Indeed the actual ‘Gnashiversary’ fell on a family wedding last year and C was disappointed in my blanket ban of ANY celebratory menacing that day.

C loves The Beano. As I did at his age, as his uncles and aunts did at his age and as probably most children in Britain do at his age. Of course I said yes to the treasures from the loft.

They appeared on Sunday evening, delivered by Uncle Richard in person. About thirty comics from the early 80s and three annuals from the mid 70s. C murmured his thanks, but was already straining his head sideways to read the cover of one of the magazines in his uncle’s arms. He carried on reading until bedtime, even as he lugged his precious loot up the stairs to his room. When I went in to wake him for school on Monday, he was reading. When I got home from work on Monday evening as the children were going to bed, he was still reading.

Today was the same.

He has even taken one to school to show his class (carefully protected in a plastic sleeve he raided from my desk).

I asked C if The Beano had changed much in the last thirty years or so. He didn’t look up from his reading, but did at least reply. He told me he was shocked at how much the price has increased – 14p in 1982 to £1.20 today. And he was even more shocked that Dennis The Menace’s father used to whack him with a slipper when he was naughty. Who would have thought that The Beano would reflect more modern parenting techniques?!

C plans to keep these vintage Beanos for a long time. Until he is grown up and can pass them on to his own children he said (“but only if they’re careful with them – not if they’re going to rip them or anything”). So thank you Uncle Richard – you have made a small boy very happy indeed.

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For those of you who are Sudoku fans, check out Uncle Richard’s Strictly Sudoku site.

East End Knitters

Pinkie Cupcake and I were bemoaning the lack of easily accessible knitting groups. I can trek into Central London of an evening every now and then, but on a regular basis I know its not really going to happen.

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So we've set up a knitting group on Facebook called East End Knitters and the inaugural meeting is next week. If you live locally and would like to come along, then please do get in touch!

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Here is O's first mitten, waiting to be blocked and stitched up. I'm rather pleased with it! The second one is merely a few rows away from completion too. I love the madly pink/red wool - it is Patons Fairytale Color 4 me in colour 4981.

Winter wishes

I hope that Garden Girl woke up to the snow she wished for. There is plenty to spare here.

A Saturday in my life

For a while now, I have been following Willow's blog. And one of my favourite things is her monthly Day In My Life series of posts. I love the little snapshot into her life - the small details are so interesting. Several of the weekend newspapers run regular columns in a similar way - A Life in the Day in The Times and Writers' Rooms in The Guardian. It is peeping into somebody else's world just momentarily, that gives me such a thrill.

So here - as a one off - is a classic winter Saturday in my life. A day neither remarkable nor special, but just lovely in its ordinariness.

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My children are now old enough to give me lie ins, which is AWESOME. I promise that I will never, ever take this for granted after the years of sleepless-baby-and-wide-awake-toddler, which, frankly, scarred my sleeping patterns for life.

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I emerge downstairs at 9:15 to find C and O settled quite happily on the sofa watching CBBC.

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I am wearing my favourite t-shirt of the moment which was Howie's t-shirt of the week sometime last month.

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I appreciate that all you can see is mirror writing, but its still cool, no? No coffee. No workee. That's me.

G sets the table for breakfast and I tuck into a bowl of my homemade muesli.

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I have recently discovered muesli base from Waitrose, which is a mixture of barley, oats, rye and spelt flakes with sunflower and pumpkin seeds. You then customise the base to make precisely the kind of muesli you want. Becuase people are very finicky about muesli. Some cannot abide nuts and some find sultanas all wrong. I like mine with big old chunks of fruit in it so I add lots of chopped prunes, figs, dried strawberries and sultanas.

After breakfast, I discovered that my children have turned into superheroes. They do this quite often. Today I had Clever Party Girl and Bogey Man (Bogey's my name - snot's the game).

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G cycled to a swimming lesson at the endless pool in Canary Wharf and I reclothed the superheroes and then took O to her ballet lesson.

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While O was at ballet, C and I bought croisssants for lunch.

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After lunch I made some bread - a sesame and sunflower seed loaf - and twiddled around on the computer while I drank some coffee.

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G and C did some research for C's project on the Vikings and O made a playmobil forest.

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I knitted.

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My evening at Stitch & Bitch London this week taught me how to increase, put stitch markers in and put stitches on a stitch holder. I'm attempting mittens now! Oh, and if you click into that link and scroll down, you can find a picture of me - looking very serious, concentrating hard and wearing black, which I only ever do if I am at work.

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I cooked a biryani for supper, and then once the children were in bed G and I dug out a DVD to watch.

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We could only manage 10 minutes of Mamma Mia...the singing! the squealing! the hammy acting! no! no! no!

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So here I am, uploading photos, typing my blog and finding out what events are on in Trafalgar Square tomorrow for the Chinese New Year celebrations.

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How has your Saturday been?

Small things

Making small things comes with a disproportionate amount of satisfaction. They are quick, they look cute, they’re simple and they use up those precious scraps of fabric or yarn that cannot be thrown away. What’s not to like?

I’ve been making a great many small things lately. It feels like what I need after all of November and December spent making C’s quilt.

I sneaked in these fabric covered moleskine cahiers in the last few days before Christmas. The instructions are in Last Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts. I love them. They are fun to make and even nicer to give away as presents. Don’t they look pretty?


In the New Year, doing such long hours at work, I stuck to small things that could be tucked into a short sewing session. I decided to make these tiny, fabric bookmarks.


I’m always turning down the corners of catalogues, recipe books and sewing books, and I realised I could easily make some bookmarks with more oddments from my vast basket of scraps.
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My machine was not happy about sewing such thin fabric with a very small seam allowance, and I had a few sweary moments when I started. But a couple of hours later I had over thirty (yes! thirty!) bookmarks with which I am very pleased. And they’re perfect for marking the patterns I want to knit in my new book.


Doll’s clothes are usually a quick and satisfying project. And they’re met with charming excitement by small girls. I made this vintage Cloth Kitty for O for Christmas. She is an exact replica of the one I had at O’s age. I made the doll and her dress by Christmas, but there were other clothes that came in the kit which I didn’t have time to make. Last week I dug the kit out, and in a spare hour thought I’d make the sweet little frilly knickers in the kit.

Goodness me, frilly knickers in doll’s sizes are a complete nightmare. It took me HOURS. The shirring was stressful – I did it by hand in the end. But Hannah, the doll, is pleased with them and so is her owner.

Hannah is now looking through the Mini Boden catalogue dreaming of her summer wardrobe.

And I am moving on to bigger things. The quilt for O will need to be started soon....

What's beside the bedside?

So Ali asked me what was on my bedside table. Jewellery mostly.

There are pots, dishes, bowls, boxes and all sorts of proper places to leave my jewellery at the end of the day, but I never do.

In this picture I can count 10 pairs of earrings, 2 bracelets, one necklace and a brooch. There is another whole part of my bedside table that I didn't photograph.

The little pot of cream is Jasmine Enriching Cream from Neal's Yard and it is the nicest cream in the whole world. It soothes hands, faces, cuts, scrapes, bruises, toes - anything you like. Love it. I have little pots of it scattered around the house, the office and various handbags, so that I am never without.

I don't yet scatter my glasses about - I always have a pair on, or on my bedside table, but judging from my track record with jewellery and Neal's Yard cream, its only a matter of time, surely?

10 leftovers my hens love to eat

• Porridge
• Last night’s cooked vegetables
• Rice
• Couscous
• Pasta (they like their carbs, these girls)
• Apple cores or a whole apple (but they won’t eat just apple peel)
• Raisins
• Grated cheese
• Sweetcorn
• Plain popcorn

Well they might like the sweet or salted versions too, but I’m not that indulgent. Sheesh.

A video of my hens at breakfast time today. Queenie is the supremely fat (and greedy) black and white speckled one at the back. Daisy is the white one. She's the leader of the flock, and looking a bit smaller than the others because she's just finished her moult. Maud is the fluffy grey one at the front.