New House

We are in our new house now, it has been two long weeks of packing and moving, but we are nearly there, a few more things to move at the weekend, like the sofa, and then we are all done.

I have been trying to sort some stuff, particularly the items we had in storage, but there is so much to do. I made some progress yesterday by putting all the utility room items in the utility room and finding plenty of shelves to put them all on.

I made up some of my new Ikea purchases, a table for my craft room and a bookcase for the kitchen. We still need to make our new bedside tables and I have one of our existing bookcases to put back together.

We are not having a real tree afterall, just my tiny artificial one so all the decorations I have made are now hanging on the kitchen cupboard doors.

I am looking forward to getting things sorted and being able to start making some things for the new house.

More Christmas Decorations

I made some more Christmas decorations last weekend. My mum sent me some pieces of Christmas fabric, I now have loads of lovely patterns to play with, I should really do something patchwork to make best use of them.



I have made some padded felt hearts with Christmas fabric on one side. They looks really lovely, especially the ones where I have embroidered the fabric with gold thread. I love playing around with some hand sewing making small things like these hearts, but I should really get back to making some Christmas presents or I will run out of time, especially as we should be completing on our house on the 2nd December.

Christmas Wrapping and Decorations

I have been wrapping Christmas presents. I think that they are looking lovely considering they are wrapped in a random selection of used wrapping paper and tags made from old cards.

I have made some more Christmas Decorations today, a yellow bauble edged with gold beads, not quite as round as it should be!

These square decorations are made from some printed fabirc, I have stitched some of the gold lines with gold thread.

I have had time to do a little baking as well, some tea cakes, a chocolate cake with cherries on top, and some chocolate muffins.

Christmas Decorations

These are the first Christmas decorations I have made this year. I thought I would start with some felt ones, I had a look on Folksy to see what other people were doing, (I have no intention of selling these) there are some lovely things being made, I especially like some of the ceramic decoration I have seen.

We should be in our new house by Christmas so it would be lovely to fill it with homemade decorations. I have a lovely advent calendar wall hanging I made last year, and my husband said he would make some paper chains, I thought we could use magazines for these.

I really want to have a recycled Christmas, I dont think we will need to buy and wrapping paper or gift tags, I saved loads of paper from last Christmas and used last years cards for tags. I am going to look out in charity shops for some nice baubles (I am hoping for a big tree this year, I normally use my 3 foot tall artificial tree, it wont be big enough for the new house). Unfortunately with buying the house we haven't had enough money to buy presents that are as ethical as I would have liked, one year it will all come together and I will have my idea of the perfect 'green' Christmas. 

Postcards From Penguin

I just had to buy this when I saw it. A book shaped box of 100 postcards featuring Penguin covers. The perfect companion to my Penguin Donkey and a must for a book lover who loves anything book related.
http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141044668,00.html?id=email&link=postcards

House!

We are buying a house! While that does mean lots of boring things like mortgages, solicitors, packing and actually moving, it also means looking at wallpaper, reading lots of Elle Decoration and planning where all the furniture should go. So far I have picked out the following things for the living room.

Sandersons Dandelion Clock wallpaper

Ella sofa from Habitat, the fabric colours go very well with the wallpaper and will create a lovely retro look.

Knitted Kokeshi Doll

I knitted this lovely Kokeshi style doll as a present for my sister who loves Japanese things. I found the pattern on Flutterby Patch's blog. It is basically a simple tube, but with clever embroidery and the cute little hands it looks like a much more complicated pattern.

I made a tiny flower to add to her head to give her a bit more detail, rather than the top knot in the original pattern.

She is so cute I will have to make myself one now!