Later I have plans to cut out a skirt…also in pink…but to do so I will have to go back on part of the other part of my protest…you see I am knitting at the moment, I am not tidying the house. I have declared Sunday an official day of rest….

Why am I protesting ? Thank you for asking… I am protesting because the boys (apart from Spider) are at Silverstone doing something motorsport related. They set off early…so it was not until about an hour ago that I realised that they had failed to stack the dishwasher and clear up after their barbecue last night. The kitchen is a tip..the kitchen that I tidied up yesterday…

So sod the housework, someone else can do it !!!  (Except there is of course no such thing as the housework fairy, but a girl can dream !).

Also, I’m not really awake, having been woken at 2am by a small boy with the runs…he’s fine now…but I probably need to put the washing machine on later…oh and buy some toilet roll…sorry, too much information I guess…but doing the washing is only to get rid of the smell…it’s not housework

But for now, I knit…later I will clear the cat hair off the landing and vacuum…but only so I can cut a skirt out you understand, not because I want the house tidy…it’s not housework.

I know, I know, if I actually want to sew the skirt up I will have to tidy the dining room up so I can get the machine out…

See, even when I want a day without housework it still creeps up on me

But for now I’m knitting…and it’s pink….I don’t even like pink really

Add to that being lost in DIY hell… at Christmas we realised that we had been back in the house after the rebuild for 5 years…so perhaps it was time we finished tiling the bathrooms and the kitchen…but before we finished tiling the kitchen Husband decided we needed 2 more cupboards from IKEA…but then we got the flu… and then after we built the cupboards Husband decided that we needed to reseal the wooden surfaces…

In the meantime I’d arranged for a furniture restorer to take away a family heirloom…a 4 ft x 4ft x 120m chest of drawers to be stripped and restored whilst I painted the dining room… of course the delays to the kitchen tiling meant that it all happened at once so the dining room (where I sew) has been out of commission since before Easter…and  I have been less than popular with the rest of the family since I moved the contents of the dining room into the downstairs bathroom meaning that for a short time we became a 1 toilet family !

Work has also been pretty stressful as pretty much my whole caseload turned litigious just after Christmas…and then the boss went on holiday for 2 weeks and I had to “act up” in his absence….

So to be honest I haven’t been “feeling the love” when it comes to knitting….I’ve lacked inspiration…and as for sewing…well I’ve been feeling a bit blocked due to body issues ( I went back on the Matt Roberts programme which eats into knitting/sewing time) plus I still haven’t finished that 3rd bag…partly because the sewing machine is in the bathroom…partly because  I have a mental block…it’s hard to finish things when you no longer feel the love…

Anyway…new month…new attitude… especially if Husband finishes regrouting the floor in the dining room so that I can put everything back together again

It came as a surprise to realise as I was standing on the train platform this morning that I was wearing no less than 5 me made items…ok so by the time I was catching the train home I had discarded 2 of them and my coat (Yay ! It’s spring at last!!!)

So the 2 discards first…a bright pink hat (wurm…not yet blogged or photographed) and a great scrunchable scarf in a shade of teal  (hmmm maybe I should pay more attention to co ordinating my outfits…but then that would involve more co ordination of my wardrobe palette…maybe sometime…but not yet).

Knitted socks…because I don’t have any decent  shoes at the moment and I’m still wearing winter boots  (note to self: Buy some spring appropriate shoes…or shall I wait to see if the nice weather lasts)

A fitted tunic style jumper in lilac…well I guess that goes with the pink hat…and possibly the scarf  (incidentally has anyone checked out Catkin yet ? Isn’t it stunning yet simple…)…I can’t post a picture of it unfortunately as I am a long way behind with photographing things…

and finally a skirt… yes I have made a skirt that I am happy to wear to work…unfortunately I haven’t made any others…

So today I made my debut in Me Made May…and it is also my finale…. hey it was fun whilst it lasted…

I probably should say “hello again” and “how are you all ?”. I hadn’t intended to be away for almost 2 weeks but I sort of got caught up in things and the next thing I knew it was the other side of Easter…

So the last time I was here I was bemoaning the temporary shattering of my skirt dream…well what do you do when you have your dreams shattered ? Er, well sulk for a few days and then try something else, something you know will work. Yep, did that…only that went and bit me on the backside too (it was another skirt)…so I sulked some more …and then did something I knew would work as I’ve already made 2 of them…and it doesn’t involve me having to wear it and look in the mirror.

The problem is the more I have made of these the less happy I have been…in fact I think I got it right first time with this…even if I did make a mess of the binding…ok enough blathering…I am talking about THIS

So this is the outside…or it might be the inside because THIS is the reversible Bucket Bag from The Bag Bible…only I didn’t have enough of the polka dots so the outside also has a left and a right side

and then this is the inside or possibly the outside

The polka dot version was made April 2012 and then in July I made it again as a present for Spider’s teacher….

So then I started making a third version is September as I still wasn’t happy with how I attached the binding…only this one was made with that denim/Camo fabric that I used for the Treasure Pocket Trousers  (aka the trousers of doom)…the material that broke my machine… this third one has not been a happy experience at all and it’s taken a lot lot longer than it should because I’m just not having fun…or I wasn’t…it’s been pretty much finished since December, apart from the binding…

The binding, which also forms the handles is 50mm bias binding…not sold in many shops and where it is the colours are limited, so you have to make your own…and that is just not a fun experience…at least making the larger size isn’t as it’s not as easy to make as the narrower which work quite well with tutorials such as this...

Anyway, after having my butt kicked by the second skirt I decided to try a bit of spring cleaning in all areas of life and bit the bullet and made the bias binding. The bag is for a friend so I will post about it later when it finally gets delivered…which hopefully will be after I have found my camera…which is currently buried by the other thing I’ve been doing…which can wait for another day…

I have been lurking Anna (Paunnet blog) for some time and slowly reading my way through her archives…so I felt I could enter her giveaway without feeling guilty…and besides with such lovely By Hand London patterns to give away there would be lots of entries so my chances were slim…

But no, when the name came out of the hat for the Charlotte skirt it was me !

I am very excited and very very grateful to Anna…

Previously I would have avoided a pencil skirt on the grounds that girls with big hips and backsides should steer themselves towards A lines…but on recent evidence (since January I have managed to make 2 long straight skirts)..it may be that this shapely skirt might be a better bet !

However some of the things the lovely  Cat said during the session have stuck in my head one of which was that we tend to gravitate naturally to the colours that suit us (she was explaining that having your colours done was away of extending your colour range into things you might not have thought about and thus extending your wardrobe…and I think she may be right as I have never met a red I didn’t like (and that didn’t like me in return), my wardrobe has a lot of red in it and so does the colour wallet I carry around. My wallet also has several greens which I have always avoided and several blues…

I think the same can be said of clothing styles and maybe we should trust ourselves more than advice from fashion gurus…for example  I have a long body and very short legs.  The advice out there says I should end my skirts just above my knee because this will make my legs look longer, whereas skirts that finish on the knee or just below the knee will make me look shorter.

What the magazines don’t usually say is that you also have to take width into account. My widest point is my hip and thigh area and as  I have recently discovered, if I stop my skirts above my knee it actually emphasises how wide I am AND oddly how short my legs are. Looking in my wardrobe I see that pretty much all my skirts are long and I mean long long. We are not talking stopping just below the knee here but mid calf to just above the ankle sort of long.

The strange thing is I can’t remember how this happened. I just know that since age 17 or 18 I have by and large gravitated towards long skirts. I remember a couple of shorter ones but they tended to be very tailored and usually accompanied by a suit jacket.

“Ahhh” says the Fashion Guru “so you are a girl with wide hips. You need an A line skirt to emphasise your waist and skim lightly over your hips”

Ha, remember this from about 3 years ago

Well that’s me in a self drafted loosely fitting A line which stops pretty much on my knees. I’d assumed the issue here was the elasticated waist. Well I guess partly it is but partly I think it may be the length. If I shorten it I think I’m still going to look wide…so maybe I should go long ?

Yesterday I made a muslin for the Colette Ginger. It is a classic A line skirt. I had to grade between sizes as I am considerably less wide at the waist than I am at the hips. It fits at the hips and then flares slowly down stopping I think at the knee…and…well…lets just say I was in too much shock to take photos. You must remember that I have been dreaming about this skirt for over a year now. I have made so many fabulous versions in my head. I just wasn’t ready for real life ! Husband, who has been an admirer of the female form for many years and can be counted on for an honest assessment said “It makes you look wide all the way down, the “A” shape keeps on widening you !”

I may take photos later after I’ve basted the zipper back in but I think I need to take it over to my Mum for a consult, because whereas Husband is an honest opinion, Mum  is a sewist and can help with alteration options such as:

a)  Make it not so fitted at the hip so that it drapes a bit more

b) Make it out of a material with more drape, the muslin is a thick old curtain

c) Make it longer

d) Make it shorter (doubt it)

e) Take out some of the flare so it’s not so wide at the hem

f) choose another pattern !

I think the problem I have here is that I gravitated early to a shape that I looked passable in and clung to it the way a survivor does to the shipwreck. I don’t know what other shapes suit me because I’ve never experimented… whereas other teenage girls I grew up with loved shopping I always found it a trial…remember the communal changing rooms of the 80′s ???

I know I can’t rely on fashion style advice because it’s all too general, talking about “Apples”, “Pears” and “Triangles” whereas really we tend to be a bit of one shape and a bit of the other.  Me I’m an hourglass fading into pear…I’m a standard size on the top but a petite below the waist…

I think possibly I need to go and see Cat again and make use of her wardrobe consultation service…at least that is specific…

So it has been a relief to have a day off to wait in for a delivery…and then half way through the morning I got a nice surprise when the postman delivered me a pattern I’d won in someone elses Giveaway. Now I don’t enter may giveaways because I’m more of a lurker than a commentator so I feel very very lucky to have won (will talk about the prize later)…and I think it’s about time I had a giveaway.

It’s not really a giveaway it’s more a “can anyone find a home for this and love it better than I did !”

The item or item will go to the first person who emails me or comments below offering to provide a home. Also there is no deadline…I don’t get enough traffic on here to do it any other way to be honest…

First up the St Denis  Magazine Premier Issue by Veronik Avery

I bought this in 2010 as it was the only place then that had Ysolda Teagues long Vintage Button Gloves which  I think has since been published in Whimsical Knits 3…

Second we have the Burda Magazine January 2013 from which I have made a skirt (yes I’ve actually sewn something !) but can’t honestly see myself making anything else out of it

and finally there is Style 2845 which is a boys pattern for “sporty separates to mix and match.  I don’t know a lot about this to be honest it was probably published in the 1990′s as Husband’s ex wife passed it on when Spider was born.  It has sizing from age 2 to age 7 . There are 20 pieces total, I’m afraid I don’t know if they are all there.  It’s  for a hoodie a jacket and track suit bottoms or shorts. Recommended fabrics are knits, jersey or sweatshirt fleece.

If you are interested then please provide contact details and let me know which item you want…I can be reached from the comments below or   currantbun AT appetiteforcake dot co dot uk

The pattern is Girasole by Jared Flood, Girasole is I believe french for sunflower.

It was originally intended for my friend the welsh goddess as a 40th birthday present…she is an august baby…I started knitting it in the July and had it finished by the november…it then sat in my WIP basket until the March when I finally got around to blocking it.

Blocking as you probably know involves drying it “under tension” you pin the wet garment out slightly stretched and when it dries it stays in the stretched position which has the joint benefit of:

a) you have a slightly larger garment

b) The stitch pattern looks better as the stitches have been “opened” out

The problem was that aside from my stepsons bed I had nowhere to block it and of course I always remembered it needed doing on a friday night when he arrived and had forgotten about it by the sunday when he left ! So it took rather a long time to reach the blocking stage.

Then…well…you see my friend the Welsh Goddess is an absolute Goddess of a woman, tall, statuesque with va va voom…lovely, but our limbs as a rule are in proportion to our height and yes the Welsh Goddess has quite an “ape index”  (ape index is a climbing term relating to the length of your arms) compared to a short a*se like me AND the va va voom factor means…well in short, my lovely shawl was too small…it makes a good scarflette, but not a good head and shoulders or even shoulders covering shawl…

I tried just before Christmas to reblock it to see if I could get some more stretch out of it, I did but not enough…

It was redirected  as a present for someone else, who seemed delighted with it, but who can really tell with handknitted  presents (or relatives) ?  I’m waiting for inspiration to strike again before August comes round again… or maybe I just reknit Girasole on slightly larger needles… because it is a really lovely pattern…

yarn: Regia Sock yarn(4ply)

The big lost thing is my knitting mojo. I’ve not knitted a thing since the 28th January, actually that’s not true I did frog and reknit some cuffs but that’s it. There’s hardly anything that needs finishing and I just can’t find the enthusiasm to start anything…

…hoping that these losses are temporary…

The found are not really found, but they make me happy.  I came back from work yesterday to find 3 patterns from Sewaholic - I went on a small shopping spree the other week to cheer myself up after such a horrible February – spurred on by Tasia’s birthday discount. Today, waiting for me was Cake pattern’s Pavlova…oh and the sun was found by all..at last !

The sudden influx of patterns to this house has started to get me a bit jittery as last year I purchased 4 patterns from Colette and as yet haven’t  made a start on any of them, and that’s on top of the Colette sewing handbook and Gerties book…I don’t know if it is a streak of puritanism or a streak of miserliness but I feel guilty about spending money on things if they don’t then get used…or possibly it’s just I fear clutter which is why I don’t really want to build up too big a stash of yarn, fabric or patterns.

ve never bothered doing giveaways on here as there isn’t much blog traffic but I am vaguely thinking of possibly the occasional giveaway of things surplus to requirement, that someone else can find a better home for…

Possibly first to go will be  kids casual pattern  Style 2845 which is for tracksuit tops and bottoms for boys age 2-7. I think it is all there and all the sizes still intact, I’ve not investigated in full, possibly inherited it from Husband’s ex-wife…It’s surplus to requirement as I have a Burda pattern in slightly larger sizes for the same sort of thing…

 Last Saturday I had the following conversation

 Me   “so who do you want to dress up as for world book day ?”

Spider “Butler”

Me “er…why ?”

Spider “Because then I can take …(insert long list of assorted guns and records)  and a Victorian cosh to school”

 Butler for those who haven’t come across him is the bodyguard in the Artemis Fowl books by Eoin Colfer. Butler is Eurasian. Spider is not. Butler is tall, very tall. Spider is 1.25 m. Butler is approximately as wide across the shoulder as he is tall. If Spider turns sideways he pretty much disappears…oh and according to Artemis Fowl “The Arctic Incident” Butler has a shaved head…I used the clippers on Spider once when he was 18 months old and swore never again, my boy looks better with hair !

 Apart from the above mentioned difficulties, it is actually pretty easy to dress Spider as Butler…OK so it is unlikely that anyone is going to recognise that Spider and Butler are one and the same for the purposes of world book day and will simply assume that Spider is going to a funeral !

 Butler wears a suit (a designer suit as he’s a very well paid bodyguard). No problem. School trousers (black)?check. White button up school shirt ? check (thank you sainsbury’s ). Black Tie ? Check (thank you Husband). Armani Black button up suit jacket ?…hold that thought…

 At the time of our conversation I was slowly cutting out and sewing up the Easy Linen Shirt from Sewing for Boys…   I was unenthusiastic and had misgivings. Not with the pattern you understand, the problem was Spider. The ELS is, to be frank, a smock and at almost 8, Spider is beginning to have his own ideas about clothing and at 8 I guess you have to start moving away from the cute stuff you can get away putting smaller children in…at least with boys in any event.

 I just couldn’t for the life of me come up with any plan for the ELS that I thought Spider would go for, apart from a light cotton denim, or what I eventually went for which was a plain black cotton with a contrasting collar, jazzed up a bit by a ribbon around the bottom and maybe some iron on patches…

 The more I sewed though the more unsure I became and I gave up having completed pretty much all of it apart from the collar and one side seam.

 So where were we ? Ah yes, a designer suit jacket in black…”Mum !!!!”

 Spider is fortunate to have an A 1 Grandma. She took the Easy Linen Shirt, finished the side seam, unpicked my front centre seam, drafted her own suit collar, recut the neck and attached the new collar, added button holes and some large black buttons…Spider also has a star of a Granddad who donated the buttons off his suit  (I promise to sew them back on Dad)…

 Resulting in…

Oh and Mum even made a soft Victorian cosh…

Pattern: Easy Linen Shirt from sewing for boys

Material:  100% Black Cotton from Royal Fabrics in Leamington Spa

Thread:  Coats Duet in a dark charcoal

New: Working in collaboration !!!

Thanks Mum