To Dry For

It's been another busy week and so another slow one on the blogging front. I spent a brilliant weekend in Glasgow seeing the wonderful Ben Folds play on Friday night (I got myself an awesome t-shirt as well, check it out below), made even better by the fact that he played Still Fighting It, Bitches Ain't Shit AND Army, my 3 all time favourite songs of his. Saturday was spent learning crochet, sewing and knitting at The Life Craft, a nice but slightly strange experience that at one point involved the police and a member of staff's full-on life story, I'll blog about that later on in the week once I'm a bit more caught up with work. We stayed with our friends Mikael and Claire, watched films, ate home-made waffles and generally caught up on the chat. It was lovely.



I'm trying to be organised about presents at the moment, since I have so much going on at uni and I know closer to exams I'm not going to want to think about it. I promised my friend Alison I'd buy her this amazing Corgi teatowel from To Dry For for her birthday, which isn't until June but while I was browsing the site I saw 2 more that would be perfect as presents so I just ordered them, free shipping as well! I can't show you the other two since they're for folk who might read my blog, but I thought I'd share with you my other favourites from the site instead. There are so many amazing designs, you should definitely check them out and the postage is pretty cheap, even internationally. I'm going to frame the ones I've bought to give as art for the wall, they're too nice to use to dry dishes!



These are the ones I'd buy for myself if I had any spare pennies:

Triceratops Meat Chart



I love Robert Ryan and this teatowel is no exception. It would make a great Valentines gift.



Make Do and Mend, I'd definitely hang this one in my craft room!



Can't wait for my order to arrive, I'll definitely be blogging about the 2 I can't show you as soon as the birthdays have passed!

For my future kitchen

I seem to be spending a lot of time at the moment dreaming about my future craft plans, but not getting a huge amount of time to actually do any of them. It's a most depressing state of affairs, the cardigan is growing very slowly, the thrifted wooden box has completely ground to a halt and the tapestry swallows are feeling rather naked. I haven't even begun to think about my 2011 project plans...oh dear...



Well, dear friends, here's another stalled project, sat waiting the right time in the future. Apologies for the rubbish photo, today is rather grey in Edinburgh. I bought this from an amazingly cheap charity shop for the princely sum of £2 thinking I would paint it and put it up in the kitchen for my growing collection of thrifted and vintage crockery. I envisaged painting it duck-egg blue or soft dove grey and screwing little brass hooks for my teacups into the edges of the shelves. It was going to look amazing...until I got it home and realised that the walls in our kitchen are lath and plaster and so won't be able to take the weight of all that wood and china. Sigh.

Ah well, it's currently residing in the pantry, awaiting the next house which hopefully will have strong enough walls. Only another 18 months until graduation and house moving...

In the meantime, here's what I'm thinking it will look like in the end:

From Shabby Chic Furniture, this is for sideways plates rather than face on, but I love this colour. I like the sideways storage because you can get more in it, but I prefer face on because you can actually see the plates.



Vintage style kitchen storage - this is what I'm thinking, but less sweet and sickly, my crockery is more a mix of colours and styles and I want to paint the storage unit a calm, neutral colour so the plates do the talking, without looking overwhelming. I love the crockery in this one though!



This one from The Orchard Home and Gifts is exactly what I'm thinking, right down to the colour and the 'worn' look and the backing paper (though mine's backless so I won't be able to do that). But £147.50?!? Nae way! I'll do mine for £2 plus the cost of paint thank you very much. I even already have the brass screws. Thrift at its best!

Finally finished Frances' bathmat!

I wanted to make the title 'Finally finished Frances' Fathmat' so it was alliteration but that would be a bit silly after all. Here's the work in progress post and here is the finished object!

It's a bit wonky and the anchor hasn't shown up as well as I'd like, I should have used thicker thread or done more of a block outline rather than a line outline (if that makes sense?!) but seeing as it's 4 months late already, I feel like I should just cut my losses and get it in the post. Gosh, looking at the picture, you can barely see the anchor against those lines! I'm a terrible friend, to everyone reading this, I solemnly promise to be better organised at keeping in touch when I graduate.



Also, check out these amazing tartan skirts I thrifted over the weekend. I'm considering keeping the blue one and just shortening it, though I'm not sure I've got anything that would go with it! It's such lovely material though, 100% wool, I don't really want to part with them. But since they were both over my budget for buying for my Etsy shop anyway, I feel like they're going to have to work for their keep and will have to be listed. I might hold onto them for a little while though, just so I can stroke them from time to time...

Etsy shop update

Apologies for the mini-blog break everybuddy, my folks came up on Thursday to celebrate my Dad's 54th and my Grandad's 80th birthdays so I spent Tuesday and Wednesday evenings frantically cleaning the flat and catching up on work before they arrived.

Also, apologies for never sharing the full photos of the Etsy shop preview I teased you all with last week, it was a gorgeous thick handknitted aran cardigan that I was all set to list in the shop until my Mum took a fancy to it this weekend and bought it off me! Unfortunately the weather was too miserable to take a decent photo of it before they left this morning (and we were drunk or walking the dogs for the rest of the time so no photography happened there either). Still, I quickly reinvested the money on Saturday when Mum and I went thrifting and I came back with these 2 jumpers and 2 amazing wool tartan skirts, one of which I'm considering keeping and shortening for me to wear. Mum also bought me 2 vintage tweed wool suits for £15 each, a complete bargain and a lovely surprise gift when Mum insisted on paying. I'm going to have to wait for someone to help me photograph them and I want to take up one of the skirts, but they're AMAZING!

In the meantime though, check out these beauties...

Vintage 1980s Scottish fair isle jumper 1



Vintage 1980s Scottish fair isle jumper 2

Inverness photo shoot

I took advantage of having a garden a few weeks back when Andrew and I visited his folks in Inverness to have a bit of a photo shoot. Andrew makes for a good camera man, he directed me to stand and look in certain ways to avoid my usual photo catastrophes of double chin/stupid expression/eyes closed. I made sure to wear make up to avoid the Shiny/Red Face Effect (although sometimes this strikes even when I'm wearing make up) and overall I'm pretty pleased with the results.

You can check the listings out over in the clothing section of the shop, although you might have seen these on the blog before, these photos were an improvement on some of the grainy or dark or fuzzy photos that were the best I could manage by myself in the flat.

Vintage Scottish fairisle cardigan



Vintage handknit sweatervest



Vintage handknit cabled blue jumper



Vintage handknit black lace jumper



Vintage yellow sweater vest with flower buttons



Lets hope they find nice homes!

Work in progress: bathmat

Years ago I made this bathmat from knitted t-shirts. It's practical but as my first attempt, it's pretty wonky and ugly. It's the back-up bathmat for the second one I made, which is pretty much used every day except the 2 days it takes to wash and dry it! I like this one much better, it's less wonky because I worked out that I had to try and cut the t-shirts the same width each time, otherwise you end up with one really thick row followed by one really thin (you can see a work in progress photo over here). As you can see this still didn't quite work in this one either but at least I know where I went wrong!



I'm not entirely happy with this one still though, if I was to make it again I'd try and choose my colours better, this one is a bit random and not in a good way. It's because I was just using up what t-shirts I had when Andrew's old flatmate gave me a load to craft with, I'd like to make it again without the wonky edges and with more of a chosen colour scheme. For the moment though, I'm happy to just use what I have, I'm in no great hurry to try making another one, it took me ages to cut up those t-shirts and knit with them!



On the subject of bathmats (now there's a sentence), I'm in the process of making a jaunty nautical-themed bath mat for Frances' new house. I say new, she moved into this house back in November and I promised I'd make her a bath mat as a house warming present, since I made her last one and apparently they used it until it fell to pieces. I like the style of that one, but I wanted something quicker this time, since I'm already 3 months late! So I ditched the patchwork idea and just went with a big rectangle instead. I thought I'd jolly it up a bit with an embroidered anchor but I'm not sure it's going to look very good in the end. I figure I'm so late though, I'll just have to finish it up and send it off, I can make up for it's rubbishness with an extra special birthday present in April!

Another Etsy update

Why does the weekend go so quickly? When I was studying Zoology in Aberdeen, I had a reasonably busy timetable for a student but still had plenty of free time to relax and indulge my non-uni past times. Vet medicine, on the other hand, feels more like a proper job but you PAY to be there and don't clock off at 5.30pm, instead coming home to study until 10.30 at night until you collapse into bed in a semi-comatose state with images of infected joints and words like 'bilateral tarsocrural arthroscopy' flashing in front of your eyes. Then at the weekend you spend the day cooped up in your tiny, windowless study for 8 hours at a time, ploughing through never-ending pages of notes, trying desperately to stay as far behind as you were on Friday, never mind catching up, just trying not to slip any further back. Only to either scrape passes in exams, being happy with 2% past the pass mark, or just downright fail and have to repeat the whole process in the summer, while everyone else is off to Thailand making out with elephants or whatever, psh, sounds rubbish anyway. Meanwhile your boyfriend resents you for not being able to a) save for a flat because you have no money, b) go on holiday because you have no money or c) move to a flat with a garden so you can get a dog because...you guessed it...you have no money. And you can't get married until you graduate. And your mum resents you for the amount of money being spent on your apparently unending education.

But at least you chose to go to vet school!

Le sigh.



Here are some recent additions to the Etsy shop, vintage floral fat quarters, made from thrifted bedsheets.

Etsy shop update

Just 1 item to show you, though I have 3 more sets of these waiting on the ironing board to be ironed and photographed and probably another 2 sets to cut out and a set of odd bits to iron and list...and and and...that's a lot of ands!

Bundle of 14 vintage cotton fat quarters over in the shop





I also thrifted a lovely little something yesterday for the shop that's currently in the process of being washed and dried, here's a wee sneaky preview:

Inspiration

Things that have inspired me this week...

Adventures in Dressmaking is doing a blog swap with Sweetie Pie Bakery and I love this idea of this men's shirt to tunic tutorial. I've got my eye on several of Andrew's old shirts!



Ayumi of Pink Penguin wrote this post full of amazing photos from Tokyo's quilt festival. Some of my favourites:







Sew Happy Geek at Excell Crafts posted this brilliant purse with exterior card pocket tutorial, I plan to have a go at it over the weekend!



What are your plans for the weekend? ♥

Halibut and Herring review

Just up the road from me is a lovely little gift shop called Halibut and Herring. It's so cute and quirky, they sell a range of handmade soaps and bath bombs (mostly made in Scotland and they smell divine!) as well as handmade bags, purses and cushions and random little gift things like a hedgehog shaped nail brush or bath crayons (to draw on tiles in the bathroom!) or a rubber duck with a doctors outfit on (I want this, he looks like a vet!). At the moment they have a range of gorgeous velvet (to continue the velvet theme) bags and cushions, I couldn't find a photo on the internet and I felt a bit weird photographing them in the shop but they're deep teals and mustards with birds and tree patterns, so pretty!



The shop itself is painted really bright colours, I especially like the teal theme they seem to have going and every time I've been in the shop workers have been lovely, greeting you with a cheery "hello!", and "goodbye!" or "thank you!" when you're leaving. Halibut and Herring has a nice range of prices as well, you could pick up a little gift for a couple of pounds or a proper present for £20-30 or more.



The window display is always very eye catching, it makes me want to go in and buy everything or run home and frantically sew all night. I love this scotty dog hot water bottle cover, so cute!



So if you're ever in Bruntsfield or Morningside, be sure to check out Halibut and Herring!

P.S. If you're into sewing and have a minute or two to spare, have a go at Sewaholic's questionnaire. It's for her business class and the sooner she graduates, the sooner we all get lovely new Sewaholic patterns to play with! I hope the link works, I've done it already so it might just direct you to a 'you've already done this survey' page but if that happens, you can check out the original link over on Sewaholic.net.

Tapestry swallows

I have a bit of a thing for tapestry. I feel quite hypocritical because when Danny and I were younger, we used to laugh at the lady who lived across the road from us because she had a tapestry bag. Being in our early teens, we thought this was just the saddest thing EVER and used to mock her mercilessly behind her back. I'm so ashamed. The irony is, I love tapestry now, one day I'm going to be that middle aged, slightly frumpy lady with the tapestry bag that the obnoxious teens across the street will laugh about. Circle of life and all that, eh?

My current purse is tapestry, as is my favourite clutch bag. I have a pair of lovely thrifted tapestry cushions and now have just been gifted this half-finished tapestry of swallows from Andrew's mum.



It used to belong to his Granny, until she couldn't really see well enough to sew anymore, so it came to Viv when they cleared her house after she died. She's in the process of sorting through her house now, since they've had 2 grandparents die in the past 3 years the house is FULL of amazing vintage treasures (and quite a lot of rubbish!) so a lot of it is being passed onto Andrew and I. Some of it I'm under strict instructions to sell on Ebay for her and some is for us to keep and use ourselves. I really like this tapestry, I'm going to finish it off and make it into a cushion cover I think.

Vintage and fake fur - yay or nay?

I had a brief debate with my friend Alison recently, after she got rather annoyed (and slightly heckled) a girl in the street wearing a fur coat. On passing glance, I couldn't tell if the coat was fake or not but that, Alison stated, was not the point. Fake fur these days is so convincing as to be almost impossible to distinguish from the real thing (this theme popped up over on Did You Make That? recently as well) and thus possibly compounds the idea that wearing fur is somehow fashionable, attractive and, as Karen from the aforementioned blog put it, "something to aspire to."

Since talking about it with Alison, I seem to be reading about fur everywhere. Debi over on My happy sewing place recently posted about a lovely 1940s jacket she made for herself, out of fake fur. It is gorgeous and she looks stunning in it, but again the question pops into my head, if it looks just like the real thing, how is it any different to wearing the real thing?

I don't have a problem with fake fur (I have sewn with it in the past), I think that it isn't directly fueling demand for the unecessary rearing and slaughter of animals for their pelts and besides the environmental aspects of the non-renewable energy and resources used in its creation (which is a whole topic unto itself and not restricted to fake fur at all), it is no more inethical in my eyes than wearing a jacket made out of any other material. The main argument I've heard for not wearing fake fur is, as above, it can be difficult to tell apart from the real thing and therefore could be indirectly promoting the use of real fur.

My main problem with this argument is that I don't think it's the duty of the person who's wearing the coat to provide a role model for others. If you chose to wear a real fur coat because you don't have a problem with the ethics then I feel it's a free country and you have just as much right to do that as I do to wear leather shoes or denim jeans. If other people look at you and think, "wow, I love her coat, I want one" and go out and buy the real thing, that's their choice and ethics, not yours and you're not responsible for their choices. It's like if I was wearing a fairtrade, organic, cotton sundress and someone who saw me in the street liked it so much they bought a non-fairtrade, non-organic version for themselves, I wouldn't feel responsible that they hadn't made the same ethical choices as me when it came to choosing that dress.



Now, I feel as a disclaimer I should write here that I'm maybe a bit biased. I have a vintage fake fur coat that I inherited from my Great-Grandma and I love it (especially at the moment as with my tweed jacket out of action, it's the only non-vet jacket I own that's warm enough to handle the snow!). I feel I should also state that I don't have a massive problem with vintage fur in principle either, I feel that since the animal is already dead, it would be waste and a death in vain if that item of clothing were just sent to landfill. I don't think I would buy a real fur vintage coat, but if I were to inherit one, I certainly wouldn't have a problem wearing it.

Here's one way to save vintage fur from the landfill, fur pillows. From The Coat Check. Bet they would be snuggly and warm...



I can completely understand where people are coming from with the other side of the argument, both with fake and vintage real fur. There's an episode of River Cottage where Hugh shoots some rabbits, cooks and eats the meat and then makes clothing from the pelts. If all fur clothing were made this way, I wouldn't have a problem with that either, but I could definitely understand people who did.

Woah, you can totally see through my top! Ha!



It's a tricky subject and can be so emotive for some people, but I firmly believe in truth through debate. Thanks to Alison for getting me thinking! ♥

Velvet love

I mentioned a few weeks back that I was planning on making a velvet skirt and since then I've been thinking about it a lot. I want to start it in the not-too-distant future but since I have a stack of more pressing uni stuff to get through first, I'm resorting to living my velvet dreams vicariously through Etsy.

Here are a few of my favourites...

I've been an avid reader of Clever Nettle for a while now and almost every shop update Anja posts I want to buy something! If this lovely dress was my size, I'd snap it up in an instant.



Tweed AND velvet?! Where do I sign up?! From Melissa Tabor, she has lots of lovely tweed clothing in her shop.



This lovely winter woods skirt is from Made with love by Hannah and comes with a detachable bird brooch.



I'm also still pining over the delicious blue velvet dress from Bohemia. Le sigh...to have money...

P.S. I'll be taking a wee break from blogging over the weekend, I'm off to Inverness for Andrew's Dad's birthday!

Work in progress Wednesday

This is my first ever submission to Work in Progress Wednesday with Tami's Amis. Hopefully this will encourage me to take more photos of my works in progress, rather than waiting until they're finished!



Check out my cardigan, see how it's grown! I love this wool, it's from New Lanark and the colour is called blueberry. There are so many cute colours of wool in that shop, if this cardigan works then I'm definitely going back for some bramble, pebble and heather. I should do a review of New Lanark at some point, it's a lovely place for a day out!



I had a scary moment last week where I thought this was coming out too large, but luckily I rechecked my guage and I think I'm safe! It's a Ysolda Teague pattern, 'Coraline' off Ravelry and so far has been pretty straightforward, check out my first attempt at provisional cast-on! It's growing slowly but that's more because I haven't been doing a huge amount of knitting recently, by the time I'm done studying for the night I can generally only stay awake for about half an hour before I have to give in and crawl into bed, so not a huge amount of knitting gets done. I'm away to Andrew's folks in Inverness for the weekend though so I reckon I'll get quite a bit done there.



Ooo, excitement! I love watching a big knitting project grow!