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.