We had house guests for the past 9 days, time just seemed to be sucked up in an immense vacume and vanish from under my feet. It was however, refreshing to have company at the sewing machine in the form of my parents. With Dad in charge of trimming up, mom & I fired through enough log cabin quilt blocks to leave me with a stack to put together into a winter themed wall quilt to partner the one mom made me a few years back.
There has been progress, lots of progress.... Kitchen roman blind has been completed and looks fantastic in the kitchen, my workroom curtains are up and keeping out the bitter cold drafts of typical scottish winter evenings, christmas gift sewing was completed on time (1 kindle case, 1 nintendo DSXL roll case, 2 sets of heat proof pot mats, bread baskets x 3, pajama bags, and from an old irish linen pillow slip I created a very pretty treasure bag for my eldest daughter. I now need to run around taking photos of everything !
Full scale into spring thinking has happened & I'm pushing on with generating soft furnishing ideas for the lounge & 2 bathrooms which will be next on our hit list. The lounge is talking to me of linen in soft beige, off white and gentle greys, the bathrooms I think I will struggle to plan until we narrow down the choice of shower unit & suite furniture.
Craft sale thinking has also been happening, a must if we are to try keep our earnings on the survivable path, so a few quilts in the planning for these and a selection of various other handy items - ipod & reader cases/purses/pillows/floor cushions/baskets etc, the work room table is littered with sketches and measurements and fabric clippings as I design board each pattern as I final draft it. I find it strange working with patterns & only do so when I want to make repeats of some items in identical size with different colourways, normally I just hold the pattern in my head & the hands know how to the rest, but when it comes to craft sales, copyright & retaining origionality & individuality of ones patterns are of utmost importance, to often have I spent hours on designs for a craft fair only to attend one some weeks later & discover someone has copied my designs right down to tiny details.
Birthday gifts are also in the forefront, my middle girl will be 12 in march. She's developing quite a thang for all things japanese so I think a project or two using vintage kimono fabrics may be in order and perhaps a linen covered diary organiser with a quirky touch or two to it.
Garden planning is also starting to happen, this years stock of seed potato are ordered & the chitting trays washed and ready, rotational plans for all 3 of our plots are done & seed catalogues are being poured over.
Monday 30 December 2013
Tuesday 17 December 2013
Seeing out the old year
I thought, since here at the wee crofthoose, a fairy big project is underway to revamp each of the 8 rooms & 2 bathrooms on a very very limited budget, that blogging might be a good way to keep a diary, esp as everything will be done on a shoestring budget. We've done the big job.. The new kitchen is in, finishing is underway & there's a little left from the kitchen budget to enable a small fabric spend to magic up some co-ordinating kitchen linens & various other handy bits and pieces. The dinning room is underway & will be blogged shortly.
Our budget for each room other than the kitchen & bathrooms is fairy straight forward... 2 to 4 pots of paint & a max of £100 on fabrics, this means setting very strict limits... get the most out of what you spend it on. Fabric choices for curtains & blinds must also lend itself to accessories and co-ordinates so that no fabric is wasted & to make things go that little bit futher that little bit easier, small things will be done to tie the 3 main rooms, kitchen/dining/lounge, together ie the excess from the fabric used to make the roman blind for the kitchen was recently used up making scatter cushions for the lounge, fabric from the dining room roman blind was also used to recover the dining chairs & the motifs from the remainder can be used as raw edge applique on Zakka style dining linen projects once we pass the season of christmas gift sewing.
The lounge is next, we'd love new sofas but like a new carpet.. they are totally off budget at the moment, so we may well be resorting to stripping and varnishing the oak floorboards as revamping the lounge will also involve putting up new stud walls as we chop the top off the room to make an office, which will make the rather long lounge easier and more ecconomical to heat, so instead of new sofas, a dive into the fabric stash & throw quilts will have to do the job instead. We are a bit ahead of our budget with the lounge as we already have curtain fabric to hand which was a bit of an extravagant purchase for our old house (but half price in the sale else we'd never have bought it !) and not used before we sold up and moved, so lounge curtains are already provided for leaving me the full fabric budget for this room, some of which will be used to buy some cotton/linen blend fabric for zakka style roman blinds & runners for the sideboard, the rest may be donated to the dining room to enable the purchase of more scrummy fabrics for table linens.
We also cook a lot here, everything from scratch & using meats and vegetables we produce/grow ourselves. Bread is also a big thing with us having no supermarket within usable distance so recipes and meal ideas will also be a feature.
Our budget for each room other than the kitchen & bathrooms is fairy straight forward... 2 to 4 pots of paint & a max of £100 on fabrics, this means setting very strict limits... get the most out of what you spend it on. Fabric choices for curtains & blinds must also lend itself to accessories and co-ordinates so that no fabric is wasted & to make things go that little bit futher that little bit easier, small things will be done to tie the 3 main rooms, kitchen/dining/lounge, together ie the excess from the fabric used to make the roman blind for the kitchen was recently used up making scatter cushions for the lounge, fabric from the dining room roman blind was also used to recover the dining chairs & the motifs from the remainder can be used as raw edge applique on Zakka style dining linen projects once we pass the season of christmas gift sewing.
The lounge is next, we'd love new sofas but like a new carpet.. they are totally off budget at the moment, so we may well be resorting to stripping and varnishing the oak floorboards as revamping the lounge will also involve putting up new stud walls as we chop the top off the room to make an office, which will make the rather long lounge easier and more ecconomical to heat, so instead of new sofas, a dive into the fabric stash & throw quilts will have to do the job instead. We are a bit ahead of our budget with the lounge as we already have curtain fabric to hand which was a bit of an extravagant purchase for our old house (but half price in the sale else we'd never have bought it !) and not used before we sold up and moved, so lounge curtains are already provided for leaving me the full fabric budget for this room, some of which will be used to buy some cotton/linen blend fabric for zakka style roman blinds & runners for the sideboard, the rest may be donated to the dining room to enable the purchase of more scrummy fabrics for table linens.
We also cook a lot here, everything from scratch & using meats and vegetables we produce/grow ourselves. Bread is also a big thing with us having no supermarket within usable distance so recipes and meal ideas will also be a feature.
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