Ruby's Button Tin

Fruit & veg

Well, since my last posting I've got my allotment.  Yay!!  I'm the proud occupant of plot 39a, and have been since last Thursday.  So I've been weeding and weeding, pulling up grass and dandelions and generally clearing the ground so I can start with a blank canvas.  I've planted the odd thing - a nasturtium, some marigolds and mint, but it's mainly a tidy-up at the moment. 

This is a view looking down the slope at my patch.  At the top I'm planning on putting flowers, then a veggie patch.  Then you get to the raspberry bushes which apparently produce masses of lovely berries in autumn, then another veggie patch, then it's compost corner. 

My windowsills all around the flat are full of seedlings in pots, and the courgettes in particular look to be very sturdy little fellows.  I've got high hopes of them, if I can keep the slugs off them of course.  Maybe eventually I'll end up with an abundance of brightly coloured veg - something like this???

I've been making lots of carrots and cherry tomato felt sofites, plus cake - Bakewell tarts and jam tarts.  It's weirdly addictive ...

My desk, as usual, is a total state.  What I really need is a separate sewing room, but no chance of that!  So I'll just have to live with a dining table covered in felt food.  How do people in swanky magazines manage to cope with those severly minimalist homes where there's not a dust bunny out of place?  Do they just clean and tidy 24-7  ?  Are there really people with no clutter?  They can't be crafters ...

Thrifty buys

Yesterday was beautifully sunny and warm, the kind of weather where you just don't want to be inside. I did a lot of lounging around, a bit of reading (Stef Penney's 'The Tenderness of Wolves') and some sewing (felt cakes). Also, popped into a couple of charity shops and found some more stuff to clutter my flat with. Not that I need more clutter, but these were so pretty ...

A dinky little green & grey patterned milk jug and sugar bowl for £2.50

and these six crackle glass bowls. (I don't know what the correct term is for them, but crackle sounds right to me.) They were £4.00 the lot, and I suppose were originally fruit bowls. What a very civilised afternoon tea that would be!

On the greenery front, my windowsills are jammed with plant pots and seed trays. Among the plants that will hopefully be flourishing this summer, I should have tomatoes, courgettes, marigolds, larkspur and foxgloves. Lots of mint too.

May already. The year is racing by ... and still no allotment news. I've had a look at 4 plots, and made by choice but the council haven't sent through a tenancy agreement yet so I don't know which one I've been allocated. After a year and a half of waiting I'll be happy to get anything frankly. 1 of the 4 plots was in good shape, fairly recently dug, complete with raspberry canes and a flourishing rhubarb patch. But the other 3 were on slopes more fitted to Alpine goats, and came with an extensive collection of weeds and brambles. I picked the raspberry & rhubarb patch as 1st choice, but there's something quite appealing about rescuing a completely overgrown patch and putting it to good use.
Oh well, patience is a virtue and I've just got to keep gently pestering the council until they get this sorted.

On the crafty front I've made making lots of felt fruit and vegetables, though I'm having problems buying all the colours of felt I need. I may have to find an online supplier as local fabric shops sell felt either by little squares - which are used up in no time, so aren't economical - or if they sell by the metre they only have basic colours - red, white, etc.

Oh, going back to all things gardening - there's a great new book out called Guerrilla Gardening. Apologies to the author but I didn't note down his name. I was reading the book for ages in Borders yesterday, and it's so inspiring. Guerilla gardening is just about taking over a neglected public space and - well - planting it! Clearing the littler, planting flowers, taking care of a verge or an area at the base of a tree. It's about brightening your neighbourhood and chimes in with another movement I really admire - the KnittaPlease crew. They're busy knitting woolly cosies for lamp posts and parking meters. Both the Guerrila Gardeners and Knitta Please have easily located websites, so please look them up on a search engine.

Public spaces in cities have been terribly neglected for years, so it's lovely that urban dwellers -seeing what their councils are not prioritising - are taking matters into their own hands and personally beautifying their streets. The prettier, cleaner and more appealing a street is, the more likely people will get out of their cars and walk or cycle along it. That's got to be good.

Cat in a bag

I've no idea why cats like to climb inside everything and anything. Maybe they were submariners in a former life? Whatever the reason, all cats seems to love clambering inside bags and boxes. This is Caesar snuggled inside a bag of tapestry wool, looking snug as a bug.

On the crafty front - the green and growing crafty front - I've been planting various seedlings and impatiently waiting for them to sprout. The kitchen window sill is crowded with pots and seed trays. The marigolds are popping up nicely, though the chive seeds I've planted seemed to have disappeared without a trace. I'm also impatiently waiting for Bristol council to allocate me an allotment. After a full year and a half of waiting I've at last reached the top of the list for my very own veg patch. Now I'm watching out for the postman to bring me a tenancy agreement so I can sign it, pay the rent and get on to my plot. Come on council, pull your finger out please!

I didn't manage to get my act together to submit anything for the softies central competition. Maybe next time ...

Food, glorious food!

Cakes and strawberries

I've been taking photographs of some of my felt food, hoping to get some decent pictures in order to submit for the softies central competition. But my lack of a decent camera and - more to the point - lack of any shred of photographic skill hasn't meant brilliant results.

I shall have to persevere!

Seriously tempted by Selvedge

Saturday morning and I was standing in Borders, seriously tempted by Selvedge. If any of you haven't come across it Selvedge is a fabulous magazine, full of luscious photographs of textiles from all over the world. Only it's expensive for a magazine, and I'm trying to save money. But it is lovely ... might go back tomorrow and buy it.
I did mooch around a craft store and buy more Anchor tapestry wool - two skeins of peachy orange and a skein of banana yellow. No matter how much wool or thread you have, there's always room for more, isn't there?

My wanderings also took me to a charity (thift) shop or two. Sometimes you can't find a thing you would give house room to, but occasionally careful browsing can yield up some treasures. One of my past favourites was an indifferent looking embroidered box I found which had been sellotaped together. Peering inside I saw someone's button collection. Maybe the former owner didn't sew any more? Or perhaps they were being ruthless in their de-cluttering. Either way for £2.00 I got a great collection of new and vintage buttons, many really pretty. Another charity shop yielded another bag of buttons, mainly in pinks and reds, my favourite colours. Some buttons were still fixed to their original cards. Peach coloured buttons with the trade name Glamor, originally sold for 2 shillings. Another pearly pink selection was labeled Bond Street Fashionable Buttons. More Glamor buttons, this time 5 cherry red ones had cost 11p in days gone by.

I've collected various sets of cups and saucers from charity shops, most of which are stuck in cupboards as there's no room to display them. These six Midwinter cups and matching saucers worked out at fifty pence each, and I could probably sell them on for a tidy profit on Ebay. But I like them, so they're staying put.

P.S. The first picture of the quilt features hidden treasure in its own way, the treasure being my cat Caesar. He seems to have claimed this small dotty quilt for his own.

Not getting much done ...

To be honest, there's not a massive amount of crafting going on right now. I've been getting on with a lot of other chores, and squeezing the odd bit of sewing in between.

I was sorting out some shelves tonight where I store material and my collection of half finished quilts, needlepoint cushion covers and assorted bits & bobs. Maybe one day I'll get around to completing all these projects. Yup, that mythical day when my housekeeper's done the shopping, my cleaning lady's hoovered, my laundry maid's washed and ironed my clothes while my millionaire husband has paid all my bills, leaving me free to occupy myself as I please.
That will be never then ...
Has everyone else got a guilty stash of unfinished projects lurking somewhere, gathering dust? Surely it's not just me?

The softies are multiplying!!

It's been a beautiful warm spring day here. Officially today British Summertime begins, so the clocks went forward an hour. It's now seven o'clock and still lovely and light. Makes such a change to your mood, though it also seems a prompt a rush of cleaning with me. I'm generally a household slut, so the flat's usually knee deep in cat hair and newspapers, half finished paperbacks, balls of wool, piles of laundry waiting to be washed. But come the bright days and the sun shines through the dusty windows and out comes the mop and bucket! I've also been re-potting various houseplants that were bursting out of their existing pots, and planting seeds in trays. The kitchen window sill is jam packed. I wish - I do so wish - I had a garden, but I'm in a 1st floor flat so for now I have to make do with indoor foliage.
I've started another needlepoint tablemat -

I'm also still softie making, and the little critters are multiplying at an alarming rate.
At the moment I'm filling these knitted chaps with polyester toy stuffing, but I've a huge bag of dried lavender so I think future ones are going to be half stuffing, half lavender. Rather than attaching keyrings to the lavender ones, I think I'll just attach a loop of ribbon, so they can be hung from a coathanger - to keep your wardrobe nicely scented and deter moths too. So they'll be useful, sweet scented and goofy. What a combination!

Softies - they're multiplying!!

I've been making some knitted softies – stripy, complete with button detail on the back and a keyring so they're hopefully both quirky and useful.

They're knitted on 3 1/4mm needles with double knitting wool, just casting on 20 stitches. The eyes and mouth are made of felt with simple embroidery for the impressive gnashers.

A long crafty weekend

It's Easter weekend, so I wasn't working on Friday and won't be back until Tuesday next week. The weather's not brilliant (grey sky, rain, wind, brrr ...) but you can't have everything. My desk, as you can see from the picture on the right, is crowded but I love seeing a jumble of completed and half completed projects, and lots of inspiring colours and textures.

I've finished a small tablemat in my favourite fishy pattern, so that's one more half-finished item that I can tick off my to-do list.

Of course the real time consumers are the various sized patchwork tops I've got sitting around waiting to be quilted. There's no quick way of quilting if you work by hand. Either you snatch a few minutes here and there, or you put by a block of time, like an afternoon or a precious whole Saturday or Sunday. Then, of course, as soon as you've got spare time and decide to quilt, the sun shines and you just want to get outside and make the most of it. Actually, I can see a bit of blue sky and fluffy white cloud right now. That's it - I'm off to walk off some calories. Bye!