I love... bird motifs

I'm not sure what it is about them, but I'm drawn to bird motifs in jewelry, and in particular brooches. These are some that I'm covetting lately.

Sadly I seem to have lost my beautiful yellow Elk birdy brooch. I keep thinking it will turn up in a jacket pocket or underneath the sofa, or somewhere equally boring, but he's been gone several months and still no word...

L-R Khaki bird ring Birdy stack brooch Tasmanian oak bird brooch
Silver brooch Elk fat birdy brooch Seagull wooden brooch

Blue & red

For some reason lately I've been noticing all of the great blue and red colour combinations that seem to occur in our everyday lives here.

It's not normally a colour combo I'd choose (too nautical, too primary maybe?) but I seem to be actively seeking it out at the moment.

According to colour psychology, apparently, red influences attention to detail and blue influences creativity. A good balance.

Do you have a favourite colour combination at the moment?

My creative space

I'm playing along with Kootoyou's Thursday 'My Creative Space' this week. Lots more creativity over there to check out.



Hi! How are you? Not much craftiness going on around here at the moment, what with visitors, school issues, preschool wobbliness, whingey toddler and life in general. You know how it is. But just enough time to squeeze in a quick dye job for a favourite old Jigsaw shirt that was looking very tired. It's the same midnight blue as the last shirt I dyed (a shade boringly called "navy" by Dylon). I'm really loving this colour at the moment and am afraid both dyeing and this blue are going to become new obsessions. Oh well, best to give in to it I guess :-) Hope you're having a creative Thursday.

Make do & mend - toy stroller

I love the phrase 'Make do and mend'. During WW2 people were encouraged to mend clothes to reduce the need to buy new ones, which were in short supply. And even though times are a lot easier now generally, I still think it's a good way to think to try to reduce our environmental footprint. So I thought I'd try to fix more things in future rather than throw them out, and maybe blog them to get me motivated.

It bugs me when I have to throw out old toys, not when they go to friends or the charity shop of course, but when they go into the bin. I hate the thought of all that plastic in particular going into landfill. I imagine it lying around for hundreds of years and I wonder how the earth can cope with all we throw at it. A part of me would love to live a life where I consume as little packaging as possible. I'm so used to the conveniences of modern life that anything more than small changes seems too hard. So I try to just do little bits where I can, even though it feels hopelessly inadequate.



Anyway... the kids' little dolly pram had been a bit out of action for a while with a ripped fabric seat. So, in a lightbulb moment recently I decided to make a new one for it to extend the life of this popular toy. I unpicked the seams of the old one to use it as a pattern, then made a new one in the striped cotton from Ikea that I've used on the girls room's curtains and light shade. I bound the edges in a bias binding and made sure I sewed the stress points several times as the kids like to sometimes push each other around in it too :-)



Do you have any tips for making do and mending? I'd love to hear.

Cheat's dress

During the heatwave a few weeks ago I decided I didn't have enough dresses and looked around to see what I could quickly make one out of. Something stretchy would be quick, and I remembered I had bought this great piece of hand printed jersey from Prints Charming during their sale last year. I'd used some of it for my boy's monkey pants and put the rest away, unsure of what to do with it. As soon as I imagined it as a dress I knew it had potential...



So during a 40c day, with the kids sprawled out in front of the fan, I set to it with pins and scissors. I wanted to make a tubular dress, floor length, with a fold-over top. It's in the same vein as the beautiful 'Love me 2 times' dress style from Gaia Conceptions on Etsy that I've long admired.

There was only just enough fabric to do it, so one seam right down the back would be the most economical use of fabric. I took some rough measurments of my bust, waist and hips, then folded the fabric in half and marked it out. Next I did some rough tacking by hand, rather than machine stitching, which would have taken too long to take out if the fit was wrong... which it was. So, after several try-on's, take-off's and adjustments it was finally OK.



I then just sewed right down the seam with my overlocker (serger). As I have no stretch stitch or zig zag on my old sewing machine, this would have to do. When I tried it on the seam at the back looked a bit puckery, so I wondered what to do for a while then in a 'duh' moment realised I could just wear the seam at one side and the tension would pull it out. So: tube of fabric, one seam, and hey presto, a dress.

As with any experimental sewing project, there are positives and negatives to this dress:

+ Positives
• quick to sew
• stash-busting - yay!
• comfy to wear
• versatile: can be worn with top folded over, either inside or outside, also can turn it down several times at waist and it becomes a skirt.

- Negatives
• a bit tighter fit than I would have chosen around the hips due to running out of fabric!
• the style's a bit confused - the fabric is casual but straplessness and clinginess make it look a bit more dressy. So a bit showy for day but casual for night... or maybe I'm being too picky.
• relies on tension only to stay up, so I'm always a bit nervous that one of the littlies will yank it down!
• Serging only on seams means it will probably come apart some time soon...

But hey, for here and now it answers the brief of a quick, comfy dress.

My creative space

I'm playing along with Kootoyou's Thursday 'My Creative Space' this week. Lots more creativity over there to check out.


I'm sitting having a cold drink and reflecting on a bit of a double whammy upsetting mama morning: First the little girl screamed for me not to leave her at pre school. I left with tears streaming down my face, listening to her desperation mixed with rage and knowing I had to leave her. And then the boy screamed his head off in the doctor's surgery before he went in for his 18 month vaccination. The doctor and nurse were so lovely, showing him toys, offering him stamps and stickers and even getting the bubble solution out and blowing bubbles to try to make him happy... and I just wanted to leave him there :-) My GP is truly wonderful. It took ages to find her amongst the not-so-great, and takes ages to get an appointment, but I can cry and laugh and cry again with her and I always leave feeling better. This doc has bedside manner in spades. Which is lucky for me. And my kids.

Anyway, enough of my mothering woes, on to my creative space...

Last night I turned my back on the mountains of washing needing to be folded and treated myself to getting on with altering a recent op shop find. I'm a sucker for soft cotton fabrics, rows of hooks and eyes and a mandarin collar, and this shirt had all of those. BUT, it was yellow - great for some but terrible for my colouring.


So the plan was to dye it, alter the seams slightly to fit better and make some sort of decorative fabric element to sit on it (a brooch/flower type thing). The unpredictable nature of dying has put me off doing it for a long time, but I thought this was worth a go. The dye took beautifully (I think the dyes have come along since I used them in my 20's) and is just the shade of midnight blue I was after (difficult to photograph though, maddeningly). But the stitching has not dyed, which must mean it's polyester. At first I thought I'd have to stitch over it in blue and then remove the original stitches, but now I'm kind of warming to this look. What do you think - keep the stitching or ditch it?

Green. Not just for frogs, apparently.

Years ago I remember a friend I worked with telling me that her favourite colour was green. I thought she was extremely unusual and a little bonkers! I distinctly remember thinking that green was still considered quite unfashionable and had been in the doghouse for a long long time - since the 80's. I guess there had been such a swing away from the 70's oranges and greens and it just didn't fit with the fluoro pink and yellow and that smurf blue that was everywhere... this was my perception anyway (maybe it was otherwise out in the big wide world :-). When I studied design I found colour theory fascinating and started to see what factors came into play as far why I liked or disliked a colour. But still I couldn't help being influenced by the trends of the time.



But, as I admitted with yellow a while ago, this old foe, the murky, dirty, slimy green has become intriguing to me, and worked it's way into my home, lifestyle and wardrobe. I very suddenly realised this recently when I looked down and noticed I was wearing head to toe green, in varying shades, apart from my toenails (don't think I'll go there yet, but never say never!).

To Sarah: you were way ahead of me and I am now totally reformed... any current tips? :-)