Lovely holidays

Me and The Dude are generally pretty bad at organising holidays but we have just spent a week outside Dunsborough with his sister and her family.  It is always lovely to get away and the Dunsborough-Yallingup area of Western Australia is just beautiful.  Even though it's getting cooler we had a couple of great days at the beach and then there are the wineries and breweries when lunch is needed.  I can thoroughly recommend the Eagle Bay Brewery - Princess and Soldier loved the sand pit!

The only slight downside was being with an almost 2 year old that doesn't sleep through the night.  I had to work very had at keeping my mouth shut and not offering unsolicited advice along the lines of "he's old enough, you just have to let him figure it out on his own". Having two babies pretty close together certainly stamped some of the gentler parenting ideas out of me.

I have been busy in the garden lately turning the sandpit that surrounds our house into something green.  There is a master plan that is going to take some time to implement so for the time being I am just having fun planting any bit of ground with vegetables, herbs and flowers.  This is the north side of the house, which I didn't think got much sun and wouldn't produce very good results.  Here is Soldier is helping get the soil ready.

 

We live on the top of a limestone hill so the soil is really just crushed limestone (aka sand) with lots of rocks in it.  I have a very low key approach to gardening which involves throwing likely looking things (manure, Dynamic Lifter, crushed rock minerals) on top of the sand, digging them in if I have the energy (I ran out about half way through this bed) and putting seedlings in.  I am a disciple of Jackie French and her book Backyard Self-Sufficiency which advocates a pretty low key approach so I feel justified in not being too scientific about things.  So that was about 4 weeks ago, here is what it looks like now...

So lush and green.  I will admit that some of the green is winter grass but I have been picking salads from here and am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my first cauliflower.  And here is a pumpkin that sprung up from the compost.  I see a future with lots of pumpkin soup!

I have been slow on the crafting front but I do have a giant granny square blanket that's almost finished, an emergency baby gift that is coming together pretty quickly.  You can have a peek when it is done.

And just for a bit of a lift, isn't this a gorgeous photo? We were in Kings Park for a BBQ and the sun coming through the trees was just delightful.

xx

Life is just crazy busy

Hi there! I wish had time to take more photos and blog more often but my life is just crazy at the moment. Between family, work, house and craft (an absolute essential in my life) every minute is full.  Here's what I'm working on at the moment... 
Tardis blanket -very belated wedding gift for a friend
R2D2 beanie - for my nephew
garden beds -have given up on getting a gardener to come to see the garden and then come back to do it!
Guest room - to be magicked up out of very messy craft room
Baby blanket - for a friends baby, nearly one year late

And yet to be done...
Baby blanket & toys - again nearly one year late
Curtains for princess and my rooms
Rugs for kitchen & entry hall
So much knitting for our English family
Tiling the veranda

And so on. That said, I'm usually pretty happy these days! How's your life at the moment? X

Baking bread

Let me start by saying I am not a domestic goddess.  I am what my mum calls a journeyman cook - I am fine at the basics but in no way fit for Masterchef. That said, I have had a go at baking bread the last couple of weekends. Look...

Little Soldier very sweetly asked for his school lunches to be made out of my bread. Aww.  By the way, my favorite mummy cheat of the moment is to make all of the kids sandwiches on Sunday night and then wrap in grease proof and freeze.  It helps that my kids only want cheese sandwiches but this definitely makes mornings easier!

I am following my lovely London sister-in-law's practice of baking a cake in Saturday mornings for weekend snacks. Both cakes so far have come from 'Mary Berry's Baking Bible', which does a very nice line in easy, plain (as in not iced, layered confections) cake recipes.  This is the Spiced Ginger Traybake and it was very nice, even out of the freezer.

One of my favorite fabric stores, Homecraft in East Vic Park, is having it's annual 50% everything sale (and they really mean everything, I stock up on zips, cotton, curtain tape, snips, needles, etc).  I have been twice already and will go again and am having real difficulty resisting the urge to buy this plastic tablecloth.  I am such a sucker for tacky...

Xx

My quiet spot

I have just figured out how to easily upload photos to blogger. Took my time but I finally got there.  So you might be hearing from me more often now. So, here are some photos from my lovely last Sunday. 

Look at that beautiful sky.  I got to sit and knit for a full hour, so lovely.

I am getting close to finishing this R2D2 beanie but there are sooooo many ends to sew in, it's taking ages. I think I might be up for aunty the year when my nephew finally gets this. The fact that I'm his only aunty won't interfere with this vote of course.

And this is the same spot later that day, so beautiful. And having a cocktail made for never hurts.

Hope you to got to enjoy a beautiful in your day too xx

Lovely life

 I haven't had much time over the last week for crafty work - the kids are now at preschool (Little Soldier) / kindy (Princess) which means I have less time than last year as school days are much shorter than daycare/grandparent days!  I am still figuring out how to fit in my increased work hours and look after the family (the fridge has been very bare on a couple of occasions) and take care of myself.  I'm sure in a few weeks it will all be much better but for now I am just concentrating on the little bits of joy in the day.

Like a perfect coffee from Hustle in Freo (soooo pretty too)

Princess' delight with her shadow

A cheese sandwich in greaseproof paper

The second fig from my new tree (I scoffed the first one before I could record it for posterity)

We are going proper camping for the first time on the weekend for my brother's birthday. By proper I mean in a tent with very limited facilities (I think toilets and a firepit is about it).  I very much like the idea of camping but it's possible that the kids will be up at 5am and not in bed til 9 pm and all of us will be grumpy.  On the plus side we will be in the forest, almost on the beach near Margaret River and very near a number of microbreweries (to keep The Dude happy).  Lovely.  

I need to go through my stash to find some mindless crafting I can do around the campfire,  all my current UFOs require laying out on a table or constant referring to a pattern.  Just aswell the stash is pretty big.

I will report back after the weekend, when I am washed and awake! xx

I'm back, or at least on the way back...

It has been a long time since I blogged.  The break has been for a number of reasons, including a very long trip to England and some very busy family times.

But I am back and ready to share my world.  And what I have been up to.  Which at the moment isn't much as I don't have much time (new job) but I need to get back into doing something creative and I'm hoping that feeling that I need to report to you will get me going.

First on the list is a R2D2 beanie for my nephew.  I am basing it on a pattern by Esther Park I found on ravelry, but I am 8ply/DK weight yarn and 4mm needles.

I'll let you know how I get on! x

Where do the weeks go?  The last few weeks have been so busy with ill children, an ill husband and the need to get things done on the house that I haven't been able to blog for a ages...

It has been so cold in Perth the past couple of days.  Perth winters tend to be a few days of real cold ((less than 10 degrees max) and then a week of warmer weather with the occasional rainy period.  So I should be used to the cold weather but it shocks me every time!  The new house hasn't performed as well as I had hoped in terms of staying warm but the fact that I haven't made the curtains for all of the rooms other than the bedrooms probably plays a big part in that.  More curtains are somewhere on the list of things to do!

We all went to the beach yesterday after swimming lessons, it looked so sunny and inviting to be outside. Doesn't it look gorgeous?  What the picture doesn't tell you was how cold the wind was!  I went to the local supermarket and we had a picnic lunch on the grass which was a lovely break from our usual weekend roster of doing things around the house.

I did finish the jumper for Princess and managed to grab a photo on the one occasion she has deigned to wear it.  It turned out pretty well and should fit for couple of years.  I'm considering making tiny versions for her dolls in an effort to get her to wear it.  The pattern should be easy enough adjust!

I have almost finished off a baby blanket for a friend.  Just a garter stitch rectangle but I love the colours.  (It has just occurred to me that the colours are a bit Dockers and I think they might be Eagles fans, oh well.)

One of the many fine things about having my parents back from their travels is that The Dude and I get Thursday nights to play at being sophisticated grown ups.  Last Thursday we met up in the city and went to the Picasso to Warhol exhibition at the Art Gallery of WA.  How they managed to swing such a fabulous exhibition for little old Perth I don't know but it was fabulous and there are another five exhibitions to come.  The Dude and I have been fortunate to have travelled in our (much) younger years and we have been to MoMA twice so we had seen some of the exhibition before but not curated the same way.  The focus seemed to be to show the 14 artists' development from regular-looking still lifes and landscapes to the weird and usually wonderful art they created at the end of their careers.  I still don't get Warhol or Mondrian (The Dude and I had our usual discussion/argument about the merit of Mondrian) but I loved Matisse's colours and Duchamp's cheekiness.

And then we went for dinner at Bivouac Canteen - very nice.  Lovely cocktails (always a winner with me) and delicious food.  Yay!

xx