Hexie happiness

Standing on the bridge, steering some admirals into harbour, and scratching her head over the complexities of indexing compound names (who am I to talk?), not to mention chaps who change rank and style far too often . . . she tenders her most sincere apologies to all who have emailed and commented and promises that when she gets this weighty tome off to the printers she will return the compliments most profusely.

But in the interim, why not make a charmingly capacious pencil case all ready for the new term (oh, how I do love that word, capacious. I yearn for capacious pockets and capacious portmanteaus [portmanteaux is also acceptable to the highest authorities, but apparently not to Blogger ...] ...).

Charmingly capacious

Your little dears will soon be departing for the halls of academe and you can assure yourself of a place in their hearts by providing them with a constant reminder of your presence in the form of a handmade pencil case.

Once again, my sewing guide and mentor Amy has come up with the perfect pattern for you to make your own pencil case - the one and only Hexiecase, capacious enough to hold all the pencils and pens that any child could possibly need.

And speaking of capaciousness, you may remember that I made one here which proved to be just the right dimensions to transport my sock knitting about. For the latest model I used fusible fleece, which gives a nice squashy effect, or for a more structured look, use standard interfacing like this.

Sadly, for me I no longer have little people setting off to school with shiny new pencil cases, so I have made my own Hexiecase just for me - it sits on my desk and in its capacious recesses I hide my very special pens for correcting admirals and their ilk (there is nothing so fine as these pens and people like to steal them so they must be hidden from husbands with pen-kidnapping tendencies).

Who knows what is occurring in those voluminous recesses?

And I am down to my very last pen for checking footnotes - its friends have vagrant tendencies and so I am afraid my little orange chum must be confined in the voluminous folds of the Hexiecase. Perhaps it will be impelled to breed in the darkness?

She sighs. The admirals are tugging at her sleeve (it is an Admiral of the Fleet this time, and they are the worst of all name changers), and she suddenly realizes that she has spent full half an hour browsing pretty pens on Amazon ...  (the ones shaped like vegetables are definitely not pretty) ... come Tuesday, she will be strung up from the yardarm, or set to holystoning the decks at least.

Adieu ... her voice trails on the breeze ... adieu ... (she departs taking her ellipses with her).

The reading corner

Did you have a reading corner when you were at school?

A quiet little corner of the classroom with a shelf full of interesting books, and somewhere to sit.

And were you allowed to sit there at break time or in the lunch hour reading, away from the rough and tumble of the playground?

I always went to schools where you were turfed out into the cold and the hurly burly of the playground in the name of character building, but I have always loved the concept of the reading corner.

And since my orange house (with a permatan that can be viewed here) has turned a lovely shade of winter white, there is a little reading corner just for me, right next to my collection of old needlework and knitting books which provided the material and inspiration for my thesis.

On one shelf is a little china iron, once upon a time full of sweets, that my dear papa brought home from Germany for me oh! such a long time ago.

And on another is a handmade model of a cutter, or ship's boat, made for me by a very clever dear friend, in whose old stone church the Head Chef and I were married and my children baptised, not quite such a long time since.

In my little corner, I can sit on the very same chair from my childhood home on which I nursed the Ploughboy over twenty-one years ago, resting on the very first needlepoint cushion that I ever stitched, surrounded by pleasant memories, and I can wonder at how quickly the years have gone by.

Have a crafty weekend

First of all she says thank you, thank you most kindly, and curtsies awkwardly. Quite, quite touched, I am sure, and positively overwhelmed by all the kind thoughts.

And now she will set you some homework for the weekend.

Time to get crafting

This rather beautiful book, Christmas Crafting in No Time, by Clare Youngs, dropped through my door this week, courtesy of Cico Books, and in my incapacitated state I thought that I would only be able to look at the pictures and dream of next year.

But I was quite excited to find that there are quite a few projects in here to entertain me and Princess Bunchy over the coming weeks, even with a gammy hand.

Admittedly, I had to resist the urge to set to on some lovely sewing projects such as these little felt owls which would make sweet little presents, or folksy decorations for the Christmas tree (if you want to see some real life examples of the owl pattern in practice have a look at Andamento blog, where you will see some beautifully crafted versions in lots of different colours).

There is also a pattern to stitch some rather sweet owl fodder (not that one should call to mind nature red in tooth and claw when looking at such cuddly cuties).

Actually, I personally am going for the edible owl fodder - there is a recipe for sugar mice, which have been something of an obsession of mine since reading The Tale of the Kittie Poosies when I was a just a little scrap.

The Kittie Poosies have been a seminal influence on my life from the days when I marched my poor mother around every sweet shop in every place we visited in search of sugar mice, and Mama Pudditat's house has had a lasting influence on my decorative style - not to mention the feminist ideas encapsulated in this proleptic tale of a single mother becoming an entrepreneur in order to support her family with not a father Pudditat in sight. So we are definitely making sugar mice in order that I can surf towards Christmas on a wave of nostalgia.

I think Clare Youngs must have read the same books as I did, as she also includes a project related to the other deeply influential text with which I engaged most fully as a child - The Tale of the Gingerbread Man, and to this day the eerie howl of a fox at night, or even the glimpse of one running like the wind across the fields, engenders in me a visceral fear. My children always took the most eager and teasing pleasure in biting the heads and limbs off gingerbread men in front of me, as I felt the urge to run, run as fast as you can, for fear of being chased and eaten (I hope that there are no psychologists reading this - I can feel them nodding their heads in a most benignant manner). Luckily these little gingerbread people do not show a gender bias, there is not a fox in sight, and most important of all they are not edible.

 Perhaps it is better to bring light into my darkness by making some pretty teacup candles, which are definitely within reach of the one-handed, and now that all the decluttering upheavals have tossed up my decoupage scissors in the tide of objets swilling from cupboard to cupboard (No dear mamma, I have not seen them, and if I did use them I put them away in the wrong place where no one will find them for a year and a day) Princess Bunchy can cut me out some white tree decorations to go with my tasteful new white-painted house.

So in sum, I am jolly pleased with this book, and can recommend it as a something for everyone type of craft book, with projects ranging from easy to skilled, and lots of potential for family participation, and holiday activities.

And thank you again for all your lovely comments and emails - I am truly grateful to you all.  I am working my way through to reply to all the emails, but sadly I can't respond to the no-reply ones (this happens if you don't have your email in your Profile) as they come without a return address.

Have a very crafty weekend, don't let the preparations get you down, and if you are the Head Chef, I'd love a box of violet creams in my stocking, just click here.

The trouble with orange, and shall we go vintage or romantic?

My little cottage is still in disarray with books stacked up everywhere, the Lady Decorators trotting up and down the stairs . . .

A very orange house with the Head Chef as busy as a bee

 . . . the smell of paint in the air, and ladders and paint pots waiting to trip me up everywhere, but the orange glow is slowly going.

Orange mess

I have come to the conclusion that I do not tolerate disorder very well, and have spent two afternoons hidden away, knitting frenetically, in an effort to keep myself in a state bordering sanity, and to fend off the guilt complex that I am not sitting in my office working.

But if I look at the before pictures in all their burnt orange gloom, then I can dream of Pointing and Old White, and remember that the alternative to the current higgledy-pigglediness is a house with a perma-tan.

Cupboards glowing orange

I have been sent some lovely books from Ryland Peters & Small and Cico Books to help me along with my dreams, and inspire me in my grand declutter and re-think of my little granny cottage which had been looking sadly down at heel.

Stairs with a suntan

And so I have been pondering on the differences between Vintage Chic and Romantic Style.

For some time now I have hankered after the cool whiteness and spare florals of Cabbages and Roses Vintage Chic by Christina Strutt, Cabbages and Roses being one of my favourite shops.

A sofa with rose printed linen and fine white curtains blowing in the breeze seem to be beckoning me to sit down and recline in a most stylish manner.

 Romantic Style by Selina Lake and Sara Norrman is divided into sections with different interpretations of what constitutes 'romantic style'

- as ever, I am pulled between the calm and pale, and the bright and flowery.

The coloured chairs in blue and green remind me of my jolly kitchen and the way that such brightness can counteract our grey and gloomy skies.

The most surprising book of all has been Essentially Irish: Homes with Classic Irish Style by Josephine Ryan - I had no picture in my mind of what constituted 'Classic Irish Style', but the book is a feast for the eyes and contains some beautiful interiors.

I went to an Irish wedding once, many years ago, and I still remember the Georgian house where we stayed, once an elegant mansion, but become a farmhouse of faded grandeur with peeling paint and wallpaper, like a faded beauty down on her luck.

Not my house - this is a stylish house

I am so pleased to see that the heaps of homeless books occupying the beds of the Ploughboy and the General find their echo in one of these beautifully photographed Irish houses.

This is the General's bed, now become a library

Perhaps I could just forget about tidying the books up and just leave them on style grounds.

So think of me, dear readers, as I dally with the F&B paint charts, and choose my colours on the grounds of the beauty of their names, wordsmith that I am.

Who couldn't want Arsenic in their kitchen, Borrowed Light in their bedroom, and Slipper Satin in the drawing room?

I am just about to write my own fairytale in Vintage, Romantic Style and fashion myself a house of dreams.

Handing on handmade

Last week I went a-visiting and took tea at the most charming little cottage in the country - a cottage quite out of a Country Living 'dreaming of the country'-style magazine spread - and there on the table I saw an array of pretty patchwork pieces, stitched together by hand.

My eye was of course immediately drawn to such prettiness and upon enquiry I found that this stitchery was the work of a little girl of very tender years, who has taken to working with the needle quite recently and with an enthusiasm and tenacity that made a great impression on me.

She had little in the way of equipment and her needle and thread sat in a recycled plastic tub.  I thought of the needle case that Jane Austen gave to her niece Louisa two hundred years ago, also the housewife or hussif (a sewing case) that Austen made for her sister-in-law, described by the recipient's son as 'the kind of article that some benevolent fairy might be supposed to give as a reward to a diligent little girl', and enclosed within which was a little poem:


This little bag, I hope will prove
To be not vainly made:
For should you thread and needles want,
It will afford you aid.

And as we are about to part,
'T will serve another end:
For when you look upon this bag,
You'll recollect your friend.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries women often gave gifts of needle cases and pincushions to each other, and I thought of this little girl taking up her needle and stitching away, an occupation which was so commonplace in th past, so bound up with female gender identity, and which now is really quite unusual in one so young, not something that girls or women are bound to do whether they will or no, and which has become purely an expression of creativity rather than necessity.

But perhaps in the loss of compulsion, other things have been lost, too, and somehow I wanted to encourage that expression of skill and creativity, and retain a sense of continuity, of things being passed on from one generation of women to another in a positive way, and that sense of feminine friendship and community inherent in the exchange of handmade gifts.

So I sat down and made a little needle case and pincushion for this little girl; she too is moving away, and perhaps one day she will pick up these small artefacts, and recollect a friend, and her first hesitant stitches, and the beginnings of creativity in her world.

And maybe you could give such gifts too - so simple and quick to make, two pinked rectangles of felt, a stitched felt flower and button on the cover.

The pincushion was eight squares of fabric from my stash (including some early Cath Kidston left over from a skirt) - I used my Go! Baby die to cut 2 1/2in squares, 2in finished size, to make up a 4in square pincushion wrapped in ribbon like the gift that it is, and trimmed with buttons either side.

A gift that was a pleasure to make, and a pleasure to give, a handing on from one generation to another of the joy of the handmade, and a lesson to me that actually giving is oh so much better than receiving.



(And if you want to find out more about needlework in the works of Jane Austen, the poem and the photo come from Jane Austen Fashion: Fashion and Needlework in the Works of Jane Austen, by Penelope Byrde, a delightful and informative little book which is a great introduction to the subject. You can get all colours of felt and felt shapes from Paper and String, and the original idea for the pincushion came from Indigo Blue.)

Canine capers

Why it is that when it is picking winners time the weather always decides to take a turn for the worse?

Hmmm . . . 

Have I ever picked a winner when the sun shines, I ask myself, and has this summer been so bad because there have been so many jolly prizes to be had?

There's something in here that smells rather nice

So, as seems to have become the custom, I took the girlies in fur coats outside to help me in my task.

Well, if she will, then I will

They had fur coats, I had a cardi (cashmere, of course, but you can't see me, so I could be making it up), and I had a butter dish for one set of entries, and a little chicken bowl for the others.

It doesn't look like butter . . .

Mad Dog was the front runner and was into the chicken bowl in a trice; the Little Stranger needed some enticing but in the end showed far more in the way of tenacity, enthusiasm, and tossing little pieces of paper around. Teddy-Face was nowhere to be seen - presumably asleep by the Aga, and utterly unaware of the fun to be had in the garden.

Any more for any more?

And here we have the winners (luckily I took photos, as I had quite forgotten who was what by the time I had battled through the gales and was back in the house).

Cue fanfare number 1 - the winner of A Green Guide to Traditional Country Foods is:

Pipany

And the winners of a copy of Organic Places to Stay are:

Summerfete, Noknittedknickers, and Nicky

So perhaps you lovelies (Pipany, Summerfete, Noknittedknickers, and Nicky) could email me with your addresses and your prizes will shortly be winging their way to you. And for those of you dears who were left on the lawn, commiserations to you, but I do have a couple more giveaways in the pipeline, one domestic and one constructive, so you have another chance to play very shortly.

The indignity of it all

And I am off to have a happy afternoon playing with my Go! Baby, a pile of fabric, and my free pattern book (if you want to join in the fun, you can sign up to download the patterns here). I have a baby present to make, but my cushion fetish is threatening to sidetrack my obligations . . .

Working and making and creating

Often, working at home means that it is difficult to draw the line between work and not-work. Notice that I don't say leisure, as I am not sure what leisure means nowadays - is gardening a hobby when you are growing your own food, and food for B&B guests to eat? Does housework count as paid work when you are cleaning the guest wing of the cottage? Are sewing and knitting leisure activities when you aren't making things to sell, but making them to use or to give rather than buy?

The poet Philip Larkin talked about not 'let[ting] the toad work squat on your life', and amongst all the different things I do to earn a crust there are some toady bits, but I prefer D H Lawrence's poem 'Work'  which recommends work that 'absorbs you like an absorbing game' - this weekend I was able to take the Lawrence approach, banish any hint of squatting toads, and lose myself in some making and creating.

It is not finished yet but just looking at the happiness colours of the fabric, and the stitches taken so gently, sitting so quietly, listening to Anthony Trollope's The American Senator (I have never read it, but I am ordering it in post haste) on Radio 4, takes me back to a Saturday afternoon out of time and fret and fever.


And even on a Monday, when the toads wake and rear their ugly, swollen heads again, at home the kitchen is filled with the pungent smell of plum chutney (recipe here), the measurable result of work which is making and creating. And it has promise for the future: the pleasure of eating, pleasure deferred, is enhanced by the memory of sowing, and growing and harvesting and chopping, in a continuum from earth to table.

There is jelly in the making, drip, drip, dripping its taste and sweetness into a bowl on the table. Tiny purple-black bush plums from the hedgerow, no work to grow, nature's bounty to harvest and store in rosy and jewel-like jars for the winter.

The tomatoes and peppers fill baskets, prolific and red - more goodness to be savoured when the plants are long gone.

And what to do with the cucumbers - don't tell me to pickle them, please, but delicious while they last.

There is work where the end is concrete and visible, not something repetitious to tick off, but cyclical and seasonal and sustaining, work to look back on and revisit and remember when the toads are long gone, squatting in their stagnant pools, bitter tasting.

I know which work I prefer . . .