My Flat in Progress, Summer 2017: Shelves!

With an ongoing home renovation project, your usual work/life balance becomes a work/life/DIY juggling act and sometimes that means one (or more) of the balls gets dropped.

Last summer, my flat got put on the backburner while I focused on helping my parents move house then settle into their new place. We took up the old laminate flooring and got carpet fitted in two rooms in June (very exciting!) and I moved the last of my furniture and boxes from my parents' house... and that was about it.

On paper, that doesn't sound like much but actually it made a huge difference to the experience of living in this flat. Two lovely clean rooms to put my stuff in! And shelves to put that stuff on after months of living out of boxes! Hurrah!

It felt kind of amazing - particularly because some of the stuff I was unpacking had been in boxes ever since 2011 when I'd split up with my then-boyfriend and moved back in with my parents to save money (god bless their patience, they are so glad to finally no longer have me living in their spare room!!).

I spent a few very enjoyable afternoons working out where I was going to put all my shelves, then slowly unpacking boxes to fill them. Arranging and rearranging things and generally feeling pretty darn thrilled to have this space to call my own.

One end of my living room is my "home office", which is a phrase that always makes me laugh. It sounds so serious when all it really means is "some shelves and a desk and a printer that doesn't work properly".

Then gradually my personal stuff takes over from all my craft supplies: books of poetry instead of books about sewing, photo albums instead of boxes of felt, etc, etc.

Oh, and I finally had space for my potplants again!

I missed my pot plants while my parents were "babysitting" them. A little bit of green and life in a space is so transformative, even if my potplants are all a bit funny looking thanks to years of my terrible plant parenting.

One "flaw" with this flat is that the windowsills are very narrow so I can't put plants on them. I'm still deciding where to put them for the best, but in the meantime they're squeezed onto shelves as close to the windows as possible. Some in my living room, some in the spare room and some in the kitchen (not pictured).

Mmm... lovely shelves...

Obviously it would have been nice if we'd got loads more DIY projects done last summer (it's always great to get stuff ticked off the To Do list), but it was actually really great just having some quiet time to sit and appreciate the work we'd done so far.

It was also lovely to spend time thinking about things like "where should I put these teacups?"...

... and "what should I put in this basket?"...

... instead of thinking about stuff like appliances and plasterwork and power tools. Simple pleasures, huh?

More flat updates coming soon! In the meantime, you can catch up with all my previous home renovation posts here.

Floral Hoop Art Pattern: Coming Soon!

UPDATE: this pattern is now available as a printable PDF from my shop. 

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Sometimes you get a bit of inspiration out of the blue and you just have to run with it.

At the weekend I'd planned to finish up July's (slightly delayed!) free project for my newsletter subscribers but ended up working on August's freebie instead. I thought it would be nice to do a floral embroidery pattern, sat down to sketch a few ideas during my teabreak, got totally sucked in to the process, and now my desk looks like this:

As you can see the planned embroidery pattern is turning into a bit of felt hoop art (you know how much I love a nice bit of felt), but there'll be plenty of embroidered details as well. I love how this design is developing, and I hope you guys will love it too!

I'll be sending out July's sea-inspired pattern later this week, then later this month subscribers to my pattern newsletter will get this floral design in their inbox. As well as the templates and step by step instructions for making the floral hoop art I'll be including a version of the design as an embroidery pattern so you can sew that if you'd prefer.

I'll share photos of the finished design sometime soon, but in the meantime you can sign up to my monthly free pattern newsletter here.  

Making a Christmas Quilt: the Finished Quilt!

Waaaay back in 2014 I decided to make a Christmas quilt for my sister. She loves Christmas and I thought a cosy, festive quilt would be a perfect, special gift.

I decided to hand sew the whole quilt... and massively underestimated how long that would take! After many, many hours of hand stitching I finally finished the quilt this spring, and gave it to my sister (hurrah!) and now I finally have lots of pics to share with you guys (double hurrah!).

This isn't the biggest thing I've made (that would be my double-bed-sized giant granny square blanket), or the longest-running work-in-progress that I've completed (that title is currently held by my mini patchwork squares blanket, which took six-and-a-half years from start to finish), but it's still a huge thing to have finished and I'm thrilled with how it turned out. Luckily my sister likes it, too!

You can read about the making of the quilt here and here, or just scroll down for lots of photos of the finished quilt in all its festive glory...

 

 

 

 

P.S. I might have finished this quilt but I'm not done with quilting! My current work-in-progress (although I've not been making much progress on it during this hot summer) is another patchwork quilt - click here to read all about it.

Summer at Kew: Rock Gardens, Peacocks & Climbing Roses

Kew has a lot of famous attractions - like the glasshouses - which are the absolute "must sees" when visiting the gardens. During my year of membership, I visited these a lot but also fell in love with some of the quieter corners of the grounds.

One of my favourite areas at Kew is the rock garden. It's huge, and includes several waterfalls!

The rock garden is arranged in six geographical areas and contains a huge variety of different plants from all over the world. These aren't big, showy, spectacular plants but they're still lovely and the cumulative effect of them all in this large rock garden? Wonderful!

Having a year's membership to Kew (which is surprisingly affordable, especially given the price of a day ticket!) gave me time to fully explore the gardens, of course, but the real treat was coming back at different points during the year and seeing how much things had changed. Look at how bare the rock garden looked back in January!

Near the rock garden in the early summer there's a walkway covered in climbing roses (super pretty)...

 

 

... and down by the Palm House pond you'll find these awesome plants with umbrella-sized leaves (this picture does a terrible job of showing just how big these leaves were but trust me when I say they were huge!).

I really enjoyed my summer strolls round the gardens...

 

... especially round the lake, which was looking lush...

... and it's always a joy spotting some of Kew's peacocks!

 

Click here to catch up with all my posts about Kew.

Click here to view my travel archive for lots more posts about my days out in London and around the UK.