A Portrait of My Child, Once a week, every week in 2013: 3/52 and 4/52

Gosh, where does the time go.  I have half a dozen half-written blog posts but nothing to show you.  I'm also a little behind with the lovely portrait project but as that is the st easily fixed, I thought I'd tackle that first.

So, 3/52 - there was really only one story in our household in the third week of the year: SNOW!  Such a comparative rarity in London and the first time Babybird has really been old enough to find it exciting.  She loved playing out.  In fact the only way to get her back in was to pull out the paints (her current favourite indoor activity).

4/52 was one of those magical moments when your child surprises you by playing a new game with no apparent prompting from you.  She suddenly appeared while I was tidying the kitchen after breakfast and announced "Look Mummy, I'm a princess!".  How can your heart not melt?

Oh, and there will be more on the crazy nightdress as soon as I sort out my pictures.

"A portrait of my children, once a week, every week, in 2013"

My very lovely friend Julia, who lives by the motto that you find the time to do what is important to you and who seems to cram an awe-inspiring amount of stuff into her life posted about this rather lovely project: you share one picture of your child(ren) every week for a year.  She heard about it here and it all seems to have originated here.  I couldn't help but want to give it a go too.  I know - I'm a shameless copycat but it's just too good an idea to pass up.

I take a lot of pictures and like Julia, most of mine are phone-based snapshots rather than the beautifully crafted photos on Che & Fidel or the many other gorgeous sites I have been hopping to ever since Julia posted her links last night.  Still, they very much capture my daughter's daily life and I love to share them with family and friends who don't get a chance to be as involved in her lift as they would like.  We did consciously take at least one picture of Babybird every week for her first year and I suspect if I actually looked through all of last year's pictures that there is barely a week completely unaccounted for.  So, if I set aside perfectionist ideas about what sort of pictures I will take, this challenge seems eminently doable and, more importantly rather fun.

I'm also hoping as the year progresses that it will, in fact, give me a chance to practice and improve my photography (I do have a very nice camera that I would like to get to know much better).  That would be a lovely bonus.  Even if it doesn't, I think the memory-store that the snaps will create will be more than enough reward.

I'm a little bit behind as we are already two weeks in, but as luck would have it, I've already taken quite a few pictures this year and I quickly located a couple that capture Babybird completely as I see her.

So, 1/52:

A little bit of a cheat, truth be told, as she actually took this herself with my iPhone.  However it says everything about what a cheeky little monkey she is and I love this picture, for all its a little blurry.

And 2/52:

Painting is her current obsession.  Thankfully a combination of birthday and Christmas presents have made it a pretty quick, easy and surprisingly mess-free obsession to indulge.  I love the look of concentration on her face - so serious.

I wonder what this week will hold.

One year on.

Well, blogging turned out to be not quite as easy as I hoped.  Despite good intentions and numerous half-composed posts that rumble round in my head and get me very enthusiastic about the whole endeavour, getting them out of my head and into a computer still proves to be a stumbling block.

Oh well, no point crying over spilt milk or unwritten blog posts.  Neither are messily important in the grand scheme of things and I'm trying really hard to accept that I fit in what I have the time and energy for but, with so many competing interests, I'm never going to have time for everything so I shouldn't beat myself up about what falls by the wayside from time to time.

Blogging stalled completely in May as I had a really busy month, planning and running the Spring Fair for the parents network that I chair.  It was worth all the effort though as we had over 1000 people attend and ended up raising £1300 for a very worthy local charity, as well as signing up loads of new members to the group.  Lots of late nights caught up with me though and I was pretty sick at the end of the month.

Then in June we discovered that I wasn't sick at all but pregnant and June and July slipped away in a fog of morning sickness and exhaustion punctuated by a couple of scary "maybe we're losing the baby" moments.  Thankfully, all turned out to be well and I'm currently stretching my arms round my ever-growing baby bump to type this and wondering how it can really only be 5 weeks until my due date.

August was all about Summer Fun, both organising events for the parents' network and heading off for a week in the sun at the end of the month (a very lazy holiday in that we didn't actually leave our hotel other than to wander along the beach at the end of the street or to pop to the supermarket so I have absolutely no view of the wonders or otherwise of Menorca - all I know is that the sun shone every day and our daughter loved the pool).  The rest of the year then passed by in a blur but definitely featured a 2nd birthday party (how can she be 2 already), a Hallowe'en party, a hastily put together but largely successful Christmas Fair, a big round of Christmas parties for the parents' network and, of course, our own very lovely family Christmas.

And now, here we are, already two weeks in to 2013.  We are no more than 6 weeks away from meeting our newest addition to the family and possibly quite a bit less.  Nothing is organised, and who knows if it will be by the time he or she arrives.  I have a very full and happy life, one that I would love to tell you about, and hope to throughout the year, but if I do disappear again, know it is because we're so busy living it, I can't always fit in the time to write about it the way that I want to.

I finally finished something!

So, I finally sat down last night and corrected the buttonholes on the sundress that I made for Baby Bird.  I'm so glad I got this finished as this morning, the weather is perfect for sundresses... no, wait... it's throwing it down with rain again.  Oh well.  Small person was undeterred so the sundress is being worn as a pinafore.


I managed to snatch one quick snap before "Oooh, Mummy has the fun black box that makes the clicky noises and shows me pictures of me".

I see this "Oooh" face a lot.  It is normally accompanied by "Oooh" noises and a general need to run away quickly before she grabs whatever prompted it and has a tantrum when you remove said item.  Ah, the joys of the terrible twos.

Anyway, if it ever stops raining, I will take some outside shots.  In the meantime, I've played around with the great Pioneer Woman Photo Actions that I've just downloaded for Photoshop Elements and I'm pretty pleased with how the dress and Baby Bird look given the haste with which these were taken in my slightly gloomy hallway.

As for the dress, I'm pretty pleased with it.  I need to work on my buttonholes and may actually try doing the next lot by hand with embroidery silk for a thicker, more stable buttonhole and hopefully a neater finish.  However I think this set would have come out better had I not muffed up the length and had to tweak them.  Note to self: concentrate!

The pattern is "Watch the Birdie" from Making Baby's Clothes by Rob Merrett, but minus the applique.  This transforms it into the easiest sewing project in the whole world since it is just two pieces (or in my case 3 - I seamed the back so that I could squeeze this dress out of what was left of the 76 cm remnant I snaffled from DotsnStripes after I'd finished making the skirt for the dress she wore to the wedding that I keep promising to show you but failing to take pictures of), some bias binding and two buttons.  The fabric I know very little about: it was called Elisabet and I picked it up in late December along with a bunch of other remnants.  DotsnStripes have a particularly good remnants page I think and  I will be popping back over there regularly to pick up bits and bobs since I rarely need a full metre to make stuff for Baby Bird.  I'm really pleased with the fit - there's growing room but not so much that it looks ridiculous and the A-line is really flattering over her big fluffy washable nappies.  I will definitely be making more of these...

New skills

I've talked before about how a nap time is proving to be just long enough for me to pick up some sewing, and about my friend's belief in the power of cumulative action.  So on Thursday, when it was close to but not quite close enough to the end of a week of busy Spring Fair planning, and I was in need of some light relief, I decided to pull out my sewing and see if I could finally nail a skill that had stalled two of my current projects: buttonholes.

I was a more than a little afraid of buttonholes.  The need to sew two parallel lines of closely spaced stitches and then snip a hole in your work without cutting any of them, or, most importantly, the little bars of stitches at the top and bottom.  It rather brought me out in a cold sweat.  My gran assured me that the buttonhole function on her sewing machine was fool-proof and that, once I'd tried it, I'd never be afraid of buttonholes again.

I found some scrap yarn and tried.  It started well but then the stitches began bunching and eventually the machine was just jogging on the spot.  I stopped and tried again.  Same thing.  I fiddled with the tension settings.  I fiddled with the pressure on the foot.  I fiddled with the feeddogs.  The machine seemed stiff.  I oiled it.  It helped a little but not much.  I tried doing some simple straight sewing.  The machine laboured.  It clunked.  It whirred.  Then it jammed.

Oh.  As one of the characters in my daughter's favourite TV programme say, "That is not very good".

I dismantled the bits of the machine that I could get to but nothing seemed to co-operate.  Clearly this called for someone who actually knew what they were doing.  I rootled around on the internet, hoping to unearth a sewing machine repair shop.  There were a few, but none particularly close to my corner of London and none who would collect the machine from me, and the closest one wasn't answering the phone.  Just when I was resigning myself to a drive into Battersea and to not doing any sewing for a couple of weeks while I tried to fit in driving back to collect the machine again, I spotted a link to a mobile sewing machine engineer.  The site looked presentable enough and he seemed to have lots of experience, plus a good reference (albeit a few years old now) from a local shop.  What the heck.  I gave him a call.

Which is how on Thursday evening, a little Lithuanian man was sat in my study, servicing my sewing machine (Hubby insists this sounds like the start of a porn film... I think it is the term "servicing") and how, on Thursday evening, I was finally able to do this:

and this:

You might not have noticed the buttonhole in the middle of the cow's head on the pocket flap...

and my sewing machine now runs like a dream.  Part of me feels £50 for the 20 minutes he was hear is rather expensive, but then he has a skill that I don't have, he came to me and he was with me within 4 hours of my call.  Plus I doubt any of the other shops would have been noticeably cheaper and all would have been noticeably more hassle, so really, what's not to like?  His card is now in a safe place for the next time (which he laughed and suggested would probably be in a couple of years).

Of course, I'm still a way off actually completing anything. This is probably why, rather than starting another project when I hit the buttonholes of the dress, I should have bitten the bullet then, but hey-ho.  I did try to remedy that last night by sewing the buttons on the dress.  Unfortunately, I discovered that I mis-measured and my buttonholes are slightly too short, so there will need to be a little jiggery-pokery tonight to fix that and I will need to remind myself of Tim Allen's mantra on 'Home Improvement': "measure twice, cut once".  But the important things are (a) I conquered my fear of buttonholes and (b) I think they look pretty good.  I'll finish the dress so that Baby Bird can wear it tomorrow and hopefully by next weekend, she will be skipping about in a pair of crazy cow print trousers.  The material is pretty bonkers I will concede, but I love it and firmly believe that if you can't dress in bonkers prints at 18 months, I don't know when you can.

The time just keeps on going

Another week, or rather, ten days, have passed me by in a bit of a blog-less blur.  I guess I'm a bit too busy living at the moment to talk to you about it.  My volunteering job is manic right now as we are busy organising our Spring Fair.  If you happen to be in Ealing on 19th May there will be some fun happenings to enjoy.  I'm also feeling thoroughly inspired on the sewing and knitting fronts and rather than methodically taking pictures of things so that I can share them and working carefully through one activity to completion, I'm flitting backwards and forwards amongst half a dozen different projects.

I'm so close to finishing a little sundress from Making Baby's Clothes (just need to figure out buttonholes and find some buttons - in fact, I'm only a moment of impatience away from just adding poppers and calling it good.  The only thing I need to do to show you the lovely little dress (Tutti-Frutti from the same book) I made her for our friends' wedding (which is already, unbelieveably, a month ago) is take some pics.  Maybe I can get that sorted over the weekend.  Especially if it really is drier as forecast.  I've also cut out and started sewing some cute trousers from the same book (I really love Rob Merrett's designs and instructions) in a very funky cow print that has to be seen to be believed (but as I bought a remnant and my Google-fu is failing me, I can't show you that until I take some pics either.

On a completely different sewing tack, I've planned a couple of easy baby projects thanks to the lovely Purl bee blog.  So, I have some terry cloth and gorgeous tana lawn lined up so that I can make a few of these fab Liberty bibs  and some more tana lawn and some organic bamboo & cotton fleece lined up to make a lighter version of this easy-peasy baby blanket.  Once my new walking foot arrives, these will all be winging their way across the pond to a very lovely little girl who has recently joined the world.  But this sewing mania (and the obsession with the Purl bee) was all sparked by these spring napkins which were mentioned in Mollie Makes a little while back.  I saw them, I loved them, I had to make some.  Which is why my sewing table is now piled with two bundles of fat quarters (one plain pastel, one bundle in the same colours but with white spots) and miles of white rick rack.  All I need is to find some spare hours in the day and, I discovered this evening when I sat down to do some work, some sewing machine oil.

I've also been buying patterns from Backstitch and Colette (at long last my Colette Sewing Handbook arrived from Amazon!) and generally drooling over the endless possibilities.  And I daren't even tell you about what's been going on in the yarn cupboard...

On that note, I'm off to find a glass of wine, an episode of Grey's Anatomy and to pick up that Siivet I've been working on.  Yep, no pics of that either.

Where did the last 6 weeks go?

I have absolutely no idea.  One minute I was blogging whilst cooking dinner and getting quite into everything, the next it was the middle of April.  It's all been a bit of a blur really.

Things were really starting to get on top of me the last time I wrote, and I couldn't really figure out why.  I think it is partly the fact that I have forgotten some of the techniques I used to use at work to keep myself straight.  Things like using my diary, and making lists, rather than trying to store everything in my head.  Things like prioritising, allocating time to particular tasks, breaking down the big jobs into smaller ones.  All that good stuff.  Carie reminded me with her tips on my last post.  I guess it seemed a bit over the top to approach my current life in the way I used to approach life as a solicitor, but actually, being a house-wife/stay-at-home mum is no less of a job than being a solicitor and involves just as much juggling and attempting to appease imperious foot-stamping children...  Especially when you take into account my voluntary job (which is proving way bigger than I imagined... or at least, it is that way I have been trying to do it so far - changes will be attempted on that front) and the fact that I really want to keep some sense of myself outside my role as home-maker and family caretaker.

So a fair chunk of the last few weeks has been spent trying (and largely failing, but hey-ho) to organise myself a bit better, trying to bring some discipline back into things, and trying to (a) bash through some of the backlog on my voluntary role and (b) figure out exactly how much time and energy I am prepared to devote to it and marshall my resources accordingly.

Then on the more fun side of things, there was that glorious weather in late March and the small matter of a trip to Somerset and Devon for the long overdue wedding of two good (but rarely seen) friends.  We might only have been away for three nights but boy did we cram a lot into that trip.

We broke the journey to Bampton, Devon down by stopping for pizza and then stopping for a run round Stonehenge.  I appreciate this may not be the traditional way to view this revered ancient monument but it was Baby Bird's preferred approach and all we could really do was try to keep up.







The next day involved a trip to Minehead to play on the beach, and
cream teas for all.  Clotted cream was, unsurprisingly, a big hit.

We then headed on for a nice pub lunch on Exmoor before spending the afternoon at Exmoor Zoo.  This is a fantastic little zoo and we are already planning to go back, as we didn't really have time to see everything.

We did get to watch the penguins being fed though, which was great fun.









The day was rounded off by a family trip to the Bampton Fish Bar, where Baby Bird was introduced to curry sauce and mushy peas (can you tell that one of her parents is from the further north than the other?).




It was all a bit much for some of us.

Saturday was, predictably, the only day that actually looked and felt like the end of March, so unfortunately, the wedding was somewhat chilly and overcast, a fact made all the more disappointing by the fact Saturday was flanked by two stunningly warm and sunny days.  Still, the wedding was lovely, the bride and groom looked fantastic, and Baby Bird was very well behaved for her first big occasion.

There will be more about this particular day later as I want to show you the dress that I made for her to wear, and I am very much hoping that the photographer will have got a good shot or two of her since we failed miserably.

Sunday we packed up and headed home, after running off a bit of steam in the nearest park, stopping off for the obligatory Little Chef lunch.  I don't know about you, but Little Chef features strongly in my memories of childhood trips and I wanted to get Baby Bird off on the right foot.

Spaghetti & meatballs wasn't on the menu back in the day, nor was the smoked salmon and scrambled eggs on toast that I had, but the pancakes that we all shared for dessert most definitely were and it was a jolly way to finish our hols.  People screw their noses up at Little Chef and places like that.  I say it's horses for courses: as a family-friendly spot for a bite to eat on a long journey up the A303, this was perfect.  We didn't want or need fine dining; we needed clean, easy and providing crayons.  Job done.

Easter was altogether quieter as all three of us managed to get sick (to varying degrees) over the course of the week either side of the holiday.  However, that did give me some time to do a spot of knitting and also some sewing.  I'm looking forward to showing you what I've been up to.