Space for the Butterflies

The phone call at 4.30 {the ordinary moments}

12/02/2017

My phone rang at 4.30. That was never going to be a good sign. I’ll quite often talk to John and the kids on the phone at lunchtime but if the message is “come home via the chippy, we fancy fish for supper” it’s going to come by text, not a call.

Poor little Pip Squeak had fallen over in the supermarket and banged his head on the bottom of a shelf unit as only an overly bouncy toddler could. He had a nice egg coming up and a bit of a nasty cut, and John and the pharmacist had both looked at it, and each other, and made that face that you make when you know that it might be all right if you just left it, but you can’t take that chance and you know you’re going to A&E. With three increasingly hungry children.

So they headed off through rush hour traffic, I threw everything in my work bag and headed for the next train with a small detour for chocolate biscuits.

In an odd way there was a sense of inevitability about it; Pip is utterly fearless and tall and strong with it, he will climb anything, run jump and throw himself into whatever he’s doing, usually literally, so to be so excited that he fell over his own feet is very Pip, it’s just that supermarkets aren’t quite as friendly places to fall over in as the sofa at home.

I was never particularly worried exactly; John is a veteran of many, many sports related injuries (see here and scroll down for evidence!) and seems to leave the best part of his knees on an astroturf almost every week so I trust his judgment absolutely when it comes to bumps and scrapes on the kids but oh did I wish that train could have moved faster. It isn’t the same as when I’d get a call from nursery to say one of the girls was poorly and I’d have to dash home as fast as possible to pick them up and cosset them, but it’s still enough to make you feel every mile.

By the time I got to the hospital it seemed that miracles of miracles had occurred and they’d found A&E to be fairly quiet so they were already in with the doctor, and my little boy was bumbling about to show everyone just how bright eyed and bushy tailed he was feeling. General prognosis: he was fine, he just needed glueing back together again. Which is exactly what happened; as Pip likes to tell people “I went hospital! Doctor fix me!”, and he was petted and given a fruit roll in the butchers so as far as he’s concerned he’s had fewer baths and a nice adventure.

I was so proud of our girls too; when I got to the hospital they were both crammed into the same chair, trying desperately not to fidget too much, and just sit and wait, and for all that they were glad to be sprung when I took them home first while John and Pip waited for the glue, they wouldn’t go until they knew what was happening to their brother, and given him hugs and checked he was OK.

It’s been quite a week. As well as Pip charming the A&E staff into giving him a biscuit, we’ve had house viewings, seen a house we quite liked the look of be sold to someone else, and John and my in laws have done a herculean task in two days and repainted vast swathes of the house (you can hear all about it in this week’s Little Loves video).

It makes me very very glad to be sat on a cold and grey Saturday evening, writing this with a glass of wine to one hand and the comfort of knowing that right now we’re all tucked up and snug in our castle. But here’s hoping to a slightly less eventful week coming.

Joining Katie at Mummy Daddy Me and Donna at What the Redhead Said for The Ordinary Moments

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Finished Handmade Quilting

July, August and October in the SugarBlock Club {handmade}

10/02/2017

In February we’re well into 2017 and yet this week I seem to be ignoring the changing of the year and sticking resolutely to my 2016 plans. My current knitting is Pip’s Christmas jumper, now on the right front with only sleeves, hood and just the 3 balls of yarn to go, and I thought it was high time that we had a little quilting update to see where I’d got to on the question of the Sugarblock Quilt, or possibly quilts.

Selling a house and making a quilt are not the happiest of bedfellows, the one requiring our habitually chaotic studio to look as though no one ever so much as opened a paint tube in it and the other inevitably shedding teeny tiny little snips of white thread all over the floor. In the flurry of viewings my blocks and precut bits and pieces have spent a lot of time stacked up in a corner, but over Christmas I had a bit of a quilting flurry and spent some happy evenings holed up in the studio sewing my way through the months.

The last block I showed you was the first of the Maritime Stars and the second, while cut out, was scattered to all corners of the house when we moved some furniture around. Finally brought back together it looks like this:

As blocks go it’s still my favourite of the whole quilt, and only the prospect of paper piecing all those sections holds me back from making a full size quilt from them. Maybe I shouldn’t throw it off entirely but just save it for later in the hope that in years to come there might be a little bit more time and it will feel achievable.

So that brought us to August and Shenadoah.

It’s a variation on the Virginia Star, the sort of star your mind conjurs up when you think of a star quilt, and this version is the perfect canvas to show off some pretty fabric.

This blue Paris print I bought to make a dress for Kitty; she wore it, Elma still wears it and the leftover fabric is still featuring in quilts and little scrap projects and when it’s finally all used up I will be a little bit sad.

For the other block I choose the elephants, both to show that that actually is the pattern; lots of other blocks have had snippets of trunk or tail so it’s nice to put them all together and reassemble poor Nelly, and to add balance. I think this is one of the most dominant fabrics in all of the blocks, and I know when I added the first block with it in I thought I’d made a horribly mistake. The more I add, the more balance the quilt gets. At least that’s the theory.

I’ve hopped over September for a minute because it’s another part paper pieced pattern and our printer hasn’t been the same since Pip decided to feed it felt tip pens, and moved straight on to October and the bear paws.

And it was at this point that I realised that even raiding my stash for unused fat quarters, the scraps are not going to make it to the end. The two bear paw blocks are made from the only fabrics that I had on hand with enough to make the paw, and I’m pretty sure I’ve exhausted the elephants and the blue spots now. I know this was hoping to be an entirely from stash sort of a quilt, both for the satisfaction of making something from leftovers and because big quilt splurges are not in the current budget, but I’m hoping to find a handful of fat quarters just to get me to the very end.

And I do now have a plan for the very end. It’s going to be two quilts. I’ve got September, November and December blocks to go and then I’ll have 24 in total, hopefully vaguely hanging together in some semblance of order. I loved the layout that Amy suggested (taken from her Quilt Block Cook Book), a diamond of 12 blocks set in a white background; the blocks shine, there’s nothing to compete with them and overall it’s gentle on the eye. But not necessarily that practical.

(I can no longer fit all of the blocks on the floor and it keeps raining outside, so this is just a snippet!)

I think of predominantly white quilts, I imagine these on the girls’ bunkbeds in the absolutely perfect next house, their room softly lit with gentle sunshine while they play on the floor nearby, the scatter of only the most instagrammable of their toys surrounding them, and then reality hits. That much white, for a six and four year old, is asking more of my daughters than is seriously reasonable. At the very least we need a little something to break up the white.

So my plan is to start with the concept of the diamond, but add in a corner to corner X made up of tiny scrap blocks. I’m thinking nine tiny squares to a block, or possibly five; whatever adds colour without taking away from the original.

Target completion date is probably Christmas 2017 so I’ve got a bit of time to play around; what would you do?

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Family Motherhood {the ordinary moments}

A snuggly sort of Saturday

05/02/2017

Somewhere it’s written down as an actual genuine rule, that when you’re at your most busy, the exhaustion that runs with it only hits when you stop long enough to notice. My January has been dominated by two big work moments, one in the middle and one at the end of last week, and the sudden realisation that I was done, or rather that I had just a smidgen of breathing space before the next urgent deadline hit me with all the force of a month’s worth of late nights and my poor little brain had to be coaxed into action with the promise of our team goodie shelf (and the very welcome and now traditional Toblerone from my boss on his return from the Alps). I was so glad to see Friday, and even gladder to see 5pm on Friday and the train home.

I know when I was the full time at home parent, the weekend felt like the chance to do something or go on an adventure as a complete family, and it’s a mindset that I think I’ve carried across into going back to work. Add in the omnipresent lurk of maternal guilt and I have a default setting that weekends should be for adventures and for making enough memories with the children that they never look back on their childhood and think I was missing. It’s also a lot of fun, as our trip to the Chinese New Year festivities last Sunday proved, but sometimes you just need to have a really lazy day.

Well sort of a really lazy day. The viewings continue so we were up bright and early yesterday to get the house back to showing standard and then headed out for breakfast to wait for everyone to finish traipsing through, but once we got home, we were home. And part of me thought that on such a beautiful sunny day we really ought to go and do something, and the really tired part of me looked at the comfy sofa and the window open to let the sunshine, and knew that the furthest we were going was the garden.

And so we settled into one of the sort of ordinary days that I seem to have so rarely now; sat around the dinner table while the girls did some colouring, Pip drew expansive blue swirls, and I picked up his Christmas jumper (sadly neglected since the big day) in between fielding illustration requests, because why shouldn’t you have a hockey player, Pip watching hockey, a helicopter and a rainbow all in the same picture. With John home for a little longer thanks to a change in hockey plans, he joined the art club and it felt very peaceful, even in the noise of a family of five.

For lunch we gave the kids a carpet picnic, a favourite treat of theirs, and when we’d rescued cheese wrappers from the floor, they brought down their duvets and pillows and quilts and we set up the play frame to make a snuggly den.

But whatever game they were playing didn’t quite stack up to just cuddling up; I sat on the sofa with my knitting and one by one they came to join us; Kitty and Elma down the other end giggling and wiggling my toes, and Pip snuggled up by my side. We didn’t read stories or even sing, I just listened to them chatter away and caught up on snippets of all the vitally important things about school; Elma’s next playdate, how many teeth each of Kitty’s friends have lost, and where she sat to eat her carrots last week.

When I was all grown up and heading back to see my Mum she used to keep patting me, just to check I was real, and really there, and at the time I thought it was sweet and a little bit funny, but now I totally get where she was coming from. As the full time working parent in this family my arms are empty more often than they are full, even in the weeks where I wake up to find Pip on one side, Kitty on the other and Elma sleeping across my feet, and though all three kids are little cuddle bugs, I can’t spend all my home time clutching them to me to try to compensate. To spend hours just curled up together with no pressure to be anywhere or doing anything was one of those days that feel like Saturdays should; the days that drop into the “you’re doing OK” side of the scales.

As I’m writing this I feel bonelessly relaxed; definitely a feeling to hang onto as we head into another week.

Joining Katie at Mummy Daddy Me and Donna at What the Redhead Said for The Ordinary Moments

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Family Finished Handmade

Traubenhyazinthe {handmade}

03/02/2017

If you’ve been following any of my Little Loves videos over on YouTube you’ll know that I’ve been doing a little bit of top secret knitting of late. I rather gave the impression that it might be a baby knit but while I do have babies to knit for this year, it was very definitely not a baby knit.

My Dad’s birthday was on Wednesday and by the miracle of the Royal Mail, there was a nice squishy parcel waiting for him to open (and put on straight away).

Socks seems such a stereotypical sort of a present to give to your father; past the stereotype and into pastiche perhaps, but these are no ordinary socks.

The colour is Traubenhyazinthe, grape hyacinth, and if the name hasn’t already given the game away, the yarn is of course the wonder that is Wollmeise Twin.

This isn’t part of the stash that came home with us this summer, that’s all marked for Kitty, John or me as sure as if we’d added name labels, but I have a little pre-existing stash from years past, mostly from when there was an enormous Wollmeise stand at Knit Nation the year Kitty was born, and this was from then, and I love it as much now as I did then.

It seemed rather appropriate too to be knitting yarn named for a spring flower for a birthday at the start of spring. Although while I can see the grape hyacinth colours in the yarn, for me it’s got shades of home; the deep turquoise of the sea on a brilliantly sunny day, against th eblue sky that you only see lying on your back watching clouds at midsummer.

If it wasn’t named after flowers it should have been called King Neptune (Konig Neptum for what it’s worth!)

The socks themselves are a slight tweak to my standard pattern; I usually knit a 68st sock for Dad but on the cuff the ribbing was pooling the pattern into vertical lines that just looked all wrong and didn’t do the yarn even the hint of justice. I started again on 64sts and the colours swirled beautifully on the cuff but then pooled on the leg, so the cuff is 64sts and the rest of the sock is over 68, having added 4 stitches to the first round of stocking stitch.

It’s not so big a change as to alter the fit, but it makes them beautiful rather than occasionally oddly pooling; and if you’re going to spend every spare moment you can find in January adding a stitch or two, then they really ought to be beautiful.

And by the time we Facetimed Dad to sing Happy Birthday, they were proudly worn; Dad knows that they’re not just socks, they’re hours of my time, when I didn’t have a huge amount to give. He knows he’s wearing love, in 24,000 stitches (and a smidge if we’re being tecnically accurate)

Joining Crazy Mom Quilts for Finish it up Friday and Frontier Dreams for Keep Calm, Craft On

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A Postcard From Family

Chinese New Year 2017: the Year of the Rooster

02/02/2017

The advantage of my daily commute to the heart of the midlands is that it doesn’t feel very far away, and so if there’s something fun on at the weekend, it feels easy to load the kids onto the train and head off for an adventure. Which is exactly what we did on Sunday. We left John to get ready for the second of the weekend’s hockey matches and the kids and I went to Birmingham’s Chinese Quarter to see if we could find a lion or a dragon or two. Kitty’s nursery were very keen on celebrating Chinese New Year; to be honest they celebrated everything in the spirit of equality, but Chinese New Year meant lots of crafting with red paper and gold glitter, Chinese food for lunch and for the older kids, performing a little dragon dance for the toddlers and babies. I think she missed it when she headed off to school.

She is a Tiger, Elma is a Dragon and Pip a Horse, while John and I are the suitably mischievous as a pair of monkeys. As, I now know, is the Lord Mayor of Birmingham.

We started our day at the main stage to watch the opening ceremonies, including the spotting of the new Birmingham Lion, a wonderfully furry monster in pale blue and white who ‘came alive’ when the mayor dotted in his final eye. We’d managed to wiggle our way through the crowds pretty well, and with Kitty holding on to a railing, Elma perched on top of it holding onto me, and Pip in the sling on my back, we all had a pretty good view despite the rain. Nothing could quite prepare us for the firecrackers though; they rattled off as the lions came to life bouncing and prancing all over the stage.

With four lions and one dragon under our belts we found another one, this time mechanical, with a handle to turn to move each little bit and an open invitation to come and play. It was set outside the Hippodrome which was running a whole loads of free activities. They had stands to sit and make a rooster mask or a chinese lantern but after watching for a bit I realised that we were in for a long wait to get all three sat down at once, and that my chances of getting three lanterns home in any state approaching dry and uncrushed was more than I could realistically hope for, so after committing the method to memory we went to play with the Lego and have a nice sit down out of the wet and wind.

And when rumbling tummies pushed us back out in search of food I promise our first intentions were to find some actual Chinese food from one of the street stalls. The problem was that after 10 minutes in the queue for dumplings we hadn’t actually moved. In fact, in the time it took us to leave the queue, go and queue up for Thai food, get the food and come back we still wouldn’t have moved more than a pace forward. It was full on culture clash; eating Thai food (and then churros) at Chinese New Year celebrations on what was an unmistakably British winter’s day while the rain pattered down and the corners of the marquee dripped.

Our next escape was to the Birmingham Royal Ballet, whose family taster day included trying on costumes and dancing a rooster dance. Kitty loved it, and while I haven’t put it in our film of the day’s adventures because there are obviously other kids in it, I do now have proof that Kitty once danced with members of the Birmingham Royal Ballet. She made the cutest chicken.

We made our way back to the main stage at the point when the weather was at its worst and the only audience watching the classes of a mandarin school sing their hearts out were their devoted parents. But it meant that Kitty and Elma could creep forward to the very front to be in the perfect spot for the finale that followed; a face changer with phenomenal sleight of hand, to the point that I only worked out how he was doing it by watching the video slowly, and another lion.