A life in lists

So, this whole mending thing...

That is a hole in an elbow (there's a matching one on the other arm). Those are two nice pieces of felt to cover said holes. Any ideas on how to bring the two together? It strikes me that as the resident sewist I ought to be finding this easier. Should I just do some kind of neat miniature blanket stich around the edge or what? Help!

ps: the aged jumper is my mother's, not mine. I'm not sure if this makes it better or worse.

pps: does anyone else have a stack of mending that is continually placed behind new projects in the To Do list? I have a whole shelf in my workroom of things that need mending, and I am so behind that my children are actually growing out of the clothes before they are mended. Which shrinks the pile a bit, I suppose...

Pleasing

 The sight of a washing line full of fabric. Yes, I prewash my fabric. I think it originated from using so much vintage and salvaged fabric - possibly if I used exclusively high quality quilting cottons I wouldn't bother, but there can be a fair amount of variation in shrinkage even in quilting cottons. I also find some fabrics fade a surprising amount, which can mean that, for instance, two blues that seemed to match perfectly no longer do when they are washed.

My system is, broadly:

1. Wait until there is enough of a particular shade to do a wash (or throw them in with our normal light/dark laundry)
2. Wash at 40 degrees with standard laundry detergent (we use either Bio D or Ecover). I don't use a colour catcher sheet - too cheapskate. Although possibly the first time I get a proper bleeding fabric will be when I convert to them. Until then, no catchers.
3. Hang on the line
4. Press (this bit is boring. A couple of episodes of Doctor Who on the computer keep me going if there's a lot)
5. Fold
6. Store
7. Sew!

We don't have a tumble dryer, so I don't tumble them. You can't beat a few hours in the breeze on a sunny day, anyway.

This batch has been waiting for a wash for weeks (can you tell I have more fabric than I need in my life?). There are even some of the limited edition Liberty cottons from our trip to the Quilts exhibition in the V&A.

Incidentally, aren't the vegetables coming along well?

Kids' clothes week

 

I have a slight confession to make. This is a teeny bit embarrassing, given my handmaking-homemaking-ethical-living aspirations, but I have never ever finished a handmade garment for Teddy or Adam, and all I've made myself recently are a couple of skirts (which now don't fit since I lost the last of the baby weight) and several pairs of socks (which I wear all the time). I've started knitting a couple of jumpers for Teddy, but they've never been quite right, so I've abandoned them mid-project.

It's been playing on my mind in a vague sort of way, as I'd quite like to gear up for a season of making everything that we can from scratch (from food to clothes to carpentry, as much as possible), and frankly if I can't knit a pair of socks or throw together a pair of pyjamas, I'm unlikely to be able to meet all of our family's needs for an entire season.

Anyway, I was finally galvanised into action by this post by Elsie Marley (aka Meg) last week, and I'm determined to make at least a couple of pieces for Teddy's summer wardrobe. Look, there's a button on the side of the blog and everything!

Of course, it's at this point that I normally put myself off by saying, 'oh, but I need a serger to make decent t-shirts, and how much use is a couple of pairs of cotton trousers?' This time I am not listening to myself. OK, so I can't make a terribly useful t-shirt, but half a dozen pairs of simple trousers would come in useful for the more frequent changes of clothes that having a garden (and all it's watering can/compost bits and bobs) entails, and I really want to knit a couple of jumpers and cardigans for him.

 
In a jumper knitted by a relative with a kinder soul than I

So, one hour a day, that's all Meg's demanding of us. I can manage that, right? Even if I only do something for Teddy's naptime every day, I'll rack up my seven hours, and I'm hoping to find a little bit of extra time in the evenings.

I've got Debbie Bliss's Essential Kids pattern book out of the library, which has a gorgeous knitted pea coat, along with a simple jumper, and I'm going to get a pattern for some simple trousers (no, my sewing skills are not up to knocking up plain elastic waisted trousers without a pattern, thank you so much) in preparation for the second week of May. I don't for a minute think that I'll get all of these things finished, but if I can get a chunk of knitting done and a pair of trousers, I'll be pretty darn pleased with myself.

And then I just need to get started on all the other WIPS. Maybe I'll have a WIP Week after Kids Clothes Week. Or maybe I'll keep staring at them and feeling guilty for a little longer.

How green is your growing?

 In the light of yesterday's post on making my textile stuff more environmentally friendly, I just wanted to make myself feel better by proving that in some ways I really am doing my (very little) bit.

I bought these seed trays last year along with some cell trays (where the seeds are sown in individual little cells rather than sprinkled over a whole tray). I love using cell trays, but hate removing seedlings from the big trays with no cells (the roots get all tangled and the plants never seemed to thrive as well), so instead of popping to the shop to buy yet more cell trays, I made my own.

I save all our empty toilet rolls, along with any other rubbish that 'might be useful', in a big box under the sink - toilet rolls can be used for crafting (currently Teddy mainly goes "woooo" through them, but I'm holding out hopes for a desk organiser in about ten years), I make our crackers at Christmas, and now, with the help of this handy tutorial, they can be used as seedling cells too.

Now I've made myself feel better about my carbon footprint, here's a quick run down of what's been planted so far:

1. Beetroot (white and red) - just a few, so we can get an early-ish crop
2. Cabbage (red) - same as above
3. Basil - useful for growing on the kitchen windowsill
4. Coriander - as above (assuming I don't kill it all this year...)
5. Leeks - for early autumn harvest
6. Aubergines - who am I kidding? I live in England, not Morocco. But anyway, I'm giving them a shot
7. Tomatoes - lots and lots of tomatoes
8. Cucumber - a few seeds, despite my two efforts last year giving up the ghost at the seedling stage.

All these vegetables have wonderfully romantic names like Monstrueux de Charentan (i.e. early leeks), instead of 'F1 Mcboring' because they're all heirloom seed varieties from this wonderful website. I think heirloom seed varieties are pretty easy to get hold of in the States, but this is the only well stocked UK supplier I know of. Delivery was quick (within a week) and everything I ordered was in neat little bags, complete with instructions on seed harvesting so I don't need to buy another whole load next year (even though we all know I totally will).

I'm so excited that this year we might move just that teensiest bit closer to our version of self sufficiency - last year was more of a practise effort on the vegetable growing front, this year I really think we might be able to get a few whole meals from them!

What colour is your quilt?

 Fabric for a floor quilt in the style of a farm playmat I have planned for Teddy to go in the new house (moving in 8 days! Haven't even started packing!). I hate these colours. Sorry. I think it needs more solids and more brights. More on this another day.

There are a couple of reasons that we, as a family, do things like grow some of our own vegetables, bake our own bread, make as much stuff as possible and generally don't buy much. While money saving and the environment that we want to bring up Teddy (and any future children) in has an important part to play in all of this beavering away, the environmental impact of our lifestyle is also a huge consideration.

Without getting up on my high horse, I'd just like to reiterate that I believe that climate change and human damage to the world is a real and present problem, and that we all need to do our bit on a local as well as a national and international level to solve it. Sermon over.

As I was pondering some fabrics yesterday to start out a new quilt for Teddy, I realised that with my quilts and other handmade items I'm turning more and more to new fabric, rather than compromising a bit on the exact design I want and using entirely vintage fabrics. As I become more experienced at the whole handmade process, I find it harder to make something that is a compromise in any way in terms of design.

I don't know the specific figures, but I would imagine that the new fabric coming into our house probably accounts for a reasonable proportion of our carbon footprint from bought in goods (we don't buy much in the way of new clothes, and our food is usually local and/or organic).

I could, of course, go back to either compromising on design, or stop making things altogether until I have the exact palette of fabrics I require for any given project, but the fact is that I also need to contribute to our household income, and if I can't make my money through my supplies and handmade Etsy stores, I have to go out and get a 'proper' job. Frankly, that's not an option, as it would mean entirely changing the decisions we made about the way we want to bring up our children (with one parent at home for as long as humanly possible, not using too much childcare, and with an appreciation for a degree of self sufficiency and the nice side of life). Spending less time at home would also mean an end to the veg growing and bread baking etc, which would mean having to earn even more money, and so on and so on.

 So, in an effort to make my work (and play!) just a little bit more eco-friendly, I've come up with a brand new and super duper five step plan for minimising the environmental impact of my work:

1. Cut as economically as possible when chopping up fabric
2. Save every scrap, sorted by size (I know quilters who throw away anything smaller than a 5" square. Not me, my friend)
3. Use the scraps in other projects, such as the current hexagon quilt in progress (and likely to be in progress for the forseeable future).
4. Recycle bits that I can't reuse, such as cotton reels (unless I can find some nice new use for them. Incidentally, there are some good ideas here for reusing cotton reels if you scroll down, and Google will probably yield even more)
5. Organise my stash properly (can't wait till we move!) by colour and size of piece so that I can easily see whether I have something suitable on hand. At the moment half my fabric is in the cellar, which makes working out what I've got a bit challenging.
6. Consider every bit of waste (fabric, thread, packaging, blunt cutter wheels) as its produced and work out whether I can do anything with it, or whether anyone else might want it for something.
7. See if a local charity can take my too-small-to-use scraps for their scrap bags (I know some charities sell scrap bags of fabric to companies that remake those scraps into loft insulation and other boring-but-essential things)

I know that was actually seven points, but we'll gloss over that...

While I appreciate that this is a long way from living in a wood heated yurt in the forest with no running water or electricity, I'm hoping that these little steps will mean that my work has a much smaller impact on the environment than it might otherwise do, and perhaps inspire one or two of you out there to do the same.

 Ummm, nothing to do with the environment at all, but there are the super-speedy-delivery-from-Fabricworm Anna Maria Horner voiles I ordered (I've got another few coming from Sew Mama Sew too). I just thought you'd like something nice to look at after all that dreary green.

New life

Tomatoes (Galina, or possibly Amish Paste)

There's always a vague disbelief, when planting seeds, that those dry little husks will turn into an actual real live plant. It's something of a relief to find out that they do.

Unsurprisingly, the aubergines in the airing cupboard are looking less convincing - still a tray full of potting compost. I'm still holding out hope that they might do something before we move though.

Next year's 'garden'

I've been looking through what we grew with success this year, and planning what to bother with next year. As I've whinged about on numerous occasions, our garden is actually a paved courtyard that I certainly couldn't lay flat out on, so we have to pick and choose carefully what to plant, and stick to those that will do well in containers.

In brief, the, ahem, less successful crops were:
1) Carrots - even special little parmex F1s designed for containers apparently don't like my containers. 2 long troughs yielded about 100g of mini-carrots
2) Beetroots - these weren't quite as shameful as the carrots, but still not worth giving garden space over to. I think the biggest one was around 3cm in diameter, the average was about 1.5cm.
3) Courgettes - apparently I am the only person in the world who can't grow courgettes. They were weedy, stringy, didn't flower very much, then turned up their toes and died in a rainstorm
4) Pumpkin - as above, really.
5) Cabbage - not a failure as such, but too high maintenance (slug magnets), and took up a lot of space. I might sow the rest of the seeds I have and see if they germinate, but won't get more.

And the best of the rest:
1) Herbs - definitely a big success (except for the mysterious death of the thyme). They like pots, they like neglect, they're hideously expensive in the supermarket and insanely cheap in the garden. A winner all round
2) Salad leaves/lettuce - definitely will do more of this next year. Had lots of lettuces, rocket and miscellaneous green things. Did some by sowing, cutting young and waiting for it to come again, and some by growing actual lettuces. Again, v cheap in the garden compared to the supermarket
3) Tomatoes - these were a last minute success - we got absolutely loads from them in September, and there are even some nearly ripe toms on the plant as I write. Definitely worth planting enough to perhaps make some of our pasta sauce from next year
4) Beans - while the runner beans weren't brilliant (mainly due to my complete failure to keep them free of blackfly), the dwarf french beans were excellent, and just kept producing for about 4 weeks. Even though I only planted a few, we got a good few meals worth out of them.
5) Potatoes - we didn't get loads, but since the biggest expense is the potato bag, which we already have (I've heard you can grow them in fertiliser bags too, might try that), and my mother can usually be relied on to donate a couple of seed potatoes, we'll probably give them another go next year.

Obviously, if we (a) move (b) get an allotment (no breath holding going on) or (c) find some other local patch of ground we can beg, borrow or steal, things will change, and I'll give a lot of the failures another chance, as well as try to make our veg patch useful into the colder months as well (we will have nothing from ours apart from the odd herb over the winter), but I'm currently working on the expectation that we'll stay where we are for at least another year.

Yes, you heard, we're probably staying here for a bit longer. Boooooo. I really wanted to get into gear and buy and get ahead on our five year plan (if someone would have actually given us a mortgage), but realistically it's going to be better to save for another year, at least, and having a bit of stability will be nice as we begin to think about things like wedding planning (oooooooh, how girly!) and actually settling into day to day life with Teddy (yes, I do consider it perfectly reasonable to take over a year to settle into having a baby. I don't know if anyone mentioned, but it is a bit life changing).

Sloe gin yumminess

Now, there are many methods for making sloe gin - do you prick with a fork, freeze, or wait until after the first frost and hope that they haven't all gone? The Cottage Smallholder (interesting blog with lots of recipes from people who clearly have more of an idea what they're talking about than me) carried out an experiment to see which method worked the best. Her results are here.

I had to take sloes when I could get them last weekend (none round here really), so it was the second best method for us - freezing for a few days. And here's what I did:

Sloe gin
Ingredients:
75cl gin (I bought a couple of litres of Sainsbury's standard gin. I hear varying reports on whether the quality of the gin makes a difference, so I've gone one step up from the Basics range, but not all the way to Gordon's)
1lb sloes
6oz granulated sugar

Method:
1) Don't panic too much about the quantities. But put about a pound of sloes into sterile bottles (wide necked enough to fit sloes into, around a litre in size), add about 6oz of sugar, and top up with around 75cl of gin.
2) Shake the bottle (seal it first!) every day for a week or two, then store in a cool dark place for at least a couple of months. Ideally you leave it for around six months, strain and rebottle, but I expect we'll give in and have some at Christmas.

The garden has almost stopped growing

I haven't really mentioned my garden (read: small concrete yard with five minutes sunshine a day) for a while. If you click on the 'Vegetable growing' tab down the right hand side of the page (under the 'Labels' heading), you can see a few updates from this summer, and you can learn a bit more about my attempts to grow some vegetables entirely in pots in our small courtyard.

So, now we're in September, harvest season is almost over, and this is how the 'garden' looks:

The cabbage isn't looking too bad, and there's a bit of lettuce left. It's all a lot happier than this specimen:

 (This, in case it's not clear, was also a cabbage).

The herbs are coming along, hopefully they'll survive the winter:

 The tomatoes have, after a shaky start, proved quite a success. Not bad considering the complete lack of attention I've paid them in recent weeks. Here's the latest crop (we've probably already eaten this much again):

They're from our four plants - two anonymous small yellow plum ones, an Ailsa Craig (although I bought a small plant for 50p, as mice ate my seedlings) and and another anonymous yellow one, this time cherry toms, and on a bush, not a climbing plant. This one was a particularly good one, so I'm hoping to find the label kicking around the patio somewhere when I next tidy up.

I'm sure there was something else I was going to add... I'll remember it as soon as I hit post.

Some things I want to try

I have a list of things I want to attempt in our mission to be more self sufficient. Although many of them involve buying in 'ingredients' of one form or another, I'm hoping that they will prove cheaper than the shop bought versions. Just thought you might all like to admire my ambition, and laugh at my complete inability to get any of it done (I have had this list since I started the blog, and haven't ticked anything off it yet):

1) Knit a jumper for me (but first I need to finish my beautiful blanket)
2) Ditto, for Adam (ditto excuse)
3) Double ditto, for Teddy (double ditto excuse)
4) Make paper from our rubbish (need a paper making frame. Ebay maybe?)
5) Make Chistmas crackers from the toilet rolls (need snaps!)
6) Make soap (scared of pouring acid all over myself)
7) Make candles (need to clear jam out of kitchen first, or risk Adam leaving me)
8) Design and make all our cards (I actually have the things I need to do this in front of me, so no excuses here)
9) Make floor cleaner from vinegar and whatever else it is that makes good floor cleaner (I did just try with vinegar in water, and even that worked pretty well)
10) Buy some secondhand linen/fine cotton and make napkins/hankies
11) Sew a patchwork quilt from all my scraps (ah, I have a proper excuse here, my mother's taken my sewing machine away to make it work better)
12) Grow aloe vera and make remedies from it (I am the most accident prone person in the world. Aloe vera is my friend)
13) Buy some fabric from the charity shop next time it's someone's birthday and wrap their present furoshiki style (I don't think we've had a birthday since I came up with this)
14) Make ginger beer
15) Make my own eye and face moisturiser
16) Learn to sharpen our wonderful Japanese knives so that they are actually useful instead of just decorative

Ummmm... Would someone like to babysit Teddy for a year or two so I can get started?