Trying to buy gifts for teenagers – too cool for the beloved obsessions of their childhood, too trendy to allow for too much advance organisation – is a tricky business. Buying for other people’s teens is even harder. Trying to balance the desire to get something they want or is useful, without shifting away from surprises too early, can be […]
“I know you prefer messaging, but this deserves a phone call”, my friend said when I answered the phone, just a couple of hours after we’d last chatted in person. I’d spent a lovely twenty minutes snuggling her brand new baby, rocking him to sleep and clucking over the tiny noises and adorable faces he was pulling in his dreams. […]
I have a nasty habit, over overestimating how much I can get done on holidays, and underestimating how much adulting I will be required to do on those days where I think I have nothing on the agenda besides pleasing myself. Tiny house life throws another curve ball in the mix – one room, one table, six people with projects […]
With a new year, comes a new rush of project energy. It’s the time of year I feel like I can commit to allll the daily projects, or at least two of them. One I’ve barely mentioned even to my main craft chat, for fear of spooking my brain, and having said brain convince me it’s a bad idea. (Clearly […]
When I pulled out my gnomes again this year, I needed to make a few adjustments. My infamous inability to handle basic estimates of size meant I needed to cull from twelve to eight. Like a normal person, I have all my gnomes listed in a spreadsheet, sorted by folder and height, and colour coded by position. It’s a work […]
Full of both a finished projects, and it’s off casts, my maker tote has been staring at me for weeks. It needing sorting, emptying, and a new home found for it. Every time I thought about it though, I ended up finding something else to catch my attention, and boring things like reorganising a project bag fell by the wayside. […]
I had big plans for a triumphant WIP Wednesday post today. After a productive week, I’d finished gnome four, started gnome five and finished it, and gotten cracking on gnome six. The wheels came off last night when I thought I might do a couple of the feature inset colours, and consulted my chart and my previous gnome, only to […]
It was the skirt I noticed first. Deep in the trenches of my own ripple blanket, the tiny little girl across the room, wearing the most adorable crocheted ripple skirt, grabbed my attention immediately. Like the Very Cool And Normal person that I am, I introduced myself and then skipped the small talk and went straight into gushing about the […]
After seemingly unending rain, days at a time, followed by a day or two of glorious spring warmth, and back to driving rain, the lawn has, predictably, grown at a rate of knots. Invariably, the rain has settled in on Thursdays, continuing through to Friday night, leaving the weekends too wet to try and get the mower out. This week, […]
When my parents, sometime in the mid 90s, decided to put their reserved, obliging, shy young teen in sewing lessons, I’m sure they envisioned a wholesome old fashioned hobby that would distract me from my troublesome reading addiction (doesn’t everyone read Bryce Courtenay’s Jessica in a single sitting?). Maybe they expected I would be sewing quilts, and bags, and tiny […]
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