Strawberries in the kitchen

We bought our first English strawberries today, but, despite their food miles, I love these dutch crates and wonder if they might become part of our play kitchen corner. Tea parties are a popular game especially for Mytle and Mo and so I've moved our much loved home-made kitchen into its own special corner ready for some additions. The top three images are from here; loving the idea of adding dresser style shelves, a play sink and a fabric curtain; love the sugary colours of the second image. Imagining more little vintage saucepans like this one and glittery potion bottles (our tiny much played with example just visible in the background)

Handmade

Daisy chains in the sunshine (baby crawling all around us loving the grass); a present for a one year old friend (8.30 am, baby on my back all the way through transferring Myrtles's picture onto fabric with the iron, quiet fabric pen colouring, hasty sewing machine piecing, stuffing, slipstitching); seed mosaics (raining, baby grumpy under the table ) What did the hands in your house make today?

Treasure

Her teacher laughed when she told them at 'Show and Tell' that she made this necklace "in the night." (She is so my daughter). Life is all about treasure at the moment, sorting it, making little bags for it out of knotted handkerchieves and folded paper, digging for it, hiding it, sorting it in special boxes, making it from beads and clay and glitter. Her 'treasure bag' the very first time she used the sewing machine on her own ("nearly all by myself"). We sewed the last seam together, putting one handle end at the front and one at the back so it sits comfortably on the hip and can be taken out foraging. Its blue flowery lining was a baby dress she was wearing what seems like not so very long ago.

New Ways

We have the trusted carriers I used for his brother and his sister; the metal framed rucksack, from which he watches the ducks, pulls my hair, points at his dinner as I make it; the much worn and washed 'huggababy' ringsling in which he chats on my hip or snuggles into my chest sucking his thumb (and wriggled out of this morning to take his first steps). We haven't quite got the hang of this new Pattapum toddler carrier (or the indulgent stripy Storchenwiege I bought several months ago and cherish like a best dress). But it conjured an hour of peaceful cooking, gazing at the garden and sipping peppermint tea, after an early, busy start to the day and made me remember carrying the others so many times, off to find adventures or just gentle ways through the day's work.

Patterns

Usually I love to improvise rather than follow a pattern (or a recipe). It feels more like playing, I can use what I have and I revel in the contradictory satisfaction of beginning with a definate idea of what I want and (through a process of endless choices and experiments) end up with a total surprise. I like not having to make all the decisions at the outset, to enjoy the journey, thinking all the way. I love that whatever project I have on the go informs the feeling of a particular time of my life, just like the book I'm reading or the music I'm listening to. While Mo slept today I lay on another pregnancy project (granny squares crocheted repetitively in endless, improvised colours of tapestry wool while watching The West Wing-), adding a little to last night's cast on project, the Kai Sweater from Natural Knits for Babies and Mums by Louisa Harding. The Debbie Bliss 'Pure Cotton' is so soft and the colour so perfect that I think I'm going to enjoy being carried along on this one, through episodes of The Wire and a new longer midday nap pattern that my little one thought up all on his own.

Celebrating curves.

I finally finished this stripy curvy jumper and, as when finishing a book I feel I've lived in, I find myself feeling totally bereft. I had it with me through so many long ante-natal appointments, waiting for scans and blood tests and midwife meetings. I was thinking of my pregnant tummy as I began and imagined the stripes ending just above my bump. On realising I would never finish before the birth (and therefore who knew when!) I picked up the cast on stitches and knit my way down in plain dark green, thinking instead of my post natal shape! The curvy melon-like sleeves with their improvised design were the perfect antidote to all that endless waiting and the rounds of solid green were exactly what I needed after sleepless nights and with a sleepy baby in my arms. I wasn't expecting to like it so much, often my improvised creations are more fun to create than wear, but this one works for me; just loose enough; just warm enough; just scooped enough at the neck to show off layers. I wouldn't have minded if I hadn't liked it ; it kept me company, taught me how to make some new shapes, puzzled me endlessly, kept me calm; but I love it that I do.

Cover

I started this with a nice neat patchwork in mind, laying out an embroidered vintage linen tray cloth, a scrap of pink fabric from an old stained dress of Myrtle's and some other scraps of cream and pink. I made this in the middle of a muddly, rainy, loose bank holiday weekend surrounded by piles of washing and ironing. Perhaps it was this in the background, or just that I wanted the cover to reflect the torn, patched and scribbled contents of my precious book, but I couldn't help tearing the fabrics and zigzagging them together haphazardly. I dyed the resulting pieced cover with tea, stitched on a bird applique I finished last year and put on a shelf and added a raggy fringe collected together from all the pieces lying around me on the floor. I tied an amulet I made some time ago on a lovely holiday in France on the front with some turquise braid and filled the pockets with a pen and some cards and scraps of cloth. Finally I painted a fragment of a favourite poem on the front with a sparkly puffy paint. The resulting cover transforms my book into something Mr B thinks looks like a book of spells, or something a pirate might have left behind in a shipwreck. The text is a verse of a poem by May Sarton;

This is a glass of water from my well,

It tastes of rock and root and earth and rain,

It is the best I have, my only spell,

And it is cold and better than champagne.

Rainy Bank Holiday

Hot chocolate in new-to-us teacups and the latest Charlie and Lola comic; cooking to live music; bluebells in the woods on our rainy walk and wisteria flowering over our pergola; today full of noisy layers of happy home-together family time.