Seriously addictive

My Summer sew project is turning out to be such fun and all in a good cause. Seven dresses have now been despatched to Louise from Dress A Girl Around the World. I keep thinking I'm nearing the end of my stash of appropriate fabric but then I see some in a charity shop which would work...I have even cut up a few of the clothes in my wardrobe. Well, it's all in a good cause!

I have never claimed to be a dressmaker but perfecting my skills can't be doing any harm and I'm just loving working on the extras - the little rag doll, bag/pocket and hairband that I'm making out of the fabric scraps.


Most of the dresses are upcycled, which can be a challenge, and definitely tales longer than the dresses I make from scratch.

My goal is 10 dresses (for now) and then I must revert to all the other ideas stacking up! All you sewers out there - give it a go - just one dress will make a difference to a little girl, living in poverty somewhere. What a feeling.

Celebrating success

It's only now, four months later that I can celebrate all the hard work we did last March in our front garden.
   Since we moved here 18 years ago it has been ok-ish space. (We're on a main road with strip of flower bed next to the car space, behind a bus stop so it's not a great place to garden.) The previous owners had sensibly spent some dosh and put some thought into a low-maintenace front with a lovely ceanothus, a rose and a laurel. For years I had sort of maintained them with the occasional prune, and filled in the gaps with grasses, a yucca, lavender, hollyhocks, cardoons and lots of big pebbles.
   In time I realised my additions had the potential to become the real stars of the show but the shrubs were ragged and overgrown and still quite dominant in the space due to their size. The trouble was, taking them out was going to be a nightmare job. 
   Thanks to the lovely sunny weather back in March (remember that?) I did start and what I start I always (doggedly) finish! Not before we had endured much extreme digging and sawing, not to mention trips to the dump and not inconsiderable backache for me and Mister.

The job was finished with a scattering of yellow and orange calendula* seeds and one of those mixed annual seed packets which I flung around with great abandon. Of course this year no watering was required through the spring as we watched and waited as the seedlings and inevitable weeds emerged. Some other flowers I added later did require some more care - the red sunflowers and dahilas are yet to flower (probably holding out for some err, actual sun). (The morning glory plants, which need sun, sun, sun have quickly chucked out a few puny flowers and given up in despair.)


   So despite this vile summer here in the UK and the depressing lack of picnic, barbecue and seaside visiting opportunities, I rush to the rainy front window every morning to check what's new in the flower patch - simple pleasures!




* Bright and breezy but inexplicably unfashionable Calendula is one of my favourite healing herbs. Its soothing properties mean its flowerheads are fantastic in home-made skin creams. The flowerheads are also great in tea for sorting out upset tummies. James Wong is my guru for this kind of wisdom - I find his natural remedies are fun to make and often do work wonders.

Dressing a Girl Around the World

Dresses, bags, hairbands and rag dolls completed this week for Dress A Girl Around the World.


Having so much fun - just finished bag for dress on the left and just started on the little doll to be clothed in the scraps left over from the dress and what's left from that makes a hairband.

Summer sew project

Over the last few days, my sewing machine has been silent, I've been feeling listless, after a flurry of deadlines and frantic activity suddenly I had no projects on the go and nothing was inspiring me... I was trying to hide it but days were passing and nothing was getting done.


When I get like this I have learnt to just go with it and see where it takes me and yesterday afternoon I found myself Googling 'crafts for charity'. After about 2 hours of contemplating lovely crafts I can't really do and great charities which were not really 'speaking' to me, I realised the answer was in a charity I came across months ago, called Dress a Girl Around the World.

It goes like this - people who sew are asked to make dresses for girls living in poverty in the developing world. Can you believe there are little girls who do not have a single dress? Some sewers make bags, hairbands, puppets and dolls to accompany the dresses which I think is such a lovely touch. When I read more, I suddenly realised the time was right for me to get involved. You know that whoosh when you realise that everything has been leading up to something and suddenly now is the time?


We try so hard to be green in our house but the girls and I are as guilty as most of us of buying clothes which we hardly ever end up wearing - that in a world where there are girls who do not have a single dress? To somehow compensate for the wickedness of this habit,I have tended to hold on to all the perfect, cotton clothes 'to upcycle'.


Trouble is, and this is shaming, the pile grows quicker that I can make sleep pillows, cushions, bags or whatever I'm into.


But the reason for my restlessness was obvious - this project was calling me and I had to rediscover it!


Yesterday I emailed Louise from the lovely blog Sew Scrumptious, who runs the UK branch of the charity and now all systems are go.

Check this blog for how I get on and a link to the charity (their website is down as I write).

Check Louise's blog for more info, including patterns and how to donate.

It's over and I really mean it this time

It's the right thing to do, I mean, isn't it? There's nothing else I can realistically make from the stuff to the left of the pic, is there?


Just don't ask how long it has taken me to come to this decision or how much I have draaaaagged out this final item, made from a charity shop pair of jeans nearly two months ago.


I tried to be experimental with the stitching, some was ok, some not as you can see from these pics.

With this one, I started without any idea of what I would end up with and now I'm triumphantly describing it to my family as my patchwork placemat for all those solitary, week-day lunches.

In case you were wondering, I found that solitary scrap to the top left, as I was finishing of and couldn't resist sewing it in, like a lonely tear.


Tbh, I vere wildly between thinking 'it's quite rubbish' to 'shows some promise'.

You may call it cheating but I dreamt up this jeans challenge so I think I'm allowed to introduce the shiny, lumpy bright green fabric which I think were part of a set of vintage curtains I have been hoarding for years.

Yes moving on is hard but always easier when you have started itching to revisit a few ideas from the past as well as embark on a variation on a theme.


After trying to steal the sleepy sheep pillow, Becky has asked for a pig pillow, I have just found the perfect fabric for a herbal bath idea and realised that the next challenge is to use up as much as I can from an upcycled sundress.


To as they say, 'take your mind off it, love'.

Saying it with flowers

Stringy, tight, thrifty, call it what you will but I was determined to use the scraps left over from my project to make stuff from a pair of charity shop jeans. The pile of denim oddments may have looked unpromising and, given the time this has taken me, was  labour intensive, to say the least.

Quite early on, it became obvious that the flower shapes and sizes would have to be different and that developed into the main joy of this project, picking up a scrap and working out how to work it!

It was fun to plunder my stitch bank and quite a challenge to bring in enough variation to keep it interesting, as opposed to messy.

So here they are from a variety of angles on my kitchen worktop...

.....with close ups of some of my favourites...

.....this (below) has to be a contender ...

Not a bad transformation for a pile of scraps! Trouble is, there are some leftovers and guess what, they are not in the bin yet.

Notes from my garden

To use a phrase I first heard from the lips of Saint Jamie Oliver, I'm really into herbage, and really quite dedicated to making useful things incorporating the power of plants.


So just because:

• Chelsea Flower Show week, where we were being regaled by weird and very wonderful garden designs has just finished
• Whoosh, summer is here and all my recent efforts are bursting forth

I thought it was time to take you on a quick tour of my garden and check out how my powerful plants are coming along.

We inherited this slightly shady, brick-edged bed and it's the perfect place for many herbs as well as this mini Bacchus statue. Check out the alchemilla mollis, various mints, marjoram, the alliums and chives.

We love to lounge around in our garden. A gap in a bed was bench-shaped so in it went. Last week I was clearing out an old shed in preparation for a new potting shed this autumn and I found this mirror which I hung on the silver birch behind it. 


When we had those lousy winters, I thought I had lost all the cordyline Australis - but no -  they started springing up at the bases so I chopped the dead tops off and on this one glued an old candle lantern.


There was always a strange circle in our lawn when we cut the grass, until I started to dig and found what I maybe whimsically now describe as a filled-in well.Some cobbles and an ever-changing planted pot and it's a bit of a feature nowadays.

For the Mediterranean herbs of course I needed a really dry, sunny spot. At the moment we're having sage with everything because of the success of this one.

Finally, for so many reasons we had to have a pond. It's full of newts although we had hoped for frogs to eat the slugs ... great how nature always makes its own mind up!
A fantastic spot for a bout of gentle contemplation.

More notes from my garden coming soon, please drop by again!