Happy Halloween!

Just a quick post to wish everyone a happy halloween and to share this year's pumpkin carving effort. 

Seeing as until last year I'd never carved a pumpkin, I'm still relatively new to the whole carving thing. This year's pumpkin was grown by my Grandad, and is relatively small so trying to hollow it out was a little interesting. We decided to go in through the bottom, rather than the top, to make it a little easier. 

And here's the finished pumpkin:

I also figured this would be a good place to post the pictures of the Halloween costume that I wore to work last Friday for our Fantasy Fun Day:

Front

Back

So, Happy Halloween everybody!

Another twenty-second birthday

Last Thursday was my wife's twenty-second birthday, and in true me-style I had to make her something. Simply buying a present is never enough. For quite a while I had no idea what to make her, then after looking on Pinterest, I found this, and decided that it would be perfect. 

After a quick trip to Wickes to buy supplies, I set to making the string heart, starting with a piece of timberboard:

I then spray-painted it in silver, trying to make sure I didn't get any of our bedroom painted in the process. After three or four thin coats I decided it was covered well enough, as I still wanted the wood grain to show through:

Next, I grabbed a piece of brown paper and sketched out a heart shape, trying to ensure that it filled as much of the wood as possible without being a very warped shape. This is the heart I ended up with, and then taped onto the wood:

 

Then came the noisy bit (which definitely confused my wife to hear); hammering in nails around the edges of the heart. I tried to make them evenly spaced around the shape, although this inevitably didn't quite happen.

Once I'd carefully removed the brown paper, this is what I was left with:

Now it was time to attach the string. I actually used some red double knitting wool I had lying around. After tying it around the bottom nail I proceeded to fill in the heart, making sure each nail was used at least once and then just playing it by ear to make a pattern that I found pleasing. To finish off the heart I wrapped the wool all the way around the outside of the heart to help shape it, tied the wool to the bottom nail again and then used a little clear nail varnish to help secure it.

After finishing the string heart, I had the slightly interesting job of trying to hide such a large present somewhere in our one bedroom flat without my wife catching sight of it, or any of the supplies I'd used to make it!

Here's a quick picture of my wife on her birthday, with the cake I made her:

Bad at being crafty

Since moving back to England, I've been surprisingly bad at being creative. I haven't yet finished the cross-stitch I started in Spain, or the Birthday Blanket that's been ongoing since last October in France. I also actually haven't started any other projects, as surprising as that is!

All I've managed to do is do some baking, such as this apple and cinnamon cake:

Aside from the lack of crafting I've completed, and the baking that's been done, mostly my wife and I have been settling into the apartment. We've still been doing some tidying and organising of our stuff, including buying things for our new home like the microwave we picked up today:

But speaking of being crafty, I've been having a little look at what Christmas gifts to make for people and decided on what to make my mother and grandmother so as soon as I've managed to finish the cross-stitch from Spain, I'll be making a start on those. I will get better at crafting again, promise!

A New Chapter

It feels like an awfully long time since I posted on here, but I've been more than a little busy. Since returning from Barcelona on August 26th, my wife and I have been in the process of moving ourselves 100 miles from our hometown. We picked up the keys for our new rented flat on the 28th and proceeded to move all the stuff we'd been saving in a storage facility those 100 miles ... all in our Fiat 500! It's taken us five journeys (and around 900 miles) so far and we still don't have everything here. 

That first week where we went back and forth three days in a row was very tiring, and then just a week after getting into the flat, I started work! A new flat and a new job, especially when you've spent the last year getting to stay at home and be crafty all the time, seems rather crazy, but there you go. Why wouldn't you want to do everything at once?

You might be wondering why we've moved 100 miles away from the rest of our family, but the answer is simple: my wife still has a year of university to complete and Oxford is where that is. I wasn't about to let her go off on her own now, was I?

In just under three weeks, we've mostly set up our flat the way we'd like it (thankfully it was furnished) and a lot of it has just been waiting for services to be switched over and on. We managed to get a Sky subscription installed last Friday and the phone line and internet have only been active since yesterday (thank goodness for iPhones!) so we're really getting there now. 

So here you, a quick look at the place we're calling home:

Bedroom

Lounge

Dining end of the lounge and door to the kitchen

We're especially enjoying having a separate kitchen with an oven and actual space to prepare food. That and being able to put up the frames we had stored has been really nice, along with having much more space to be in than we had in our teeny tiny French flat!

Well, what do you think of our new abode? Any ideas of where we can get a cheap chest of drawers to supplement our clothes storage? Any of you moved home recently too? 

Leaving Barcelona

Four weeks and 1800 photos later and we're about to hand back the keys to our rented apartment here in Barcelona and jet off back to sunny (or not so, as the case will probably be) England. We've had a thoroughly excellent time although both my wife and I are feeling that it's high time we were back to our homeland, looking forward to our exciting move to our new flat in a couple of days time and getting on with 'real life' again. 

Over the last four weeks we've seen a fair bit of what Barcelona has to offer, delighting in all the Gaudí buildings, walking round several museums and exhibitions, and throwing in a decent number of beach trips for me too. 

As a little taster of the fun times and sights we've had and seen, peruse the following photographs, but don't worry, I shan't put them all up!?

Roman ruins of Barcino

La Pedrera

The Gràcia Festival

Monastery of Pedralbes

Amazing dolphin show at Barcelona zoo

Maze in the Jardins del Laberint d'Horta

Nova Icaria beach

The Sagrada Família

Park Güell

We found Gaudí!

Yummy tapas and sangria

The 'Magic Fountain'

All in all, a wonderful stay in this city and I've almost no doubt that at some point in the future we'll visit again.  

Toby Fox

At the beginning of 2011 (although it feels much longer ago) my local fabric and haberdashery shop was announced to be closing after 40 or so years. There, as there always is, was a closing down sale, which I inevitably went to several times to try to catch me a bargain. While looking through the various leftover items at one of the later stages of the sale, I found a fair number of Woodland Folk cross-stitch kits. I immediately thought they were super cute and decided that the four smaller kits I'd seen would be mine. 

I started one pretty much at once, but then with packing-up and moving a couple of times since, the cross-stitch I'd started was packaged in a box in our storage facility along with the majority of my wife and I's belongings.

Feeling a little more settled over the summer, since returning home from France, I recovered that started cross-stitch, knowing that it was smaller and therefore more portable than the 'Sampler des 4 Saisons' I'd started in France this year. 

So, out came Toby Fox. Over the course of a couple of weeks, stealing time in the evenings after my youngest sister had gone to bed, or weekends when everyone else was out, I made progress with Toby. Finishing all the cross stitches, but not all the backstitching, I decided that Toby and the other cross-stitch kits would be useful to bring to Spain as standalone projects to keep me occupied here. I figured four weeks without any kind of crafty hobby to do might be a bit hard to maintain!?

And, here he is, in his finished state, just waiting to go back to England and for a frame to be found for him.

Buying art in Barcelona

For the past week and a half, my wife and I have been in Barcelona as the Spanish part of her year abroad. For the first week we also had my 17 year old sister with me, to give her a holiday! All in all, we'll be in this city for 4 weeks (!), so have got plenty of time for sight-seeing, beaching and also some breathing space for just being. 

So far, we've managed to see quite a lot, although we also have plenty planned for the coming two and a half weeks. 

Last Friday, whilst at the Park Güell, we walked past a man selling art, and happened to like one of the paintings he had placed on the top of his pile. For 10€, we thought it a bargain, and picked it up. Yay! :)

So, here's the painting we bought, which is currently resting up against a window in our rented apartment:

Of course this now means we'll have to add yet another frame to our 'to buy' list, bringing the total up to five now, I think!

Ten Green Bottles ...

On a walk to our local park the other day, my wife and I noticed a sign on the side of the road offering collections of vintage bottles for sale for £4. Unfortunately we didn't have any cash on us at the time, but the next time we went past we made sure we did so we could purchase one of the boxes, yay!

This is the box we picked up: one of the four on the road side.

Then, after a bit of a scrub we were able to see slightly better what we'd actually bought. 

Not bad for £4 if you ask me :)

Who Doesn't Love a Freebie?

Not a whole lot has been going on over here what with having less time to complete projects than I had in France. The Birthday Blanket is slowly getting sewn together and I also completed a mini cross-stitch project over a couple of evening last week. 

The cross-stitch kit came free with CrossStitcher magazine that my mother picked up with the shopping one evening, and made a sweet little bookmark that I have given to my wife (she generally reads more than I do).

From Little Acorns II

In From Little Acorns I introduced you to our little oak trees. We successfully managed to get them back to England in our little car when we came back last week. Then it was time to pot them up after a little trip to the garden centre.

We bought five 40 x 40 cm terracotta plant pots which we figured would be big enough to keep our trees in for a good while. We also bought three different types of compost to mix together after asking for advice at said garden centre. 

Firstly we mixed our compost, using a wheelbarrow, to make sure it was evenly distributed.

After adding some broken pieces of clay pots to the bottom of each plant pot for drainage, in went the compost.

Then it was time to repot the little oaks. Some of them had surprisingly impressive root systems and all seemed pretty healthy.

To help us keep track of each trees progress, we numbered the plant pots and then placed them in an out of the way place.

Now it's just time to watch them (hopefully) grow!

Back in England

Our time in France has come to an end, and now we're back in England. After a slightly crazy week, involving crossing the channel three times, us and our stuff are back at home.

Fitting all our belongings from the last year into our little Fiat 500 was slightly interesting but we managed it. It looked like this:

Forgive the bad lighting, we were in an underground car park.

Laying out the Birthday Blanket

I set myself a target to complete the Birthday Blanket during our time here in Grenoble, and in this post I had only thirty-nine days to finish the knitting of 46 more squares! I'd like to announce that I've managed this; all 121 squares for the blanket are finished, hooray!

This is them, all of them:

You'll notice in this picture that the cream coloured squares aren't yet blocked. 

So, I figured I'd best lay out this blanket just to check that it looked good in its final design still (although I don't really know what I'd have done if it didn't...)

This is the blanket in the configuration that I drew out on paper

But, as I'd already suspected, the top left quarter was looking a little dark with the brown and purple squares. I therefore swapped out the purple ring from that quarter for the red ring in the bottom right corner, and we had this ...

More balanced, don't you think?

Now I just need to sew all 121 squares together ... not sure that'll get done before we go back to England, but at least all the knitting is done! (...other than the border which will be done at some point, but shhh)

From Little Acorns

Back in the autumn, my wife and I decided that it might be fun to try to grow an oak tree from the hundreds of acorns that were along the sides of the roads here in Grenoble. So we picked some up. At that point we didn't really know the correct way to set them growing, so we looked it up on various websites and ended up putting the acorns we'd collected into a bag of moist compost in the fridge.

They stayed there all winter, and we retrieved the acorns in early March to plant them out. Many of them had already started sprouting so we knew they were ready.

Fast forward to now and we have a whole host of small trees growing. Pretty much each acorn that we put in the compost has started to grow! Each shoot is about 10 cm tall and developing nicely.

We plan to repot the shoots into much bigger pots when we get back to England, as we don't anticipate having anywhere permanent to plant them for a fair while. 

Any advice on how best to care for our growing trees would be greatly appreciated :)

A New Recipe Book

Back when I moved to uni my wife gave me a recipe book which had her family recipes in it. This is the recipe book we've used since and added to with a couple of new recipes. However, it's not very big and with an ever-increasing number of magazine cutouts that don't fit in the recipe book, I wanted to make a new one - not that I love our little one any less mind you.

This is where the rest of our purchases from Dalbe (as mentioned here) come in. As I knew that I wanted to make this recipe book I thought being given vouchers for an art shop was the perfect time to get my supplies as otherwise who knows what I'd have come out with!

And this is what I bought ... 

Included in that pile is:

• 10 sheets of 160 gsm A2 paper in two different colours,
• one sheet of 1.5 mm foam board, 
• a 60 cm roll of paper-backed fabric,
• one 50 x 70 cm piece of decorative paper

I knew that I wanted to construct the recipe book in a traditional manner, using signatures and sewing them together. I used this tutorial as the basis for our recipe book and here's how it went ...

I started out by folding and cutting each of the 10 A2 sheets of paper in half lengthwise. After this I cut 5 cm off the right edge of each sheet to make the pages and the spacers for the book. (I decided to use spacers for this book as a means to attach recipes that are double-sided, and also to make sure the book doesn't get overfilled by sticking in photos and clippings.)

The next step was to fold each of the pages and spacers in half which I did individually, considering the weight of the paper, to try to make sure they were as accurate as possible. As the spacers were pretty small and I therefore found them quite tricky to fold accurately, I first scored each one down the middle using my ruler and a knitting needle. Each page was then pressed along the fold using the back of a metal spoon to make a nice crisp fold. 

I then organised these pages and spacers into signatures using two pages of one colour and two spacers of the other paper colour.

The next step was to punch the holes into each signature to facilitate the sewing. This was done by marking holes 1, 4.5, 8, 11.5, 13.5, 17, 20.5 and 24 cm along the fold of one of the spacers to use as a guide. This guide was then laid on the top of each signature to show where I needed to punch through. I used pegs to hold the pages together while I did this in an effort to make sure the holes remained accurate. 

The signatures were then organised into their final order and the sewing commenced. 

To sew the book together I used some leftover embroidery thread from the 'Un Jour à la Montagne' cross-stitch. 

While I was sewing I found it most useful to flip the book between two positions depending on whether I was working on the new signature or the one immediately before it. These were the two positions I made most use of:

After all the signatures were sewn together, I glued over the spine of the book with the only glue I had available and used pegs to hold them in place while they set. 

I then focussed my attention on the cover for the recipe book, measuring out two pieces of foam board 26 x 30.5 cm and one piece 26 x 2 cm. I used masking tape to tape the three pieces together with 3mm between each piece.

The foam board cover then needed to be covered in the paper-backed fabric which I did by glueing the foam board to the fabric, folding over and glueing the corners and then glueing each of the edges, trying to make sure the fabric was taut at all times. 

Then it was time to assemble the book together. 

I taped the bookmark I had made from some more embroidery thread onto the spine of the signatures, and used some more masking tape to help hold that together more securely.

The decorative paper was cut into two pieces 25 x 60 cm and each was folded in half.

The first endpaper was then glued onto the first page of the book before being glued onto the cover to attach the signature into the cover, making sure that there was an even gap around each edge. 

This was then repeated for the back of the book, trying to make sure the signatures sat back against the spine. I then placed the finished book under weight (which happened to be two wine boxes) to hold it all in place while the glue dried.

And there you have our new recipe book, ready for putting all our yummy recipes in.