Craft from Cardiff

Jess is two weeks old today, which means that David has gone back to work and we have a bit more time on our hands to think about crafting and blogging as well as finding a routine that works for us both during the day. There is no chance of managing that at night time yet!

In these first two weeks we have been inundated with cards and presents so we’ll have to get a move on with our thank you cards this week. In the meantime, here are a couple of handmade items that arrived from Cardiff. Anny made a handstitched pair of kimono pyjamas while Helen and Megan made us a new baby card. Lovely job ladies, thank you, we love them!

    

Remember that you can order your own pair of pyjamas along with many other beautifully made pieces from Anny’s website – madebyanny.

A Growing Menagerie

Jessica is blessed with lots of talented friends and relatives who have already been busy making things for her. In particular, over the last few days her collection of handmade soft toys has been growing. Her Auntie Ruth delivered the fabulous crocheted giraffe on Sunday and then Gran gave Jessica the amazing knitted dog along with the customary knitted mouse (David has lots of these himself). We were also very cheeky and had Katryn’s knitted mouse repaired on Sunday, which is why it made it into the moses basket for the photograph below. We’re very grateful for the gifts and I’m sure that Jess is going to absolutely adore them for years to come.

     

Look what I made!

This is surely the best thing I have ever made! Welcome to the world, Jessica…

Challenge Accepted & Completed

In response to one of my many grumbles about being on maternity leave without Baby B having made an appearance yet, David challenged me to complete my latch-hook rug project before he or she arrived. At that stage I’d completed just a touch more than this in almost three years…

A pitiful effort I know. Sometimes I need David to appeal to my competitive nature and set me a challenge to spur me on with these things. So, I have spent many hours in the last 10 days sat like this...



… attaching almost 9,000 pieces of wool to the canvas, somehow avoiding RSI, until I finally finished my second latch-hook rug at nine o’clock this evening – Baby B’s due date and two hours into my labour! A job well done I feel.

Homemade Roll-up Blackout Blind

I bought some black-out blind material and a couple of metres of hook and eye velco to attach it to the PVC frame of the window in the nursery. The baby won’t be sleeping in there yet but it seemed sensible to do these things whilst I still have the time and energy before Baby B arrives.

The instructions that came with the material were to just slap it up and peel it off as needed each day but that would also mean that we needed somewhere to store the material during the day so David challenged me to come up with a better solution.

Having cut the material to size I had quite a few spare bits of material so I cut three strips to use to hold the rolled material up. I made a total of four buttonholes at the end of the strips and attached the other ends to the blind enclosing them in a hem. The final step was just to sew on the four buttons and fix it all to the window.

There is velcro all around the window frame so that the blind fixes tightly to the window when rolled down and eliminates all of the light from outside but it’s pretty inoffensive and you can hardly see it.

New Baby Card

This beautiful card was made for me, David and Baby B (who’s now due in just 8 days) by one of my ex-students, the writer of artlitandcakes. She’s even written a tutorial blog post about how she made it, which you can read if you click on the image above.

Thanks again, Shivani.