(The gentle start to a seasonal corner.)

Over the weekend FB had a fever. He’s fine – he doesn’t get ill much (thank goodness) but when he does he turns into a little busy oven. His sleep goes all over the place, and he wants to be everwhere at once.

Add in british summertime ending (so we’re having to coax those were-5am, now-4am get ups back to at least 5am again), and a couple of work deadlines for me, and you have a mama who needs to take extra care of herself.

So here are a few things I’m enjoying right now:

• Dara O’Briain’s Tickling the English which I’ve borrowed from the library and which is proving to be great fun. For the last two nights I’ve gone to bed as soon as all the jobs for the day were done so that I could read this and think of nothing else for a little bit before sleep. I’m really looking forward to the audio version, which I think its going to be great for car journeys.

• Nigel Slater’s Simple Suppers (which is still online) and Tender volume 1 (which is going to help make sure all of our allotment produce gets to the table). I’m very excited about volume 2, which is all about fruit and is out next May.

• Organizing Your Way to a Simple Christmas by Organizing Your Way. Not that I’ve done much towards christmas in the past couple of months but it’s got me thinking, and I know that the printouts are going to prove useful.

• The Natural Parenting Center Blog, which is giving me a huge amount of comfort, and In the Fishbowl, which is giving me lots of thinks to think about (even if things have ended up being more hectic around here than I might have liked, which has meant I’ve been very quiet on the fishes comment boards.)

• Making Waldorf Dolls, which I treated myself to last month. Given that I started crafting when I was about 6 or 7 making toys for myself, it’s been a long time since I made much of anything like that. I’m using the tiny start of a seasonal corner on our sideboard as a way of learning the ropes.

Hope you’re having a good week too. What are you enjoying?

(I promise there will be knitted FOs too, very soon! Once they are blocked, and photographed.)

I really love Simple Sewing for Baby by Lotta Jansdotter – it’s full of useful things that you can make with a limited amount of time. Perfect for my foreseeable crafting life. ;)

So far I have made:

A drool neckchief (perfect for my teething boy) – the first of many!

And (finally!) a mini tag blanket (which has been on my to-do list for months.

(Mods – I made FB’s smaller than suggested, and added a button hole to one of the corners so that it can be attached to his pram or triptrap via a toy tie. You can’t see it in the picture but the other side is fleece. Very cozy.)

And now I’m going to gush… I think I’m a little in love with Rebecca Danger’s toy patterns. They’re so full of life (and the patterns are so well written, imho.) I’m pondering which one to knit next…

FB’s easter basket turned into the easter basket that never was, due to a bad throat infection and raging temperature that had him in hospital over night on Good Friday. (Though – bless him – he managed to still grin at everyone and want to play with a temperature of 39.8)

After clearing him of the scary illnesses that could have been, and sending him home for cool baths, calpol, and ibruprofen, Easter was a wash out and I never managed to put together all the elements of him easter basket for Sunday morning. (Of course he wasn’t the wiser, and I was just relieved that his temperature didn’t spike again overnight.)

However I had already finished his monster, who proved to be the perfect buddy for a little unwell boy.

Here is my backtack offering – A startled rabbit!

She’s made from Matchmaker 4ply, and knit in the round.  I threaded the buttons onto the yarn before hand, so that I could knit them into place, like you do with beading.

I wanted to keep to Wee Wonderful’s bunny pattern, but knit it rather than sew, which meant lots of measuring, and fiddling with the pattern as I went along, but overall I’m pretty happy with.

She has a gathered head – a homage to Jean Greehowe. :)

Poor thing, she does look startled though! She obviously needs lots of love and a nice view, to help her settle in. I’m sure, at Ariana’s she’ll do just fine. :)

—

In other swaps and challenges news, I’ve had to drop out of the Nectar Gallery ‘Wall of Yarn’ exhibition. I feel like a total jerk and hate letting people down, but everything I tried just looked terrible. You know sometimes an idea really works and you get into a really creative groove? And sometimes exactly the opposite happens and you wonder why you’re even trying in the first place?

Well yeah I had one of those. 

I guess I figured doing something artistic, instead of useful and pretty was like riding a bike – even if you haven’t done it in years, you can just do it and it’ll be fine. But it’s obivously not, and with hindsight I feel a bit stupid for thinking it would be. It took years to earn my artistic skills and since I didn’t keep them up after university (or rather they morphed into something more practical) they are rusty now that i come back to them. I think maybe i need to back off the deadlined projects for a while?

Either way I feel really bad.