Home Making part 8 or 9: Meet Lyra

More house stuff. I put off taking down the tatty net curtains from the front window for several months because of being exposed to the street. Problem solved with this window film; you can get all sorts of fun designs these days but this one is faceted and makes rainbows in the front room when the sun shines in:

and looks like this from the outside in the evening:

We had been cat-less for more than a year, putting off adopting until we were settled in the new house. Monkey and I went up to Rochdale RSPCA centre after Julie had seen an elderly one-eyed cat in the adoption centre at Pets at Home. Sadly he was already taken when we visited so we spent an hour or so meeting all the other cats waiting for new homes.

We could have taken any (or all) of them but Monkey fell in love with Lyra:

partly because she is a shoulder cat:

and we got her just in time to help with the curtain making:

The living room is kind of done but not finished or tidied up so I have not posted photos, but we bought this fabric from Abakhan:

and here are the lovely curtains that I made:

And these are the lovely outer space curtains Monkey made for her bedroom:

I spent far too many weeks making a new duvet cover, patchworked with silk remnants and some sari yarn and backed with brushed cotton so it is lovely and cosy:

And then the other day my bedroom door conspired to prevent me going to work and Tish had to barge it open and rescue me. This confirmed a vague plan to replace it with a curtain. I rummaged through the stash and gathered all the remnants of velvet and patched them together, and lined it with some leftover quilting:

I am sure lots of people have a home without a pet, but having one is so friendly. Lyra definitely likes to climb, and look outside, so a nice climbing tree is next on the list.

Launching on Etsy

Having made about £150 on Ebay selling mostly Sylvanians and Playmobil I have taken the long anticipated step of opening a shop on Etsy. To avoid confusion and to keep the 'brand' image (cos we're so professional here) I have called it 'Silencing the Bell'. It is going to be a steep learning curve since Etsy is now quite a massive organisation and, while I would personally regret their decision to allow 'manufactured' goods to be sold through their shops, I hope that it will become a good outlet for my crafty activities. I don't anticipate quitting the day job any time soon but I hope in the short term that it will at least contribute to the Monkey Fund. Now I think I have spent enough time crouched over the computer today and need to go put the kettle on. Do please pop over and at least give me some visitor stats to encourage me.

Silencing the Bell Etsy Shop

Sewing, Knitting, Spanish and Morality - a catchup post

I feel like I have not posted much recently. Life has escaped me, mainly, if I am honest, because of too much Words With Friends. But on the plus side my brain has still been working hard. I have been doing another Coursera course on 'The Moralities of Everyday Life' with Paul Bloom (see an interesting Ted talk by him here). It has looked at the hows and whys of the moral choices and decisions that human beings make, whether there is such a thing as moral absolutes, the impact of different cultures on morality. It has all been very interesting. A few choice articles that we were sent to read:

• Steven Pinker on The Moral Instinct
• The Case Against Empathy by Paul Bloom
• Frans De Waal on Morals Without God
• Unbelievable Stories about Apathy and Altruism from Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
• The Brain in Trial by David Eagleman (or how responsible are we for our actions?)

I have also been learning Spanish with Duolingo in preparation for a grand adventure that I am taking with my mum in a couple of months; 'Yo no como queso' being my most useful phrase so far, but I am hoping to master more important stuff by the time we are due to head off into the rainforest.

This lovely jumper for the Monkey has been taking a while, it was started just after Christmas. The pattern is called Elfe, though it will be adapted to have long sleeves and it is knitted in green Admiral and variegated orange/red Zauberball both from Schoppel. 

I got a nice lump sum in my wages the other week after Royal Mail and the CWU finally agreed last year's pay deal and we got our back dated pay increase, so I treated myself to a selection of Rowan Colourspun, Sublime Tussah Silk and Luxurious Tweed:

which will hopefully become something like this (Bute from Rowan 52 magazine), though I am going to make it a sweater not a cardigan. Having enjoyed my forays into cabling I thought a bit of fairisle would be a good challenge:

In other news we have started a 'Monkey Fund' to raise money for the Monkey's fees for next year (Year of the Monkey). I have already made nearly £100 selling Sylvanians, Playmobil and clothing on Ebay. My collection of duvet covers, which will go up in an Etsy shop as soon as I get organised, have been listed as well but not sold yet. You can see the entire selection here. 

I also made a couple of batiked cotton shopping bags that will also go up on Etsy and have plans for all sorts of other crafty stuff. Add to that we now have a deadline for finishing the Beekeeper Quilt, it's about 97 hexipuffs and counting. It's going to be a busy few months.

Pre-NaNo post

NaNoWriMo is upon us again tomorrow so I will be reading less, knitting less, and (fortunately) working less, and hopefully writing much more over the next 30 days, but not so much here. Creature and I shared the Macbook last year, and though it was ok as she often wrote at night I decided it was time to invest in another laptop. Apple no longer do the Macbook so I got myself a reconditioned Macbook Air; it is very shiny and very silver and very lightweight, and has a keyboard that glows in the dark. Here they are talking to each other and making sure the new one is up to date on all of my fastidious little preferences:

I dashed off to Sussex at the weekend at the secret instigation of my niece Natalie, who planned a family get-together for my sister Claire's 50th birthday. She was quietly enjoying a crappy film on Saturday afternoon when mum and dad knocked on the door. Then as they debated dinner plans I arrived. Sunday morning Auntie Ann arrived and, as Nat got on with cooking a massive dinner in their tiny kitchen, our brothers Bart and Giles arrived; the whole thing reduced her to tears (good ones). A lovely dinner was had by all, including also Bart's partner Vieanne and Giles' two girls Aisha and Miranda.

One of the rare occasions when we are all six together has to be captured for posterity:

The last two days have been spent fixing Creature's duvet cover ... you can see how it used to be back here in March 2009. I bought her a new mattress and new bedding but she wanted to keep her old cover. I added another strip of stripes down each side and a border of black velvet and voila!

Duvet Day

I started my day off with a plan yesterday and even managed to carry most of it through. I confess I would rather have had a Duvet Day (though we tend to define it as a Dressing Gown Day, one where you don't get dressed all day and do pretty much nothing, though you are not obliged to actually stay in bed) having been feeling really exhausted recently, but there are always so many things to do on my day off.

I finished off yesterday's blog post and wrote a short piece for the Open Stories "Real Story 2011 Competition" that I came across via the Manchester Literary Festival (it is closing Saturday so you'd have to be quick). I am going to be volunteering, and hopefully blogging too, for the literature festival that is happening over two weeks in October and am really looking forward to it.

The job I really had planned though was a new duvet cover. My first foray into duvets was a lovely patchwork velvet one for Creature that you can see in this old post, made when we moved to Fosseway Avenue, and the inauguration of this blog was a post about the first one I made for Tish. Dunk and I have had one done in purple satin made at least five years ago, it has irritated me for some time because it did not fit the duvet very well and the fabric had become very worn. I have a very large fabric stash because at some time in the far distant future this may become a home business (I have six or seven made up ready to go in an Etsy shop), and having trawled through it yesterday I plumped for the embroidered duck egg blue with a shot gold/blue edging. I cannibalised the old one, removing the cotton backing fabric to use on the new one so that I could get it finished. I sewed to the accompaniment of 'Fahrenheit 451' on audiobook, that I will review for you later. For once the sewing machine did not put up a fight so it all went pretty smoothly, and we cuddled up quite contented under the new one.

It's duvet time again

The second of my baby birds is flying the nest next week so the bank holiday weekend has been well spent making a duvet cover for Tish. It has a central panel of red satin embroidered and decorated with sequins (it comes like this, I do not do all that embroidery!), edged with a patchwork of velvet and a thinner border of shot pink satin ... so she will be cosy and fabulous at the same time.

We trawled the charity shops yesterday and came home with two nice cookery books, one on pasta sauces and one from the 'Ready Steady Cook' programme, and a yoga book, as well as a collapsable washing basket. Tish herself spent today clearing out 'under the bed', a very scary process (fortunately she didn't find anything dead), and has filled the recycle bin with her college notes.

Dunk made us a delicious banana cake, which has kept me going while I sewed, and has worked on the short film he made of our jam making process. It is finally up on his blog, so you can pop here and see how it is done. He is a bit of a perfectionist and tends to tinker with his projects indefinitely and resists putting them up for others to see. He did a brilliant one of the process of making bread but refuses to upload it claiming it is not finished.

Never again!

I am NEVER taking time off work again! Came home today and I could hardly stand up, and hardly sit down either, every bit of me ached. It goes to show how much this job really does keep me fit. I have done nothing ... and I mean nothing ... for nearly four weeks. I didn't even clean the house, which is saying something 'cos I hate to sit around if I think the place looks filthy. It's like my muscles have atrophied, they have completely forgotten how to work. So you could say it was a bit of a shock to the system.

On the up side I didn't waste my last day off yesterday. The lovely Sadie, eldest daughter of my dear friend Julie, went off to uni in September. I promised her a new duvet cover at the time and then totally failed to live up to the promise. The whole family are coming down to spend the weekend, partly to see us but also so they can go and spend the day with Sadie, so I thought I would make one for her now. It is done in mainly royal blue and bottle green satin with some bits of velvet thrown in for good measure. As an experiment I appliqued some of the leaf designs into the centre since I had only used a relatively small amount of the embroidered satin. It was nearly a big mistake as the machine decided to try and chew up the fabric, but I just managed to rescue it and fix what was going wrong. I am very pleased with the outcome, the overall effect is lovely, just don't look too close as the stitching on the applique.

The original laptop is now sporting a nifty little antenna, as you can see in this photo of Tish. We were getting very annoying 'kernel panic' crashes (you really don't want to know, unless you are a computer geek, in which case you already know) which Dunk sorted by getting an external pickup for the wireless internet. I managed to take this photo and she didn't even notice, you can see her new hair cut, which is quite a transformation if you look back at the old one. She had worn her hair long her entire life ... kind of like me only I am too big a chicken to risk the change.

Baby bird flying the nest

My son Jacob is leaving us at the weekend; I am driving him up North to go and live with his brother. He moved down from his dad's to live with us nearly two years ago after deciding he didn't want to continue doing A levels. He has been working in a factory in Bourton, mainly while he thought about what else to do with his life. Then last month, on the spur of the moment, he found a course that grabbed him at Gateshead College, phoned them up and jumped on a train to go to an interview, and suddenly the decisions are all made. Although I will miss him I feel pleased that he is pursuing something that really interests him.

He was feeling left out that I kept making things for other people (he was the only one not to get socks), so I promised him a new duvet cover to take away with him, a kind of leaving present. Here it is, done in black velvet and a variety of stripes in plain and decorated satin, made this morning to the accompaniment of 'Die Hard 4.0' and 'Pirates of the Carribbean 2'. It's not very colour coordinated, just meant to be bold and striking.

Duvet cover

The finished article. I hope she likes it. Edging is velvet, next layer is shot gold/pink satin then centre is gold embroidered satin.