Mirthful

Some pictures from the new flat:

Kitchen and living room to the right, bedrooms left. Will have to paint this wall. Might cover it with bookshelves.

1st bedroom, with something that looks like a carpet on this wall. WTF? Will tear down and eventually this will be the guest/craft room.

Wardobes in what will be our bedroom. Will have to paint walls. Also, probably, tear down paneling. Or just paint it. We'll see.

Third bedroom. Will stay as is and be "junkroom" for the time being.

More wardrobes. Three of the four bedrooms have these old wardobes, and they're great, so that's good.

Fourth bedroom. The lass has decided this is her room. Doesn't need much work, as we'll keep the walls white and add colour through furniture and accesories.

View the other way, into the little hall which will act as a sound barrier to the living room, and has lots of closet space.

Living room - not crazy about the brick but I can live with it. It'll probably be hidden behind bookcases anyway.

Kitchen

Kitchen

Now, problem areas:

• That carpeted wall. What were they thinking? Down it comes. Room will be painted white. Probably.
• Green walls: Will be white ASAP.
• Paneling: I hate it. Will consider tearing it down. Otherwise painting it white to blend with rest of wall. Probably tearing down, though.
• Window frames and mouldings: I don’t like it. You guessed it: Paint it white.
• Doors: Oh, the horror. A lick of paint would help, but I want the moulding gone, really, so I might try removing it on one door to see how much work it will take to make the door presentable.
• Kitchen: It’s ok, I guess. Long term we will probably want to remodel. I’m still tempted to paint it, but I might not bother if we’re going to tear it out in a few years. It’s not the first project I’ll tackle, anyway.
• Oh, and yes, those windows over the doors and wall. *Shudder* Not quite sure what to do there. Need to think. I suppose we could replace them with something “cleaner”.

Well, so.

What if we combine that last one with this:

Picture from the Cath Kidston shop in York by Attic 24

Nice.

(via Attic24)

Since we can’t really do a lot until we’ve actually taken over the flat – in less than two weeks’ time! – I’ve been browsing blogs that have an element of interior design. I now have quite a few in a new folder in Google Reader, and on one of them, Trippel, I just found this image:

Styled by Lotta Agaton

Trippel, in turn found it at Emmas designblogg, who used it to illustrate how excellent work of Lotta Agaton is. I am not going to quarrel with the styling, which I find impeccable, but my main interest in the picture is how a very striking set of shelves is constructed from a pile of crates. The husband keeps bringing home these lovely crates from work which have been used to ship wine bottles, and we have actually used them for shelving before, but in a much more straightforward, boring way. This idea needs to be mulled over.

Other blogs recently added to the “interior design” folder:

• Den gode feen
• Fargesirkelen
• Fjeldborg
• Kvirrevitt
• Lullaby og la la
• Nästet – ett hem att trivas i
• RareRina
• Tusindfryd
• Huset ved bekken
• Bare wunderbar
• The vintage hausfrau
• Karen Marie Dehn

Most in Scandinavian (that is, Norwegian, Swedish or Danish), I’m afraid. Have a wee browse even if you don’t read those languages, they are all brimming with gorgeousness in the form of pictures – which, after all, is much of the point in seeking interior design inspiration.

Europris have recently started selling a line of storage boxes from Lego. They don’t have pictures online, but these seem to be the same:

 They are even stackable. If you had enough of them you could build a life-size lego fort. Now there’s an idea…

Ok, maybe not, but I will certainly be stocking up on a few in order to store the increasing Lego collection.

I notice we are not the only ones, Den gode feen has also discovered them, and already purchased some. I think we’ll wait until we have actually moved.

The friendship bag went astray, or was somehow appropriated by the post office. It certainly never reached its recipient. What with sewing mojo already being at the low ebb, this didn’t help. Still, there is simply no excuse for the tardiness of my package in the stitcher’s angels swap, but more of that by the by.

Once I got myself by the scruff of the neck back to the sewing machine I made a replacement bag for Renata of Zigzago:

This one made it to Italy, I’m glad to say.

I received my package in the stitcher’s angels swap at around the time one would expect if the sender stuck to the deadline, that is, in November. I loved the package, but didn’t have the heart to blog about it until I’d sent my own, and the longer it took the harder it was. Anyway, my package was put together by Lene of Denmark, and just look at this overabundance of loveliness:

For more pictures, just click through to Flickr.

And I finally got my own package in the post, then waited with bated breath until Joy could report its safe arrival. Wouldn’t it just have been sod’s law if it got lost after all that? But they did arrive, and I could breathe again.

I was a bit optimistic earlier this autumn and signed up for a couple of swaps. Well, let’s say I haven’t been able to stick to the deadlines completely. I am contrite, and consistently a couple of days late. I must resist the temptation to sign up for more swaps in the near future. Anyway, one of the swaps was the Friendship Bag Swap hosted by the Quilting Gallery.

Here is the one I made:

I used the pattern provided by Rachel Griffith, because I’m lazy and because it really is quite a nice pattern, and I was rather pleased with the result. The bag is wee, cute as hell. I think I’ll have to make another one to keep.

Here’s a detail:

And here it is all wrapped and ready to go :)

A few days after I sent mine off, I received this little gem in the post:

Made by the wonderful Maya.

It came with goodies galore, too:

And now to send an apology to my next swap recipient, I’ll be late…

Can you tell I’m doing catch-up?

Well, I have dug through my fabric stash and now I have this pile:

And all I have to do is locate some thread and trimmings and the scissors I picked up at IKEA the other day (scissors are useful when sewing, right?), and perhaps I have some yarn, too? Anyway, it is then getting wrapped up and sent off to the Netherlands where it will enter the mysterious thing that is APO and hopefully, at last, end up being put to good use by an Iraqi woman (or man?). Stashbusting AND do-gooding all at once, can it get better?

Hurry, you just have time to join me! Go to the IBOL-blog for more info and to sign up.

Edited to say:

In case you’re wondering why I’m doing this, I guess you could call it paying forward. And I just found this piece written by the woolywoman via the IBOL blog:

Well, I hope somewhere in Iraq, someday, a young man who is hearing that he needs to blow himself up because the Americans are evil pauses back to the day that the American soldiers gave his mom a bundle of sewing supplies, and how happy she was, and that the bundle was sent over by a regular American woman for his mom. Maybe she will be making her sons some nice little shirts for school out of that green fabric, and they will remember, and the world will change a little bit. I remain hopeful. My kids remain hopeful. I am so grateful to the US soldier who gave me the opportunity to reach out to a mother across the world.

So I’m not American, but in this case it really makes no difference. This war was started in my name too, whether I like it or not. So here’s my contribution to a common sense attempt at making life just a little bit better for just a few Iraqis.

I have to use one of these:

Because I purchased two dresses this summer. One for wearing to a wedding and one because I found that first, and really liked it, so caved, but I couldn’t wear it to the wedding because it was black. So. Both dresses were on sale, though I’m not sure I really think that helps. (Well, it helps my finances, obviously, but not the “do not buy new clothes” angle.)

But the dress was sleeveless and, well, Scandinavian summers can be a bit unpredictable, so I decided I needed a bolero. And I had two of these tops in my wardrobe, one grey and one purple.

As they were too short for me in any case, and what do I need two pretty much identical tops for anyway, I chopped and spliced a bit on the purple one and got a bolero.

From the front:

And the back:

What I did, if you’re interested, was to cut off the frilly bit from the bottom, then cut a reasonable bolero shaped bottom hem free hand then sew the frilly bit back on. Very simple, but very effective, and frankly it looks much better on me as a bolero than it ever did as a top.

The scrappy hedgerow quilt is done and gone.

First, of course, it has to be bound. By hand. I guess I could do it with machine stitching, but, no.

Here it is in all its glory. And I forgot to snap a picture of the back… Oh, well.

As you can see, I did pretty simple quilting on this one – well, I had to do it myself, for one thing. Just straight lines, one wide masking tape width apart, except in the corner, where I did an A, as the recipient’s name starts with an A (I used masking tape to mark out the A, too, and just sewed around it).

So. We were at my parents’ house, guests were coming and it was simply way too hot for the jeans she was wearing when we left home that morning. I guess a two-year-old would have gotten away with running around in her diaper, but it did look kind of silly. But my mother, though she sews very little nowadays, can be counted upon to produce remnants when requested, and so was born the ultimate whip-up skirt.

You take:
- 1 piece of material, approximately 30cm x 75 cm
- 1 piece of elastic
- 1 sewing machine stuck in the backwards mode

And you sew. One seam up (backwards) the side. One seam around (backwards) to make a casing. Luckily the remnant had a selvedge, so I didn’t need to hem it.

It took, literally, ten minutes. And it looked d***d good, if I do say so myself. The only thing I’d have wanted to change (apart from the direction of the sewing) is the width. I think another 30 or so cm of material would not have been amiss, but I was winging it, after all.