My favourite craft books

Ok, this post should really be called 'look I've learned how to make a photograph mosaic and how to put clickable photographs on your blog' because they are all clickable!!! Admittedly they do all take you to Amazon because that's where the books are sold but this is huge progress for me.



These are my absolute favourite craft books, most especially 'bend the rules' which I am using now to teach my nine year old daughter to sew with. The projects are simple but still useful and the instructions are pretty fool proof (there are some errata on the 'bend the rules' flickr group.Alabama stitch book is where I have learned to hand sew, I love love love this book and I truly do want the new studio book too.The glove knitting book has every type of glove you could ever wish for, it really is beautiful and I have made many pairs of gloves from it.I just love the way Suzuko Koseki puts prints and colours together in patchwork style, the log cabin quilt is just so cool, I couldn't have imagined log cabin ever looking so clean and modern.Poppy Treffry's stuff is just fun and gorgeous and makes lovely presents for people (when I can get my machine to perform properly)And finally sewing clothes for children just has fabulous patterns that can be messed with according to how your child wants their clothes to look, frills, ribbons and patches or sober, cool and modern.No doubt over the next couple of days I will find more reasons to create more mosaics, the main one being folksy friday, so look out for more mosaics.And here is where I found out how to do this http://craftbloguk.blogspot.com/2010/03/blog-treasury-template-haptree-mini.htmlI'd love to hear about your favourite craft books too.

red girl with flowers

red girl with flowers, originally uploaded by glassmountain.

I've been doing a little drawing and painting. Normally I turn these into embroideries but J suggested that I do them as drawings instead and I'm a little bit pleased with the result. I'm thinking that maybe they would make nice cards...

May day

May day seems to have been slowly disappearing in the UK since my childhood (not so long ago!) when we had a maypole in the playground and enforced country dancing. I have heard that it's a government conspiracy because it's traditionally associated with workers getting together and agitating but I suspect that it just gets forgotten about in all our busyness.

There are celebrations around May day in Cornwall, Padstow 'Obby 'Oss and Helston flora day but neither involve a maypole. So we felt incredibly lucky to come across a revived May day picnic with maypole just outside Penzance at Trereife house. It was so lovely, completely hand made and nothing commercial apart from nettle cider and pimms for sale (the nettle cider is an acquired taste although J liked it).

Sadly we had no camera over the last week or so (only because no-one can remember to buy batteries!) So these gorgeous pictures are not my own beautiful images but they capture the spirit.

The only stalls were demonstrations of green living. One lovely man had brought samples of water from local springs to try (ones that are regularly used so safe to drink from) and there was a talk on forest gardening. But my favourite thing which we absolutely have to make was the forerunner of the slow cooker, a haybox cooker. You bring your casserole up to boiling and then simply put it in a box of hay all day to cook, no fuel at all! A friend said she's made one in a big chest that will take three pans and is making most of the family meals in it. So we have a plan to make one and I will write more after we have experimented.

And of course the maypole was beautiful, decorated with bluebells and greenery and strings with flags decorated in pressed leaves. There was cornish dancing and beautiful music along with dancing around the maypole. The council were not interested in funding this festival which I can't help feeling was a good thing, better to have willing volunteers and to be able to make it a community creation. I hope you all had a lovely May day too, maybe there's a revival out there.

this moment

a beautiful idea from 'soulemama' blog, just an image to capture a moment from the week with no words

the owl and the pussycat purse

the owl and the pussycat purse, originally uploaded by glassmountain.

A little bit of sewing. All the talk of Alice in Wonderland has got us interested in nonsense rhymes and so we rediscovered Edward Lear and although the boat is not a beautiful pea green I'm sure the owl and the pussycat would not mind too much.

getting back into the swing

A little bit of sewing, Annis is at the sewing machine making a skirt for a rag doll I've made for her. I love her sewing machine (possibly more than my own)it's so simple and produces a really strong stitch, I never seem to need to mess with tension or anything else really (unlike mine!)
And biking weather is here again... but although it looks sunny it was actually freezing because of the wind, so we lasted about half an hour on the beach.

just long enough to show off some interestingly funky dressing, boys surf shorts and over the knee socks! She is very much her own person.

and the beach, who would know it was soooooo cold!

It took this long to eat all the chocolate

I'd like to say we had a gentle non commercial Easter, celebrating the start of spring, giving and receiving seeds rather than over packaged chocolate eggs but when it comes down to it it's all about the chocolate!

we did go up to Lincolnshire to stay with grandparents so the Easter egg hunt took place in a big beautiful garden (which we don't have) with cousins, so there was quite a bit of spring taken in, you can't help but notice things growing if some of your eggs are hidden in the greenhouse or under treesI am too ashamed to show the towers of eggs that the children created (notice towers plural! they were too short to create one tower of eggs) So I'll show the sweet Thorntons eggs instead!
And since Easter? Well, we've been eating chocolate. It takes a long time to get through four towers of eggs as tall as four children!