New Work Days

We are slowly settling in to the new weekly routine. This week is actually half term so I have my little whirlwind back midweek but he's been really enjoying nursery, although he finds it very tiring (conked out on the carpet there last week bless him), and I've been enjoying having the time back. 

The morning part of the routine is the worst bit I think, he starts at 8.30am so to walk there we leave at about 8am but he likes a long gap between waking up and breakfast so we are struggling a bit to get him to eat breakfast before we leave. I'm turning more and more to bags of apple rice cakes and raspberries which he can nibble on the go but it's not a particularly filling breakfast. 

Last week as we were walking it was oddly muted with a dense fog. The air was wet without actually raining and Baby F seemed a bit confused by it all, pointing at the shadows and talking about monsters. 

Having dropped him off, I spent my morning working on a new workshop project I'm developing to have at a new studio location I've discovered near to me called Juicy Lemons. They currently have mostly pottery classes but are opening up their workshop spaces to other tutors to create more of a diverse range of creative classes. I met with one of the owners a couple of weeks ago and we share a lot of the same ideas behind why people should be creative and the benefits you get from working with your hands and creating time for yourself to be creative. 

We are just organising a stitched Christmas card workshop which is really exciting and I had to make up some samples to photograph to advertise the class. Eventually there will be a couple of sizes on offer and everyone will be able to stitch a small piece in a hoop before cutting it out, backing it with felt and stitching it to cardstock for an extra special Christmas card. 

Putting together this card took me a couple of hours, so I've suggested a workshop time of 10am - 2pm to allow for discussion and stitch demonstrations but, more importantly for me, it should fit into my little nursery time-off routine! 

I have advertised this workshop on my website events page, but it's not yet up on the Juicy Lemons website to book. I think it will be by next week though so do keep checking back. There are two other workshops we have planned for next year as well which you can see more details of on my events page, but again they aren't currently available to be booked so I'll keep you posted. 

I pick Baby F up about 3.15pm so leave at just before 3pm and honestly, these photos were from the same day as the first photo in this post and it was totally different! The sun shone, the sky was, oh so blue, it was warm and the colours of the leaves just glowed against it all. Quite amazing. I do love living in England when it's like that - you can experience all weather types in just one day. 

Of course, I'd also had to allow in my day time to create monster crispy cakes for the nursery's fundraising cake sale. I got some very strange looks wheeling my tray of cakes through town in the buggy but it was much easier than carrying them and pushing the buggy along. Baby F is often so tired at the end of nursery that he can't walk home so likes to sit in it as we bump over speedbumps up the drive from the school, and then he can also sit back and chill with another snack of some kind - or whatever is left over in his lunchbox from earlier in the day. 

Autumn Thoughts

 

Before Mummahood, I had a lot of time - well, more time - where I could sit and write my blog, or sit and sew; especially as only two years before that it was the start of a global pandemic that meant all we had in the world was copious amounts of hand sanitiser, a weekly tradition of banging saucepans outside our front doors, Boris Johnson with charts and 'experts', and time. So much time. 

After having Baby F, my sudden lack of time, for me time, or feeling I've achieved something time, has really grated on me and I've been finding myself feeling frustrated for no reason at all. It creeps up on me and I get an uncomfortable bubbly feeling inside and thoughts about just needing to hide under the duvet and ignore everything and anyone who requires something of me. It's not just becoming the centre of a small person's life but I've been asked to take on other additional roles in recent months which are very heavy on the workload and it's all just been piling up on me. I'm often asked how I juggle it all and to be honest, I don't know. I'm not sure I do actually, things just roll around until they become a desperate priority and then they get done, or not done and just ignored but they're usually the things that I want to do so it doesn't affect anyone else other than me. 

I've been reading back over my early blog posts from 2011/2012 and onwards, and seeing how I used to make simple blog posts about the seasons changing, interesting plants in the garden, strange weather patterns or anything else I fancied and I'd like to start doing that again. 

Today marks the start of a change! Baby F has his first full day at nursery today - it's somewhere that he's visited a couple of times and my goodness does he love it there already. He needs the interaction with other children, and also adults who are solely there to chat to him and don't have to write emails or do the washing or try and get 30 workshop packs put together at the same time. They have space to put out new and exciting activities and, judging from the photos I've been sent already on the nursery app (apart from the accident report 45 minutes after I'd left him to say he'd fallen and banged his head), he's thoroughly enjoying playing with their cars and tool station and making friends with a little chap called Reggie. 

Not only does Baby F get two exciting nursery days a week starting now, I also get two days a week where I can be me! I can do whatever I want between the hours of 8.30am - 3.30pm and it is actually like a lightness, a little bit of pressure that has lifted. I don't think I really realised how hard I was being on myself and the guilt I had for wanting to be more for my little one but also keep everything else going. 

I'm very hopeful about what this new change in our routine will bring. The season is changing and we are changing with it! 

Last week I ended up in a different coffee shop to my usual Tuesday and Friday Costa. I go there for breakfast two days a week before I start work in a haberdashery as it fits in with everyone leaving the house but means I have an hour to kill before I start. They hadn't opened for whatever reason and I had to source my breakfast elsewhere - ending up in Gail's for some very posh sourdough toast with jam, which arrived late but also with an apologetic, on-the-house, cinnamon bun! The coffee had a heart on it which made it all the better, I very much appreciate heart love on coffee. 

This week started with a settling-in-to-nursery session for Baby F. The weather that morning was simply horrendous and I was dreading walking the 20 minutes to nursery, packing extra clothes in preparation for the likelihood of him getting drenched enroute and sticking his little legs into his wellies.  But, as we were seconds from leaving the house, he ran to the window pointing and shouting, "RAINBOW!!" It was a fantastically strong, double rainbow actually, beaming down on us which felt like such a good omen. We had the whole curve of it right outside our door as you can see and, even better, we weren't getting rained on whilst looking at it. 

He was so pleased to get to the nursery. They have a little drive down to the gates which have speedbumps that he likes to go "up" and "down" over, then we push a button to let us in and the gates magically open. He knew exactly where he was going, marched up to the front door and knocked then sidled on inside and got going with playtime. The lovely nursery ladies assured me that I didn't need to stay as he was quite happy so sent me back out by myself for an hour. I ended up with a takeaway coffee on the village green, sitting rather uncomfortably on an umbrella as it was the only thing I had which was slightly waterproof and meant I could sit on the bench without getting a soggy bottom. The sun was still shining though and I had had the forethought to bring some stitching with me so I sat and stitched outside (which I love doing anyway) until it was time to pick up one very excitable Baby F. 

The leaves are just starting to change colour and put on their autumn finery. It's not been cold enough yet to really snap them into action so we are all enjoying a fairly mild start - although it does keep on raining! I doubt there will be many more opportunities to stitch outside this year. 

Today of course, is the big day - the first full day - so we'll see how that goes! After I'd dropped him off, after some more speed bump jumping and a very sweet kiss goodbye at the door, I walked back home with the empty buggy, pausing to get myself a celebratory Biscoff latte from a converted horse box coffee shop in the high street called Tommy's. I specifically wanted my coffee from here this morning, partially because they are the only ones doing Biscoff lattes (I'm a sucker for all things Biscoff related), but also because Tommy was a little boy, who lived locally, who passed away at a really young age, just younger than Baby F is now. He never got to go to nursery and in an odd way I felt I owed it to his family to stop by the coffee shop in his memory. We are so very lucky to have our little boy and to be able to send him to nursery and see him grow up. 

So, I hadn't meant to come on here with a sad blog post, I was meant to be writing about the autumnal changes, the dark mornings and increase in rainy days or foggy weather, jumping in muddy puddles, making apple cake and crumbles, purchasing our first pumpkin of the season and starting to light candles in the evenings for the autumnal glow - but I'm afraid this is what has tumbled out of my fingers today! Thank you for reading. xx

Sheffield Park Waterlily Festival

We visited Sheffield Park at the weekend with my family. It's our nearest National Trust property and, as we are all members, we visit here lots during the year, watching it all change with the seasons. The property is just a big garden (the house is there but now privately owned and split up into majorly expensive flats I think) with a series of large ponds which culminate into a lake and lots of lovely plants and trees. 

At the moment they are celebrating the beautiful waterlilies on the ponds with their annual waterlily festival. They add decorative waterlily sculptures and trails around the garden, and also install a floating jetty on one of the ponds so that you can get up close and personal with them. Of course the ducks and geese will join you pretty much wherever you go. They are fairly tame here and you can buy duck food for them at the shop - we always take our own proper duck food as the babies absolutely love it! And to be honest, I do too. They will eat out of your hand and climb all over your feet so it can get a bit muddy and messy but it's good fun. If you've got your toes out they are often partial to a toe nibble or two and we ended up putting safety crocs on Baby F so he didn't lose any digits. 

It's such a beautiful place to go and walk round. We like visiting when it's fairly quiet and, as there was lots of rain and a thunderstorm forecast, there weren't many people going round on this particular day. We managed to get most of our picnic in before the rain started, and then kind of hid under the trees for a while to finish it off. Even though it was raining it wasn't cold so we mostly weren't bothered and carried on with our walk for a little while longer - eventually ending up in the main café which is outside of the entrance and back through the carpark but serves the most excellent rhubarb flapjack!!!

If you get a chance to visit this place it is absolutely worth it! Walk down from the entrance to the main pond and go around it towards the left and you'll come across a little shed called The Shant which does excellent hot chocolate and snacks for you to carry around with you or sit and drink in little covered seating huts, then wander around the big lake at the bottom, up the hill to the cricket pitch and over the little bridge...there are so many hidden alleys and walks. If you want to get away from it completely there is a woodland walk away from the main track (somewhere Reece and I went on one of our first dates and spent a long time sitting on logs chatting about anything and everything). Lots of good memories for us here.

One

Can you believe Baby F is one year old already? I'm not sure I'm fully believing it myself - it seems only yesterday that I was writing the post to announce that he had arrived! I'm playing catch up with blog writing so I'm behind but this year his birthday fell on Easter Saturday and we had a little egg hunt for him and my nephew - in fact, we had several egg hunts as the joy was in finding them all and as soon as they'd been found, someone had to go and hide them again! 

My sister hosted the party at her house and we put out a wonderful spread, lots of fun coloured fruits and veggies in a safari theme (thank you to Pinterest for the inspiration); a snake made out of cucumber, a pepper and hummus lion, kiwi turtles.... My SIL made amazing Easter cookies and chocolate carrot cupcakes (the carrots were actually strawberries covered in chocolate!) and it was just a really fun, simple day with lots of smiles. 

We spent Easter Sunday at home but all of Reece's family came and squeezed into our tiny flat for their turn to celebrate Fin's birthday. (Reece has six siblings so with all of their families that's quite a few bodies to come through the door!) Finley has been very spoiled with new toys, new sleeping bags, new towels, plates, cups, balloons, books, clothes.... 

It's amazing how quickly he is growing out of things - both clothes and toys as he is growing and developing his little mind. It's a fantastic thing to watch, the little cogs whirring and ticking in his brain as he figures out how to open and shut things, spin things, fit things together - in size order, press buttons... he loves books and will sit and 'read' them himself for ages, turning the pages and moving the moving parts, examining it from all angles. I hope he'll stay a thoughtful, patient kid who likes to learn and know stuff - and I really hope we'll be able to have all of the answers and be able to help him further his knowledge!

Thank you to everyone for his birthday well wishes. 

Staying At Home

I'm generally a homebody, happy to stay at home for long periods of time and busy myself with various projects. My family are hoarders (sorry Mum but we are). Hoarders of activities, crafts, projects, knowledge, interests. We have a love of music, history, archaeology, arts, crafts, textiles, computers, games, fossils, sports....and this manifests in our house in the form of 'stuff'. It's a lived in house and, whilst not necessarily messy, we don't have enough proper storage for it all so generally we end up with piles or corners of interests which get moved around to suit what's going on in the house.
That being said, I'm also a country girl who relishes being outdoors in different places. I love travelling, finding new views and spotting startled wildlife who scurry away as I approach. I love breathing in the smell of the sea and staring out at all that blue, hunting for sea glass as the sand squidges and crunches between my toes.
All in all, being in lockdown due to Covid-19 hasn't been that hard - not as hard for us as it has been for others. Our family have been safe and we've closeted ourselves away in our little home bubble, working on new routines and being very thankful for our house of 'stuff'. However, I must admit, now it's starting to grate on me, the four walls are closing in and I catch myself being unfairly irritable to other members of the household but not able to hold the irritation and frustration in.

Considering that we haven't really gone anywhere for the last 10 weeks (? I think it's 10 - it all blurs together), a lot has happened. I've crossed off so much on my calendar, but added new things too.

❤️ We've had two babies born; one to my sister (I'm an Auntie for the first time!!) and one to a close friend. The Mother has become a virtual nanny, offering nanny-ish advice via FaceTime at all hours of the day and night.
❤️ We now have a very specific Friday afternoon routine - homemade pizza (an absolute must, Friday night is Pizza night and that's that!) followed by a Zoom quiz with my lovely friends, offering a much needed giggle and escape, even if it is whilst sitting on my bed rather than in a pub jostling around the slightly sticky table.
❤️ Saturday night is a family Zoom quiz, which started as a way of demonstrating the wonders of Zoom to some slightly un-educated family members - it seems to have stuck.
❤️ We've had three birthdays in this house (including the cat's) which required homemade cake and presents provided by Amazon and Etsy. One had a surprise Zoom party with his friends, with some highly dodgy singing over the inter-waves.

I think part of our luck and ability to cope with the situation is down to having two key-workers who have a Monday-Friday job working from home. There is still a routine for them. Dad organises traffic lights and various aspects of roads, crossings and bus lanes etc so he has been continuing to develop and improve roadways whilst they are mostly empty. He gets up at the same time as usual as if he were off on his 50 minute commute, made quicker by only having to go down the stairs, and finds it easier to get remote access to his office before the rest of the office world wakes up and clogs up the system.
My lovely other half, Reece, gets up at 7.30am for a shower which means that I get a half hour lie in before I also get up to sort out our breakfast at 8am. He's a computer technician, helping the nation to do what Dad now does, work from home and operate their various computers, laptops, technical devices and phones in perfect harmony.
With one home-worker taking over the kitchen table and the other on a desk in the sitting room, the rest of us have to be as quiet as mice so that we don't interupt Zoom meetings or client phone calls and the space is very limited with five of us knocking around.

The garden is a good place to escape to, and is a project that Dad has been working on with great gusto! We now have a vegetable patch at the bottom of the garden, it having been rescued from the patch of weeds and grasses, and thanks to home deliveries of compost the plants are happier than even to be attended to so regularly. I've mentioned before about how the colour of a garden changes at the beginning of the year starting with yellow (Daffodils and Primroses), on to blue (Forget-Me-Knots and Bluebells) and currently we are on purple (Aliums, Clematis, Foxgloves, Cat Mint and Chives.)

The weather has helped as well, beautiful sunshine is so much more pleasing than endless days of rain.

I started out lockdown with great gusto, using the time well to work on projects that had been overlooked or pushed to one side, working on and developing new kits, making up more of those that sold out and generally being amazed at the amount of stationery I was getting through posting out the orders that were flooding in! I will always be very grateful for those orders as they kept me, and The Mother with her thread card making, very busy in those early weeks and fairly consistently since.
I have started redeveloping the ladybird kit originally designed for Saira at the-stitchery but I must admit I am flagging and feeling less motivated to continue with it.
I find myself saying that "tomorrow I will do this or that" and by the time tomorrow comes, the feeling of 'bleurgh' or 'meh' descends and I can't make myself do whatever it was, finding ways to procrastinate until it's too late to start something new, or would be inconvenient to the household to get that particular project out.
Much as I love having Dotty Textiles and the Stitchscape business, I haven't been able to escape it for over two months. I won't show you photos of our sitting room or my bedroom as The Mother would not be pleased (I refer to you the first paragraph of this post) but I am quite literally living, eating, sleeping, dreaming in a quagmire of Stitchscape paraphernalia! It's all been brought home from the studio and there is no way to switch it off. I fear a little resentment is starting to creep in. I am seriously considering throwing a blanket over the boxes and having a little holiday from it all to try and get my mojo back.

I think I am more worried now about what's going to happen in the future than when lockdown started. You knew where you were with the 'stay at home' instruction. Now it's all becoming a little hazy - stay at home, but not if you have to work, but if you can then do. If you have to use public transport to get to work (I do, three days a week usually) then don't go to work, but if you do get on a bus then you must wear a mask, but ideally don't get on in the first place.
I am currently still furloughed and my bosses don't seem to know when they will want me back in - it depends greatly on what happens when the shops open I think. I imagine they are hoping for a rush of customers sweeping in and ransacking the shelves after so many weeks of not being able to access half of the stuff, but I really doubt that will be the case. People are so wary.
Well, most people are. I struggle to avoid some people on my walks to the Post Office - they don't care whether they are within the recommended meterage of you and are too thoughtless to think about how you may feel about the situation. It's hard to avoid these people and we can no longer leap nobly into the roads to keep distance from them because the traffic is nearly back to normal.
There is no foreseeable end to this weird world of being scared of touching people and it concerns me greatly.
Workshops where I would usually sit next to students to demonstrate stitches are now being considered being done behind masks and screens and I appreciate we must make it work but it saddens me that it can't go back to the carefree, happy environment it was.

But for now I am grateful for the little pleasures we can find. I haven't been able to get to the shops to buy bunches of happy flowers (which I love getting, especially at the beginning of the year) so I snipped a few blooms from the garden where there were lots and made a tiny posy for the table - it lasted a pleasingly long time.
I also came across a company who were offering home delivered afternoon teas so I treated the family to one last weekend. The scones and apple cake were utterly delightful!!

This week when I didn't feel like doing anything I finally tackled the bag of workshop threads which was looking very sad and scarily tangled. I sat out in the sunshine all afternoon (getting my tan/burn on) and patiently untangled everything, threading the used skeins and little lengths onto thread cards. I end up with lots of offcuts of thread cards as I buy them in at a set length and trim them down for each kit. It seems a shame to throw them away (especially as thread cards are expensive to buy pre-punched!!!) so I've just been keeping them, not really knowing what to do but I think this is a great solution as I can also write the thread colour brand and number so workshop goers can purchase more of a particular colour if they like it.
This weekend I think I will be kind to myself and work on a totally non-Stitchscape related project - like sewing on badges to my camp blanket or picking up a crochet blanket that's been half finished for the last two years. Next weekend we have managed to book a timed slot at Scotney Castle, a National Trust property which is one of a select number they have reopened the gardens of. You have to book in advance and it sells out within minutes when new dates are released, we had three of us on the website trying to get different places! Something to look forwards to as I have so missed being able to visit these gorgeous spots.
Be safe and keep smiling!! xx