State of Play

I sewed some traffic tracking code onto my blog the other day so I could check my friends were reading my blog as instructed, and was delighted to find that that it has maps and percentages and pie-charts and all sorts of exciting things.  I am a very sad person - every morning I say, woo-hoo, I got 10 visits last night of which 83.22% were from referring sites and a massive 2.1% from search engines - isn't that amazing?  I barely know what I'm saying of course.  It's been a long time since I was in a job where I used words like those.

The best bit though, is the map, which shows where the hits are coming from.  The daughters were mighty impressed when we discovered that we had had some visitors from America, which they know aeroplanes fly to sometimes because Daddy has definitely been on one and brought back pyjamas.  Isla was very impressed with our visitors from (and here they stabbed at the map with their fingers as we listed them) Oregon and Michigan and Colorado and Washington and Indiana and Illinois and Maryland and Tennessee and South Carolina and New Jersey.  Hetty said very solemnly, I think we'd better go and visit them Mummy hadn't we.  On an aeroplane.  So, if you could all get your guest-rooms ready, we'll just get packed and hop on board, and see you all soon.

Kind Minds

Well, what a lovely world the crafty blog world is. I won the Fair Isle Knitting book in one of Making Good Use's Monday Giveaways, and I received my package this morning. And not only did she put the book in (which I must say is for my mum - I am nowhere near this level of skill yet - I last night abandoned some unstitching halfway through the job, so that my supposed wristwarmer lies ignominiously straddling two size 4 knitting needles. I know. Doesn't sound comfortable does it. You've never seen such tragic cable deknitifying in all your life. I had a little tantrum and everything) but she also wrote me a lovely note and enclosed some fabrics too. Now, isn't that just the nicest thing?Look at them - all sitting there with their lovely colours. Hetty will be thrilled. She cannot yet articulate all of her consonant sounds but she can say fabric and fat quarter, which I find hilarious. Not so hilarious her grubby little fingers all over them when she's 'sorting them out' as she likes to put it, but since anything I make will end up filthy dirty no matter what, it barely matters really.

So in the spirit of blog friendliness I implore you to go and visit Making Good Use, since what with it being my Year Of Making Birthday Presents, you could very well find one of those fabrics in yours. And I, in the spirit of thankfulness, will send her a little something too, from my stash of stuff and things and whatnots. There may even be small delightful smears of chocolate or an old raisin in there if she's very lucky.

Gender Mender

I have been trawling the internet like some prowling fabric nut for toy-making ideas; my sister's assertion that you need to get cracking early if you're going to make all presents is coming at me hard and fast.  I sat there yesterday while the daughters did colouring-in (aw, don't they sound nice?  In reality they were a pair of agents from the dark forces for most of the day), transferring dates into a book of birthdays, and panicking.  Each birthday invitation that arrives now is a race against time, but I am meeting the challenge head on.

Make a dog from a sock?

Make a rocket from fimo?

Do something snazzy and piratey with magnets?

March and April are full to the brim with birthdays, and I have my first boys' birthdays coming up.  Now, those who know me will know that I rail against sexism in toys - I am constantly astonished by the toy industry's persistent gender stereotyping - just check out a toy catalogue - and especially since I have no sons to create a natural balance of toys, I choose toys with calculated precision to try and achieve that balance between boys' and girls' toys.  They have a kitchen, and also a toolkit, a trainset and lorries and lego and also dolls and dolly beds.  I snort in derision at most things fairy, princess or pink based (although the daughters like those things as much as anything else of course) and feel affronted that my daughters might be excluded from things pirate, castle or tractor based.

So you'd think I'd happily be sewing nice pink bags for the boys, or creating a little princess sock puppet for them, or manhandling giant foam tractor shapes for the girls, complete with rake-wielding farmhands and a giant carrot barrow.

But no.

I'm in a state of nervous tension over what boys will like.

So far the girls have all received either beanbag bags or homemade crayons in bags, and the truth is, the boys would like those things too; but somehow I'm all paranoid that they won't, because the darn system's got to me hasn't it.  It goes like this: right, I'll do a bag and the chunky crayons for Boy 1.  Voice in head - ooh no, boys don't like colouring in.  Boys don't like bags.  And hey presto, the doubt has set it.  Now, the two little boys I know best are actually very keen on colouring in, very good at sitting and doing crafty things, with good concentration spans and so far, no penchant for needing to stand on the table beating their chests and spitting at people.  In fact, when I cast the net further and think of most of the boys I know, they're all rather well behaved, and if I go even further and think about the little girls I know, there are plenty who would quite like to leap from a tree and stuff my chunky crayons in an electricity socket rather than do colouring in.  But there I am, biting my lip with worry about giving crayons to boys, whereas I didn't question it at all with the girls.  I'm disgusted with myself.

So then, who's up for an anti-gender-stereotyping-in-toy-manufacturing demo in Trafalgar Square on Saturday?

I'll knit some placards.  See you at the train station.  Don't wear pink.

Patterns in Space and Time

As if all that confectionery and bakingness weren't enough on the sticky front, I then decided to get up to my neck in self-adhesive tiles and glue and ribbons and fabric and buttons.  Don't get me wrong, I have no aversion to sticky messes; I'm not known for being a fastidious, clean-liking, anti-muck sort of person.  You ask my mother.  She has, I'm sure, very fond memories of mud-pies and me volunteering to black-pot all the pans after Guide Camp.  Pretty sure I was sent outside with a brillo pad and buckets of water and left to my own devices with that job.  And my father will tell you unpleasant tales of mould in mugs.  My assertions that this was how Louis Pasteur discovered penicillin were not welcomed, if I remember rightly. 

A n y w a y...so I don't usually mind 

a bit of muck.  

I was making a noticeboard in my sewing room.  I like to see things - sketches, plans, pictures, fabrics, notes, ideas and so on, or I simply forget what I'm doing.  I have come to the conclusion that this is largely because I do not have a good memory.  Alternatively, it might be because I have about 87 ideas all cramming themselves into my head at any one time.  And I forget what I'm doing.  Also, I have very limited time in which to do them, what with the fact that I'm actually meant to be looking after two small children, so it is difficult to build up any momentum.  Right now, for example one of the children is blowing a whistle very loudly in the other one's ear, one is taking its vest and shoes off, and another is walking round the house with an umbrella up.  Hang on, that's three, and I've only got two.  One must have been doing two of those things.

Not really focussing on the task at hand am I?

And I'm not actually terribly good at multi-tasking.  I would be if I could wear a clipboard round my neck and keep a note of everything I was doing all at once, but it really would get in the way.

For the last hour, the clipboard would read:

• Sort out bag of clothes for freecycle lady to pick up
  
• Cut Isla's fringe
• Cut Hetty's too, because she'll want to do the same as Isla
• Find coins for them to pay me with at the salon
• Play Humpty Dumpty on the ipod
• Put Isla's jumper back on
• Supervise a poo
• Try to make a nice cup of tea
• Supervise another poo
• Unload dishwasher
• Load dishwasher
• Try again to make a nice cup of tea
• Unload washing machine
• Load washing machine
• Unload tumble dryer
• Load tumble dryer
• Get really bored of loading and unloading things and decide to make labels for all the toy trays
• Try once more to make a nice cup of tea
• Wish I had a laminator for the toy tray labels
• Explain to Hetty that her tights don't have pockets for her hairdresser money
• Remind myself to call my mother and ask her how the devil I'm going to unpick two accidental overdoses of cable stitch in my knitting 
• Really wish I could get round to making a cup of tea

It's a bit scatterbrained, but that's what life is like with little ones.

The noticeboard looks very nice from not too close up - get too close and you'll see some shoddy fabric-sticking and distinctly glue-sodden ribbons (which I picked up for 20p each in a charity shop, although at that point they were not sodden), but it is exactly what I wanted.

First thing I shall pin up there: my attempts to design a pattern for a hairband - you can see my four failed attempts pinned on it.  Four.  I mean, that is ridiculous.  My hairbands are a comedy of errors.  I like to stick the evidence of my constant inability to get the maths right in view, to spur me on, and in the hope that some random person will have just the right sized bonkers head to put one of them on.  Either bizarrely small, or in the case of one - man-sized tennis player size.  I'm pretty sure quantum mechanics is involved, on account of the use of elastic, elastic being an odd, warping, bending sort of substance, much like time and space and atoms and worm-holes, and other particle-type things of which I know very little.  

I'd better brush up on my physics.

Sticky Lingers

I obviously felt the need to get away from nice dry fabrics, because I seem to have spent the last 3 days doing things involving glue, or similarly sticky substances.  It was of course Valentines Day, so I and The Daughters rolled up our sleeves and made biscuits for Daddy, who does like sweet things.  I'm sorry but biscuits are a hideous thing to make.  Dough?  Ball of dough?  How can you describe the sticky mangle of hitherto food-like materials as dough?  Dough I think of as dry and kneadable - this was a disgusting mash of goo which we were supposed to roll out and cut into shapes.  Is it just me, or is there not a single person on the cookie creating planet who hasn't had to add more flour to dry it up a bit?  Why not add an ounce to the recipe?  It was total chaos - not the fun it is purported to be, this cooking malarkey, because rather than celebrating the joyous mess of creation I spent the whole time saying things like "Hetty! No!"  "Isla! Stop!"  "Hetty!  No!"  "Isla! Stop!" amid other equally constructive comments such as "Do not pick up that spoon!" and "Don't touch that till I tell you to!" "Hetty, do NOT put that in your mouth!"

Hm.  Easy there, Mummy, we were almost nearly enjoying ourselves.

It did all more or less right itself in the oven, and we ended up with hearts and men and circles and flowers, which when cool were pretty unappetising, but who cares, it was all about the decorating.  Thence to more sticky stuff, the pink icing sugar and little tiny sugar alphabet letters and hundreds and thousands and chocolate dots, for decorating the unappetising biscuits, which was fun.  We three of us sat there, with our tongues sticking out, bent over our biscuits, or in Hetty's case, eating our biscuits, and had such a lovely time decorating them we did not notice it being suddenly ten past five.  Well fancy that.  Normally they have nagged me for television by then and their tea is underway, cooking itself somewhere, or even, if I've been terribly well organised, being eaten.  I looked at Hetty, whose face was full of her fifth biscuit, and said "You're so not going to eat your tea are you?"

They had a yoghurt and a cracker for their tea at 6pm.  

And slept through.

Hmmm.....

Waffling On

I think it's high time I subjected you all to some of my recipes, in celebration of my latest craft effort.

A waffleknit knitted dishcloth. I can hear my good neighbour groaning and raising her eyes to heaven but it was her who started it. We were sitting outside two summers ago (it can't have been last summer because I distinctly remember it was hot and there was some of that yellow stuff in the garden, what's it called, um, oh yes - sunshine), drinking tea no doubt, and probably considering stopping one of three small children throwing or smearing sand at or on one of the other of the three small children, or in the case of Hetty, stopping her from eating it. Somehow we got onto the subject of cleaning (how? Of all things, why on earth were we talking about cleaning? It's bad enough having to do it) and Her Next Door said, have you got that vinegar book? And there's a bicarbonate of soda one too. Ooh I thought, and before you know it I had bought them. But even better I came across this book, Natural Stain Removers, which is like a recipe book for cleaning products. It has everything you could possibly need.

Now then, I've just sat here and done some maths which is terribly unlike me - adding up how much I've spent on my cauldron of natural goodies since June 2008, and then some very exciting research on the Tesco website to see how much conventional cleaning products are. I took as my example a fairly lax and shoddy type of cleaning person (me) and worked out what products they would use in a month, and in what quantities. I'm not being unfair here - I've gone for own brand all the way, (which are usually substantially cheaper than brand named products) and worked out how many uses I'd get from the products - so for example, with the best will in the world, it's going to take me 3 months to get through some pine floor cleaner because at best I only manage to clean the floors once a week no matter how filth ridden they are. My list is very basic - washing tablets, fabric conditioner, stain remover for collars and cuffs and paint and bolognese and mud and glue; washing up liquid, kitchen cleaner, bathroom cleaner, toilet cleaner, furniture polish, window/mirror cleaner, floor cleaner. Fairly basic kit of stuff, no? Probably even forgotten something obvious. At a conservative estimate, I'd say you're paying £15 per month for all those. Which is £180 a year.

I buy my goodies at Summer Naturals, and spent initially £60 on bulk quantities of things which are going to last me, frankly, until doomsday. I mean 8 months, a year, more even....

The massive 5kg bag of bicarbonate of soda is hilarious - it's like a huge bag of coal. The whopping bottles of white vinegar take me months and months to get through, the glycerine will be years of use, and I have neat, dainty bottles and containers of soda crystals, borax, liquid soap, soap flakes, lemon juice and my lovely essential oils all stacked in nice baskets. The essential oils are a fairly expensive thing - but even the ones you get through at a rate of knots (eucalyptus, lavender, tea-tree all of which have antiseptic, anti-fungal or stain-removing qualities) take a few months to use up. And of course you don't need many - you get orange essence, and lime, and clary sage, and rosemary, and pine because they smell nice, not necessarily because they blitz germs. Lovely zingy lime and lemon on your worktops anyone?

And what of germs, I hear you say? Do these things actually kill them? Yes they do. And don't forget, we have a highly clinical view of what is necessary in germ-killing. Bacteria have to be kept at low numbers, not completely obliterated. And just exactly how much raw chicken do you actually spread on your fingers and wipe on your child's face before smearing a pooey nappy on your high chair tray and feeding the child its tea from the floor?

I'm dead chuffed with all my cleaners, although The Husband is a saboteur. I find sneaky boxes of washing powder sitting about, and when I accused The Saboteur of trying to undermine my housewifely pride by insulting my utility room with gawdy boxes of chemical toxicity, he peevishly stated that he didn't like that the washing balls have no smell. Bless his cotton socks. So now, I put a macho blend of rosemary, clary sage, pine and lemon in the conditioner compartment when washing The Saboteur's pants, to give his Y-fronts freshness on the fragrance front. He doesn't actually wear Y-fronts; that was purely for the sake of the prose. It was panty-hose prose.