OriginalStitch Giveaway

Well now.  It's about time I did some intelligence gathering!

Goodness knows my poor local friends have been bombarded with questions and demands for the last three weeks. I've shoved bits of fabricky loveliness in their mitts and demanded to know what they would pay. I've asked them to put pencils in pencil rolls and tell me what width a pencil roll pocket should be. I've requested alternative versions of things that don't work. Got them testing handles, loops, flaps, rolls, ribbons. Stood arms crossed and assessed their child playing with a product. Got them designing products on the spot.
And not a stitch of remuneration don't you know. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch.

'Er Nextdoor was very cross with me the other day. The afternoon previously, I not only brought my daughters round for tea, where they made a mess in her son's bedroom, and ate her food, and she had to give me copious cuppas; but I also grilled her mercilessly on my prototypes, pummelled critiques out of her, and instructed her to come up with new ideas, oh and another cuppa please love; and then she couldn't sleep all night for trying to think of the perfect memo-board magnet-pad pocket-tastic anti-husband's change device all night.

Blast you and your fabric things, she said over the fence the next day as I handed her pan back (I stole the remains of the children's tea for my own tea - class act ain't I?) I'm sure I didn't get a wink all night for thinking about colourways and drop-down menus. You.

A...n...y...w...a...y.......
So as you can see we have been very busy making things for this 'ere Christmas Fayre I've signed up for, at which we have decided to focus on Kids' Stuff.
And I would love to know your thoughts on any of them....see some pictured below. And more next week when I have prototypes.
I don't mind what thoughts, just thoughts.
Do you like?
Would you buy?
Like the fabrics?
Would you buy for a boy or a girl?  Or both?
What ages would you buy them for?
Or maybe give me a thought on something totally random, like "We found a baby toad today". It's not at all connected, but that's what Isla said to me when I said what do you think of this backpack Isla?
O...k....
So, dear opinionators - put your comment in the comment box below, and I will choose one at random out of a woolly bobble hat (or rather one of the daughters will) and you will receive one of my fabricky bits of thing. Not even a prototype, but a real OriginalStitch product, homemade with love, labelled, wrapped, and sent just as if you had ordered it. Even more excitingly, it will have been made not by shoddy old me, ooh no, but by one of my lovely new OriginalStitchers. I don't know what it will be yet, and it may have to wait till after the fayres, but think - you'll have forgotten all about it and then it will turn up out of the blue, ah! The surprise! How lovely!
Can you just imagine?!
Wherever you are, whoever you are. Tell me your thoughts. I'll post to anywhere on the planet.  The daughters will be shoving their mucky mitts in the bobble hat on Halloween, 31st October and I'll announce the winner shortly after that!
Up in the next Giveaway - the Cafe Set, Pocketiddle Bag, and Hide'n'Seek Pops.  Aren't you just dying to know what the devil in a pencil roll they are? Hm?

Ratbags

Once, the Husb, during a part of his childhood spent in Mexico, got stuck in a bathroom for 6 hours. There he perched atop the loo in terror, unable to reach and unlock the door, while a huge black rat lurked and prowled, presumably trying to figure out how to eat him. This memory, and I think in general the memory of whopping great enormous Mexican rats, has rendered him, how shall we say, somewhat unkeen on the creatures in question.
He was therefore not amused when I tried casually to break it to him that we had rats. I very nearly ended up with divorce papers on my doorstep, because it is of course, all my fault. You see, I have a compost heap. Two in fact; the Dalek kind (for those of you across the pond who are not familiar with the Dr Who television programme, this is those big black plastic ones - they look like the evil protagonists called Daleks who are the enemy of a time-travelling, um, time-lord type person, who whizzes round the universe, I think, in an old English police-box or... oh really, don't worry, it's not important). The Husb has never liked my compostification of things, especially peelings and eggshells and stuff, and shuddered visibly every time he saw me marching out there to compostify my old bits of potato. "We'll get rats!" he would shriek irrationally. Of course I pooh-poohed him and raised my eyes to the heavens, marching purposefully out there, compost bound, with my old bits of cauliflower.
However, as I stood at my kitchen window a month ago, who should I see but a jolly brown rat, milling casually around our fallen apples, scooting around under the shed, lurking suspiciously by the compost bins, and popping off to other gardens, dragging his apples with him. And then his pal too. Or most probably his good lady wife. Very attractive nice lady rat she was, and no doubt really pregnant with a litter of like, a million babies.
Ahem.
To cut a long story short, I dealt with the problem (lovely ratty multi-storey town-house dwelling in my compost bin = council rat man = what a lovely fellow = ah, yes, they're in yer compost bin = poison 'em = dead rats = possible daughter poisoning = better come clean to the Husb who is playing out in the garden...)
The husb was not amused. It was, he claimed all down to the two eggshells he had seen me put in the compost bin last August, which had apparently attracted and sustained an entire family of rats throughout the long, cold winter. I retorted that it was in fact the apples we had negligently failed to clean up for 6 months and which were giving the rats A Food Source. I had no idea. I honestly thought rats liked things like burgers. Not apples; I mean that's a bit wholesome isn't it? They did look quite wholesome actually; I think they were probably quite rustic, as rats go.
Anyway, the rats are no more, and the disposing of the compost and the dead rats brought about our garden makeover, a project hitherto only vaguely on the horizon, and precipitated by our ratty removal antics.
Which brings me at last to my point, which is - where on earth have I been?
What a lapse in blogging. I mean, how can I hope for a nice bunch of comments and new Followers (of whom I have a couple - hello you!) if I neglect my blog? Tsk.
Garden planning is where. Never mind drawing up plans for nice sewing projects, I've been printing out graph paper and drawing gazebos and leafing through 89 gardening books and 14 gardening magazines and comparing paving slabs and fences and borders and shrubs and and prancing about out there with tape measures, and liaising and negotiating and purchasing and price-checking and oh my goodness. And as you know from my pencil-roll boasts, I do like a bit of planning.
So that, and a 4th birthday party in less than 2 weeks (expect more desperate posts on that matter in the coming days) means my Makeys have been on the scant side.
Except for my tour de force that is - the lovely quilted bag o'pens at the top there - for 4 year old Isobel. It's got a little colouring book in it, and 12 pens, and I painstakingly designed the pattern myself whilst the Husb and his best pal painted the outside of the house and the daughters ran total riot around me upstairs.
And I am thinking - it's about time I started putting some of these things out there isn't it? So, to make up for my lazy blogging, I am gearing up for a nice series of How-To tutorials, one of which will be the quilted bag o'pens. Get yer needles poised ladies, collect up some pretty fabric, and prepare to become obsessed with Making Gifts for Kids, which will be the first series.
But I'll warn you now, I haven't tried any soft toy patterns yet.
But I could do.
I could start with a nice friendly giant rat...

Drum Roll for the Pencil Roll

Well. For once I am not going to be self-deprecating. After the Duffin the Mule Debacle, I have excelled myself. I am, in short, quite brilliant. Sure, this time I went careering off in the polar opposite direction and spent longer preparing for this project than I did making it, by about a million degrees. I read the instructions in Last Minute Patchwork +Quilted Gifts about 14 times. Then a couple more times just to be on the safe side. And then, just to ensure I'd understood, I wrote them out and added drawings and measurements and little notes

Yes. I did as I was told like a good girl, and well. Will you just have a look at this...
It's a pencil roll isn't it? Quite undeniably, and recognisably a pencil roll. With pens in too. 24 pens and pencils all tucked in snug. I'd have loved one of these when I was little.
Yes, no doubt about it - I'm quite astonishingly pleased with myself.
Truth be told it wasn't really that difficult, but then neither was Duffin the Mule, so it just goes to show that if you follow the instructions while you're still learning the results will be better. It was the same with the tea-cosy. I copied those instructions out too, and also did a lot of unpicking and re-measuring. Measure twice, cut once and all that. I also (and here was a stroke of forward-thinking genius) cut two of each strip so I can make another pencil roll in double quick time for another birthday. Oh aren't I just so clever?
Now, don't let me lull you into a false sense of my expertise here - there was a good bit of swearing, and a lot of head-scratching. How the devil I managed to muddle up my colour strips when I thought I'd lain them out and then immediately pinned them together in their right order I really don't know, but I did get in a terrible muddle. There was a lot of "What the...how did that...now hang on, why's that there....didn't I...where's the...which one's this?" going on. Had to unpick a load of stitching and get all the pens and pencils out again and lay out all my colour strips on the floor again to work out which one was meant to go where.

What I like about it is the colours, and the origins of the fabric, which are from all sorts of things: a bit of the border from the living-room curtains, lots of bits of the fabrics sent to me by Elizabeth, including the Woody one (can you see him? Can you see the other ones? This is like a gentle fluffy treasure hunt), old bits of soft furnishings fabric from a bag of remnants bought in Teddington, the bathroom window fabric, bits from Mum's stash I've stolen, leftover bits from my quilt, Isla's curtains in this house and the old one, an old pillowcase, an old Size 6 skirt given to me as a present by my old flatmate in Crouch End when I was a (clearly skinnier) Twenty-Something, an old ball gown my mother made me from my university days, a Husband's old tie and some I just have no idea about.
This will be a present for my goddaughter's sister, who is big fat 3, so just the right age and level of developmental obsessiveness to like sorting out pencils and pens into their rightful pockets. Once I'd finished this, the daughters helped me put them all in, and were of course exceedingly pernickety about it. Critical too. I am spared no quarter, fat or otherwise, by these daughters.
"Er, Mummy, that one isn't the right colour."
"Mummy, this pen doesn't quite fit in here."
"Oh dear, this one should be darker."
"I don't like this fabric, it's horrible isn't it?"
Yeah, thanks for that girls. The other day Hester told her father he had lots of spots, and once Isla told me my boobies looked 'tired'. Yes, one of the benefits of having children is how nice it is to be brought back down to Earth after moments of sinful pride. Just in case I was getting a bit too big for my boots or something. Although I am exceedingly clever, so there.

Little Biro Peep

Where do they go? I mean, really, this is the kind of stuff we really need studies on - pens - where? Where? It's not like the husband takes them, because he has an almost pathological allergy to writing. I am a List-Maker; he says Just Tell Me. And unless the girls have developed stilt-like capacities, it is usually not them either, although they do love a biro of course, being two and a half and three and two thirds. Ooh Mummy's pen, ooh a blank wall.....
Anyway, so my point is, pens do disappear and they do need herding, or they will go a-wandering and get themselves all lost and then need shepherding back to the flock, to somewhat overdo the collective nouns.
So off I went to my box of scraps, and dug out some old bit of jean, and some lovely red scraps; cut them into pointy shapes, and sewed them very roughly together to make a rectangle. Then tidied it a bit with some seams, put a back on it, and sewed running stitch at inch-long intervals to make pen pockets. This has been hammered onto my newly created corkboard and although a good shepherdess would have counted them in and out of their pen, ahem, pens - I do believe at a glance that they are more or less staying put.