Face it, you Twits, you Follow?

This was the original Facebook logo - they nearly went for it, honest, but decided on a felt-tip pen one in the end.

Well now, me and Dormouse Moneybags, aka Amanda, only went and had an OriginalStitch Works Outing yesterday didn't we! Yes, we were on day release from OriginalStitch Towers, leaving The Husbs in charge of their respective progeny, and off we went t'Big London to the UKAware Show at Olympia.

It's full of like-minded ethical, eco-friendly, environmentally driven sort of types like us, so we came back bulging with business cards.  And we thought we'd do a little celebration of some of the stuff there.  Follow us, follow them, follow us all!  Hoooorah for following!

Gingham tweeting, it's all the rage

Now, we love this Blog, and it is where you'll find the chaotic undercurrent of OriginalStitch, (are you Following us in your Google reader thingy? Oh, do, my loves, why don't you, hm? Look, you can join all those lovely looking peeps to the left there - aren't they handsome and pretty?) but Facebook and Twitter is where we also daily update you on products, special offers, or just share nonsense from our day in headline style, plus links to the latest blog post too.
And look - I've even made you special linky badges from fabric to get you to them - just click and follow us!

But with no further ado, lookee here at these fab things:
www.reestore.com, home of Dragon's Den winner Max, who designed this smashing plastic bag bin - you just pop the bag handles over the tops and the bag pulls the plastic tight. Brilliant. Made from 100% recycled plastic. We went home with 4 between us. Saw us comin' eh? 

Next, we liked Fairtrade Innipooh, with these fab bicycle baskets made in India - go to her website and read the fab story of how Trudi, from Suffolk, came to find herself in business with Parvathi in India. We toddled off with 3 of these in bright jolly colours for some daughters. I repeat, saw us comin' eh?

And how about this for the latest in at-home parties - the Swap-a-Rama Clothes Swap parties? You take along 5 of items of clothing or accessories you no longer wear, but which are of course nice and clean and non-shoddy, swap them for vouchers, and spend those on something pre-loved your friends have brought along, for a small fee on the door!  Amanda, who is Class Rep on the PTA is all over this for the next Ladies Indulgence Event at our girls' school up the road, so I will be manhandling fivefoot women in the street to come along so there's stuff to fit me. Um, that's women who are 5ft, not women with five feet. You knew that, right?

Bung-It-In Bag, from soon to arrive Piece&Jam Collection

And last but not least, here is a lovely sneak preview of an up and coming product we found being showcased by two very attractive, glamorous and successful looking ladies wondering round the show, one of whom was five foot.
Ahem.
Ok, so you know that's us right?
I'm that transparent aren't I?
Well, anyhoo, what the heck - we'll be revealing the whole new collection soon so come and find us on Facebook and Twitter, and you'll be able to see all the next sneak previews, as we launch the whole Piece&Jam Collection.  It features applique and quirky embroidery of fab, daft or iconic images like bunting and radios and sewing machines, on stuff like aprons and laundry bags and tea cosies and Bung-It-In Bags.
Oh yum.

We look forward to meeting you, you handsome pretties, you.

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...

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.