Well, in a bizarre twist of fate I now have a back-log of three, yes I say three, THREE presents to tell you about. I have on several occasions allowed the daughters into the Room of Sharpity, otherwise known as my sewing room, to create unknown havoc in a corner so I can get on with some sewing.You see, I'm no night-owl. Come eight-thirty at night I'm yawning. Come nine I'm wondering how to climb the stairs. So evenings being the only time I could sew unmolested was beginning to take its toll on the holdalls under my eyes, (as if 5 years of sleep deprivation hasn't done enough). Towards the end of the holidays (now that's a massive contradiction in terms isn't it? Ain't no holiday in my opinion) I had thrown all ambition to tidiness or order to the winds in an attempt to hold on to my disappearing sanity, and was living in a toy splattered hell-hole of mess and dirt.
I gave up.
I let the daughters do whatever the heck they wanted while I tried to get on with some stitchery. Hetty was playing with the pin-cushion and it's jolly bead-headed occupants. Isla was snipping old bits of fabric with the pinking shears. They are, I should remind you, 3 (just gone) and 4 an'arf respectively. The husb would have freaked if he'd seen them with these weapons, and even I wondered at my blase attitude to the sharpness of their implements.
But what's a stitcher to do? Birthdays don't just stop happening because we have children. Indeed they merely add to the list, the pesky creatures.
So, this means I at least got a couple of little fixes over the hols, and by stepping over the mounting debris of strewn toys squintingly, and walking around with my eyes half-shut I just pretended the house was tidy, rather than freaking out at the horror show of chaos left after abandoning two children to their own devices for an hour.Now then. Yo-yos. Ooh these are niiiiiice! They're a bit twee, yes, but in the right fabrics, they make a nice bit of decor for a cushion. I bought a dinky little gadget which is very simple and
quick to use, and sat and made the 13 you see there on the cushion in one evening. I was watching some cookery programme on the gogglebox about making your money go further - starting off with a baseline dish on Day 1 which seemed to take ages but formed the basis of the rest of the meals for that week; you know, cook a massive salmon one day, then fishcakes the next day, then gravadlax the next, then thai prawn mawhatsit the next, then with sushi and tiny vegetable wraps the next and so on. Jolly good idea that. But cooking is my nemesis, and Nigella's no-respeck quick cuisine my saviour. If something takes me more than 3.5 minutes to prepare I'm almost grizzling. My cooking has to be thus: lob it in a dish, slosh some ridiculous and expensive foreign-sounding sauce like nam pla or sherry vinegar or lime juice or sweet chilli or some other drizzly thing on it, cover in herbs and of course Maldon salt (what else, one simply mustn't use yer ordinary salt) and throw in an oven. Then eat with lentils or cannellini beans from a tin cooked in 30 seconds flat with cheat chilli from a jar and cheat garlic from a jar.Shoddy, eh?
A...n...y...w...a...y....yes, so, yo-yos. So they're nice and fun, and they look lovely with a button in the middle, which I used to attach them to the cushion panel. A very simple cushion cover recipe this, from Sewing in No Time, by Emma Hardy. I have to say, if you buy one fabric recipe book - it's got to be that one. The fabric, with the stripe and bobble on it, was from a bag of remnants, bought from a rather pricey interior design shop in Teddington for, I believe, tuppence ha'penny. Here the cushion is modelled by my rather serious looking assistant daughters. Assistant daughter? Is that like if a daughter is off work one day there is an assistant to take over the messing?
And hey, I don't mean to blow my own trumpet, but Yo Cushy?! The title of this post? I'm sorry, but isn't that genius?Maybe not so professional drawing your attention to it, but I am, I tell you, a-smirking.
