Living Arrows - 28/52

ISO 400, 50mm, f/2.2, 1/800

I'm later than usual posting for Living Arrows this week and that's for two reasons. Firstly we moved back into the house on Friday night and although the builders may be close to finishing, our own work has only just begun, but more on this later in the week...

Secondly I thought I had my photo this week, it was a picture of Theo asleep in his new bed which for him was the highlight of the week, but somehow a picture I took without his knowledge just didn't feel right. Mostly he is a willing participant in this portrait project and I hope there is nothing I publish that will make him cringe in later life, but somehow a sleeping photo just felt a bit... invasive?

Anyhow, I reshot today under the lovely weeping willow in my parents garden. I'm sure I'm not alone in constantly trying to define boundaries in blogging and who knows if we will ever get it right?

Where we've been sleeping...

For the last few months I have been a little evasive about where exactly we've been sleeping during the massive building works on our house, but with only one night (hopefully!) left till we move back into the main house, I can now reveal a bit more...

The cabin we had installed back in March has actually been our temporary home. It's insulated and heated, but it doesn't meet building regulations for accommodation that can be slept in, which is why we had to not publicise our use of it.

Internally it measures 4.5 metres by 2.5 metres, which is just large enough to accommodate our bed, Theo's cotbed, a bedside table, chest of drawers, changing table and an Expedit bookcase which divides the room.

We whitewashed the walls ourselves before we moved in and Jim laid the laminate floor (Homebase's cheapest floor at £2.99 a metre!) I took theses photos in March when we first moved in so it looks very tidy, but over the months that bookcase has filled up with all manner of stuff.

As you can see everything fits very tightly and that's no accident. Jim drew it all out before we moved the stuff in! There's about 30cm between the end of our bed and the double doors, which makes it pretty tight coming in and out, but it's doable.

Temperature wise, we have had more trouble with the heat than the cold. In the spring it retained heat during the night quite well, but it has done the same in the summer and at 8 o'clock at night it can easily be 25c inside even with the windows open.

Although sharing a room with a toddler is not ideal, the bookcase has helped keep the spaces separate and I pinned a quilt on one side of it so that he couldn't see through (is there no end to the uses for quilts?) Theo has also been pretty good at quietly playing with his toys when he wakes up early on summer's mornings and we've been disturbed more by the sound of the billowing wrap round the scaffolding and the local wildlife than by him.

Keeping Theo in a cotbed for so long has not been what we would have done if we'd had a choice. His obsession with keeping cars in his bed has lead him to have several disturbed nights as he tossed and turned and bumped into them. He is also pretty tall for his age and so the cotbed is rather small. The move to a bigger single bed in a few weeks will definitely lead to a better nights sleep for all of us and quieter nights!

We will actually have pretty fond memories of the four and a half months we spent sleeping in this cabin, but we are ready to move on and I'm excited for its next role in our lives.

Once the beds are moved out this building will become my quilting room. A real physical embodiment of the Maybush Studio this blog is named after...

#CapturingColour - Orange

It's our sixth week of Capturing Colour and it's been great to see the momentum really growing on Instagram. What started as a group of photographically minded bloggers posting about the colour blue at the beginning of June, has blossomed into a really exciting little community with over a 1000 posts sharing the hashtag #capturingcolour on Instagram.

Orange week has been both good and bad for me. Bad because I struggle a bit with it as a colour, it has associations with cheapness and safety equipment and I have never encountered an orange flower that I really loved (even the tatty nasturtiums in my garden.)

But it was good too because I am trying to embrace the colour and part of that was completing my first quilt that quite apologetically featured orange in a big way...

This is our final week of sharing #capturingcolour through our blogs, but it will be continuing on Instagram where next week's colour will be gold. 

A huge thank you to Kirsty at My Two Mums  for inviting me to take part in this project back in May. I really felt honoured to be included and it has been great to have a focus to my instagram posting. Don't forget to visit the other four bloggers taking part today and lets keep the colour sharing going...

Hayley at Shutterflies

Chloë at Sorry about the Mess

Lauren at Real Housewife of Suffolk County

Lucy at Capture By Lucy

Another HST quilt and bargain basement wadding...

So this is my third half square triangle quilt in as many months, but it turned out very differently from the two before it after I was forced to deviate from my normal wadding choice.

Firstly I should say that I normally buy my wadding by the bolt, but since we have nowhere to store it at the moment I am buying it as and when I need. This lead to the rare situation of being completely out of it when I realised that I needed to finish a quilt quicker than expected. So I went to the Eternal Maker on Friday and bought some of their Eco wadding which is £11 a metre. Grand total for 1.5 metres was £16.50.

I didn't get a chance to baste it till Saturday night and when I unrolled the wadding I realised that it was uneven thickness with a really large thread bare patch in the middle (you could actually see through it!) The Eternal Maker wasn't open again till 10am on Monday so I was forced to consider other options...

In the end I went to Falcon Fabrics and found some poly-wadding which was £2.50 a metre, a total of £3.75, that's £12.75 cheaper than the other stuff! I was VERY nervous about using it, but if you don't try different things you will never make discoveries.

So the verdict? It was much puffier than the cotton wadding I normally use, which luckily worked well with the fact I made a square quilt intending it as a playmat. It was harder to baste successfully (a bit of bunching as I quilted) and the end result doesn't have the weight or flexibility to fold neatly. I wouldn't use it again for my own quilt, BUT if you are making as a gift it certainly helps cut the costs down a lot. The one thing I won't know of course, is whether it beards later on...

 
A few notes on the quilt itself... It is 40" square, made from 10 squares originally cut at 5 inches. The fabric choices were based around the hedgehog fabric as this is a gift for a baby whose mother is involved in some local conservation work.

The rest is a mixture of Kona solids (School Bus, Pond, White and Ash) and some low volume from my stash. I backed it with grey gingham from Ikea (about £6 a metre I think) and bound it with Kona Orange which I *just* managed to do with a fat quarters worth. I would have preferred to match it with the School Bus in the quilt, but it was a case of what I had to hand at the time...

Living Arrows - 27/52

ISO 1250, 35mm, f/3.2, 1/250

This face pulling is new. A part of a new stage of self-awareness that goes with the understanding of how to go "cheese" for the camera (something I most definitely did not teach him!) and learning his own style of nearly-three-year-old humour.

His mornings at nursery play a big part in this. His friends there are all girls. The doe-eyed brunette who he chatters about constantly seems to barely to register his existence, but a new curly-haired girl has appeared on the scene and when I left him on Friday, my heart-skipped a beat as I heard her greet him slowly, quietly and kindly by name. I'm so glad he's got a friend and that he's not dishing out all his affection for no return.

Yesterday we bought him his first proper bed and next weekend if all goes to plan, he should be sleeping in it in his new bedroom.

PS - A note on camera settings... The ISO setting I choose for this photo is really too high and you can see a bit of grain in the image as a result, I should have opened up the aperture a bit wider and reduced it... I don't always get it right.

Capturing Colour - Yellow

It's week five of Capturing Colour. This project has been a really well timed virtual kick to get me active on Instagram again. You may have heard Tots 100 are now using it as a metric for working out their rankings, which is a sure sign that it's something that us bloggers need to embrace, but beyond that I love the ease of sharing images and joining virtual communities. It has in some ways taken over where Flickr has declined. If you want to follow me I'm @maybushstudio and as well as heaps of colourful images, this is also where you will start to see the interior shots of our house.... I know, I'm such a tease...

So this week has been all about the colour yellow. It's everywhere from street signs to warning labels, flowers to bicycles. Some of the images I have loved most on Instagram are the ones that make use of the graphic shapes and lines of street markings. I had every intention of seeking some out myself this week to photograph and then I got a cold and the only yellow I wanted to see was Lemsip...

Next week the colour orange takes centre stage. You can see previous weeks posts below to give you a flavour if you missed them...

purple / red / blue / green

Please join us over on Instagram #capturingcolour and check out the other great bloggers taking part who will also be publishing their yellow round-up posts today...

Hayley at Shutterflies

Chloë at Sorry about the Mess

Lauren at Real Housewife of Suffolk County

Kirsty at My Two Mums 
Lucy at Capture By Lucy

The last push...

Before I have a whinge, I would like to say that I fully realise we are luckier than most. In a few weeks we shall be living in a great house and although we will have a larger mortgage and reduced savings, we are exceptionally lucky to have had the opportunity to create our family home. But...

...this last bit is killing me!

Last week Theo brought home from nursery an all consuming summer cold, which first worked its unpleasantness and sleepless nights on him, before moving on to me. Then the seal on our washing machine expired, I ordered a new one and when we took the machine apart to fit it, it was the wrong one. We ordered another one. The pile of washing kept growing. Over the weekend I seemed to be perpetually washing hankerchiefs and children's pants in the sink whilst pausing to mop my own streaming nose.

The decorators arrived (yay!) and decided to listen to a competing radio station to the builders. Who listen to a competing radio station to me. That's three radio stations in one house (and yes I realise I could turn one of them off!) The electrician came to install LED lights he thought I had. I didn't. He opened up the boxes of the electric towel rails we had delivered three months ago and discovered they were not electric. So I ordered some replacement ones which were more expensive than the first we ordered.

The new seal for the washing machine arrived. Jim's away till Friday so I have so far spent 6 hours trying to fix it. It is the worst job ever. I am now so far into it that I can't not finish.  In between this contractors keep reminding me of the little extras we agreed to which will appear on an as yet unfinalised bill and even though worrying about it is pointless, I still do.

So that is that, but here is the good news... The carpets are being laid next Friday. That means that in all probablity we shall be out of our temporary accommodation in the garden and into the house in 10 days. I still can't quite believe it.

After that there are still rooms to paint (the decorators are only doing the newly plastered ones) wallpaper to hang, the downstairs flooring to lay, the stairs to varnish, a garden to try and rescue and our lives to unpack.

But we are nearly nearly there. I just need Lemsip and a washing machine to power me to the end...