Flutterbymama

Lucas’s 4th birthday!!! (Yup a tad late)

But better late than never I always say. And believe me I’m nearly always late…even the boy was late!

The boy was born shortly before 6 in the morning on Sat 9th June 2007. It was a fairly straight forward birth. Into labour about 11pm Friday night and, although the midwife said it would be at least another 12 hours before I needed to come in, I was in hospital by 4am. Have some rest and try and sleep she said… yeah right! I had no idea that he was coming so fast but boy am I glad he did. Within a couple of hours I had him in my arms and we were overjoyed. Most of it was a gas and air blur and I saw baked beans on the ceiling and traffic lights changing from red to green but it was an amazing experience. It’s true what they say about the pain fading from memory to some degree. The midwife who delivered my bundle said I could probably be home by lunch! Fab I thought. Then it started…

I made a decision, mainly because I brick it if you come anywhere near me with a ruddy needle, to not have an epidural or the needle in the thigh to speed up the placenta removal. I had a brilliant water birth in a small local midwife run unit and I would do it all over again. The problems came whilst waiting for the placenta to come away. It never happened. So in the needle went to help it on it’s way. Still nothing. It was like trying to give birth all over again but this time it was painful. Sorry for those who are squeamish, they pulled on the cord, I pushed, nothing! After a couple of hours they called the larger local hospital as I had to be transferred so they could do a removal procedure in theatre. All pretty intense and I’m so glad my mum was there. She turned up from work just after Lucas was born. Thanks mum I can’t thank you enough for what you did that day. So long story short… they tried again to pull it out and then I heard a pop, yay it’s out no need for surgery. No it turns out they snapped the ruddy cord off the placenta. So spinal block and manual removal it is… woohoo. I’ve never been so effing scared in my life. Procedure went well but felt pretty shit as had no sleep since the previous morning, hadn’t fed Lucas and my poor hub thought he was going to lose me. It all sounds pretty dramatic but remember I was on gas and air throughout most of this so I was non the bloody wiser half the time. Very surreal experience. Not something I want to re-live but there is a high chance of it happening again if we decided to have another child. The moral of this story is that we are all safe and sound and happy and that that was just a small blip in our lives which we’ve had to come to terms with.

Continue reading…

A bit of a cheat?

Ok so I’ve had this great idea…start a shop selling some vintage pieces but until it’s up and running, which, come on, knowing me, could take like forever! The idea was to start with a few of my own handmade sewn goodies but where to start. Decorations, bunting, monsters, bags?

Well on a little trip to the local sewing machine shop, which by the way is actually not that little, to buy some fabric dye to try and dye a sofa cover, rather unsuccessfully I might add, I spotted these lurking about.

Oooh what are they I hear you ask…Well they are a clever little company called Hamble&Jemima. They give you everything you need to sew you’re own little bag, cushion, phone case, travel bag etc. Really bloody clever if you ask me. I have a friend who has made some bags and they look fab. When I asked her for a pattern she said all she did was copy one she already had. Well unfortunately for me I’m not that clever/brave yet.

I was amazed firstly at how effing enormous this little local sewing machine shop was. My hub bought my beautiful PFAFF sewing machine from here about 6 years ago (my God have I really had it that long?). He’s a bit of a shorty and needs all his trews taking up and shortening and it was getting a bit pricey, what can I say he like shopping. His brain wave was to spend £90 on a sewing machine for me to do it. He remembered me telling him how much I loved it at school…come on that was nearly a quarter of a century ago! (Shhhhh!!!!) This little shop actually goes a long way back and goes into the next 3 shops which sells craft, fabric, t-shirt printing and embroidering. They have just about everything you ever need and it’s been right under my nose all these years. It’s 2 minutes down the road from hubs business. Me thinks I’ll be visiting rather frequently?!

So one day he pops off to said shop and comes home with the funkiest little machine I ever did see. My man has some serious taste, well he married me didn’t he…anyways I digress. So he comes home and says I bought you a present, Impressed? You think I would be but being me just thought what a tight arse he just doesn’t want to pay more money for doing his trews. Well needless to say some years later I’ve managed to do many pairs of trouser shortenings, as well as my own, and I’ve made a pair of curtains for the boys bedroom and a duvet cover and pillow from a double Orla Kiely duvet on sale in orange, as well as my boys birthday monsters. It’s really helped me get back into sewing…albeit a slightly long winded journey.

Anywho to cut a slightly rambling story a tad shorter, we came across these little boxes. Intrigued I took a peek inside. All you need to make your very own little bag, including pattern…bingo. I now have a couple of bag patterns and projects to get my head around the idea and then it gives me the knowledge to do my own ideas and designs…wooohooo! (No I won’t be blatantly ripping them off…it’s research dahlinks!) And it’s my lovely mummy’s birthday tomorrow and she adores Radley, so I bought her the little sling sac with dogs on. I’m going to make it but I have warned her that her present may take a few weeks/months/years to get around to.

I’m really excited about making these but I may just switch out some of the buttons supplied to ones from my own vintage collection.

I’ll let you know how they go.

Have a happy sunny(?) weekend everybody : )

Easter thrifted & gifted (KARMA!!!)

Easter, like Christmas and other kiddo friendly events, is getting more exciting as our spud pot gets older.

There is a definite change in how we do things and we are tending to venture out more and visit friends with kids too. To be honest I’m the kind of crap mum that has no idea how to do Easter… yeah i know buy chocolate eggs dummy, what I mean is egg hunts and nice stuff like that. My hub, being the creative control type freak would have designed every bloody sign and thought up a whole mapping satellite system to follow. What we needed was experts! Cue a visit to our friends the Trevaskiss’. They live in a lovely part of Sheffield which is almost 2 hours away from us so we don’t get to see them often.

I adore their company because they have 2 amazing little people and they themselves are pretty amazing peeps too! When we arrived we had belated birthday gifts, God I hope they didn’t feel a personal attack from my previous post?! Ooops! Guys it wasn’t intended to make you feel any guilt… I promise. Gifts very gratefully received. I love fabric and Fi gave me some offcuts to get me inspired to make something… she hasn’t seen my stash cupboard : /

Next stop… kids and big kids went to do dam building and cycling and ice cream whilst mummy’s went to 2 really cool retro/MCM vintage shops. Oh my days! I could have bought everything in both of them… fortunately for my devoted other half I really like a bargain and struggled to find something that wasn’t over priced. After a good hour this is what I ended up with. Pretty nice huh? Well I love them. £4 each the label said well the nice lady gave them both for £4 the pair. Still don’t know if that was intentional. The way I see it, it was a bargain. This is what they looked like once I’d purchased them:

and this is what they looked like 2 minutes later… shocking

Lots of rain whilst in the shop and lots of shit falling off trees… yes I slipped and ended up on my arse and bruised the hell out of my knee, I ripped the pants I was wearing-GUTTED-and threw the bloody glasses across the floor. NO it wasn’t on purpose it was just that I decided not to put them in my hideously large bag to keep them safe, I was too excited and kept hold of the flimsy arse plastic bag. After checking I was ok, my friend laughed her face off and said well that’s just KARMA! Damn you rain and certain chain of events that led us to said car park accessed by slippery bloody path. I HATE YOU!

SO basically made a tit of myself and it cost me in the end anyways. DAMN if only I’d purchased those retro curtains they would have surely cushioned my lovely glasses and I wouldn’t be sat here now trying to find a replacement glass. Hrumph!!!

Apart from that little episode we had a great Easter with lots of delish food , done on the dual BBQ combo, cheers Bri. The big boys were up till midnight making signs for the Easter Bunny and drinking copious amounts of red wine, so that’s the way it should be done?!

Maybe we’ll do the signs a little earlier in the day next year but what a brilliant sight to see the 3 of them so excited that the bunny had been and left eggs for them all. Unfortunately, well I feel it was fortunate, Lucas hates caramel in his chocolate so he gave them to the other 2. He has enough eggs and will still be eating them next Easter!

Thanks for a brilliant weekend guys, can’t wait to do it again soon!

P.S. Thanks for this special offcut I feel I need to search and buy it for making curtains in our bedroom. It’s just sooo perfect.

Crafting/workstation

This is actually a project we tackled late last year but I just haven’t gotten around to posting. Mainly for the reason that the living room, the room which is open with this play/craft room was looking a big hot mess. It’s still not how I want it but at least it’s a touch better.

Now that we have the kitchen and extra room all done at the back of the house these two rooms at the front became a little redundant. We nicked all the bits of furniture from here that we could fit in the new room…that meant sparse city in here. After a bit of thinking and swapping around of furniture we decided a craft room and desk would be a great solution. All of Lucas’s toys and his play table are in this back section and we wanted a space we could all use. SO with a bit of brain storming we came up with this idea of dividing the space with a long table. Only thing is there wasn’t a reasonably priced table this long. It’s 2.4m!!!! Oh Yeah you heard right. The only thing we could think of was to somehow make our own, but how?! Well after checking out a few blogs on people making shelves and using plywood it seemed a fantastic solution:

Dan’s shelf in his bedroom manhattan nest

The one thing that bothered me was if we were going to slap a big table/desk in the middle of two adjoining rooms then you would always be able to see the crap on the desk from the living room side, as well as the possibility of stuff sliding off the rather large desk. Then I had the idea to replicate the back and side panels in the kitchen as this was the same concern in there.

So it was coming together in our heads but a few details weren’t clear…legs. Cheap legs from Ikea? Nah too open. So lets wrap the plywood around the side as well? Nah too closed in but that was all we could get, until I saw this:

Bang on the money and I recognised the units at either end. Ikea! And the top looks like plywood too. Credit to Kathryn Tyler. I love the idea of the extra storage that the 4 units would give but to fit 2 adults and possibly a 3 year old at the desk in one go there wouldn’t be enough leg room so we opted for one of the drawer units and one of the cupboards and put them at either end with a single chrome leg at centre back…perfect. So a trip to Ikea later and a delivery of pre cut 20mm ply we got to putting it all together.

On the basis of the above image we also decided to leave the whole desk ply unpainted, we just sanded it down and rounded of the edges slightly and gave it a coat or few of matt varnish. We did however decide to paint the upstand in white on both sides but left the edge untouched.

We are really happy with the outcome and it’s a more positive space and whilst we work/browse the web/sew/knit etc Lucas can play with his toys or just nag us to play with him and we can all be creative in the one space.

Puss needs a new home…

Well she actually has a home with us but since the renovations on the kitchen she no longer has a cat flap for ease of access. This usually means she’s hanging by the back door to be let out for toilet business and then she’s straight back in. There will be times that she’ll opt to stay out but presumably that will be when the weather is warmer.

Doing a bit of DIYing this weekend my hub made the incorrect decision of asking what he should do. My sarcastic reaction, “make a cat kennel”, so what did he do? He washed the cars, no really he didn’t he went and made a cat kennel! Is my man fab or what?! F.A.B.

We had some scraps of 20mm thick plywood that we had used for our desk project…yes I really need to do a post about that one. The cat flap we already had as it came out of the old back door. We also had some linoleum offcuts that my mum gave me and some left over scraps of decking boards. All we had to buy was a catch for the lid and an extra piece of 6mm ply. Not bad considering we had a quote to make one and it was about £70. This my friends cost us less that £10!

Are you ready for this?…

Please ignore the surrounding area. All will be tidied and prettied for summer. But not bad eh?

The close up…ignore the feet, I haven’t finished painting it yet. The whole thing needs another coat or two and we’ll eventually get some shed roofing felt and clean up the cat flap. The boy done good.

The inside needs a bit of padding on the sides to keep it cosy and I’ll be making a snug cushion for her to sit on. I’ll also swap out the take away containers for something a little cuter.

This is what our decking looked like this last Saturday and Sunday but at least we’ve had some use out of all that decking so far.

He was surprisingly tidy and I’m proud of him for rising to the challenge and not a single swear word seeped through his lips the entire weekend.

Not bad for a few bits of leftover wood and stuff eh? What shall I have him make next…

Knit and Knatter

The year before last I did a weaving project at college and decided it was time to try my hand at knitting. Always wanted to do it but just didn’t believe I had the dexterity for it. It lasted all of about 3 weeks as I became too busy with other stuff and renovations. Just before Christmas I decided it was time to pick up the needles again. I made the choice to get large needles and chunky yarn and to just start knitting and see how it goes.

These are the first results and I’m rather proud of myself:

This is the first one I made and this has gone to my good friend for her 40th birthday…I should get a photo of her wearing it really.

This second one is for a friends 8 year old daughter who has the most beautiful red hair and these colours should suit her complexion.

I made this little one as a test to see what size would be good for say a 3/4 year old. I made it so the buttons can be used to make it fasten in different ways. Because I used UK size 15 needles and chunky yarn I didn’t need to think about making actual button holes. Not got there yet!

It’s only been a short journey so far but I’ve learnt that I much prefer bamboo needles to the grey metal ones. Less clickety and much nicer on my hands. My speed is picking up and I enjoy quick results hence chunky needles. Most of the buttons I use are vintage but I have found a couple of nice new ones that I will buy again.

Maybe one day I will set up an online shop selling my knits and sewing…watch this space.