Make: Easter Crafts and Edinburgh Yarn Festival

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Cook Quilt Make and Bake

Hi Folks!

We hope you all had a lovely Easter however you decided to celebrate it! We had a fun and relaxed weekend of church, crafts, chocolate and movie watching under duvets, lots of delicious lamb and home made hot cross buns (you can find our recipe here!). Plus the best bit was that my brother Adam up visiting us! Even the sun managed to make a brief appearance on Sunday morning after a day of snow flurries on Saturday.

I decided that as it was Easter I would make the most of the chance to decorate the house so I filled jam jars with mountains of pretty daffodils and tulips ….

… whipped up the worlds quickest Easter egg garland out of some left over scrap booking supplies …….

… and enlisted the boy’s help to blow and dye some duck eggs (which we used for tasty scrambled eggs on Easter Sunday!) …… a couple of these were taken with my phone as I didn’t want the camera to be splatted by egg so they might be a bit grainy ….

Phil is back to work today after the long weekend but I have an extra day off which I’m using to try and catch up after our fun few days by working on my neglected laundry pile, opening the windows to air out the house and curling up with a cup of tea and some Easter chocolate to go through our SD card and share with you a photo-dump of a fun recent solo trip I took …. to the Edinburgh Yarn Festival!

The Yarn Festival took place a couple of weekends ago at the Drill Hall in Edinburgh. I couldn’t resist the chance to go along and have a peek at all the lovely goodies, so I left Phil at home shelf building in the cupboard while I popped out to have a look.

As I was there on blog duty I managed to keep my wallet firmly in my pocket (which took a lot of self control amongst all that beautiful wool !) but I did take a small mountain of pictures and met lots of lovely lovely ladies.  So, here is just a small selection of some of my festival highlights.

Wool wool beautiful wool, of every shade, colour, thickness and ply. In skeins, in balls, in piles high on tables, all ready and waiting to be lovingly crafted into something even more beautiful!

There were so many yarns I had never seen before! I fell completely in love with this incredibly soft Tibetan Cloud Lace made of Yak wool. When spun the wool was incredibly soft and airy. Perfect for a summer scarf or shawl.

There were blankets blankets galore (too many to take pictures of!) but these two were my stand out favourites. The top zig-zag blanket works perfectly made with soft variegated yarn. The knitted circles blanket was just beautiful, and I love the colours against the cream background. I’m desperate to have a go knitting in the round myself now.

There were also some great looking classes on spinning and weaving going on during the day. I must remind myself to sign up early next year to have a go.

One of the most fun and original displays of the day was this giant sheep made entirely of yarn. Each visitor was encouraged to make a pom pom from a table full of yarn and to pin it to the sheep. By lunchtime the sheep was already looking pretty full (and wonderfully multicoloured). Mine was the little silver and red pom pom tucked into the right hand corner. Such a great and interactive idea!

It also wasn’t all just wool. There were these beautiful handmade knitting bags to stash your needles and wool in on the run …..

… bags of roving and fleece ……

… mountains of buttons ……

… and the cutest knitted greetings cards I ever did see!

So, all in all it was a great day, and having chatted to one of the vendors afterwards it turns out that more than 1500 people visited on the one day. You can be sure I’ll be back next year!

Seeing all the beautiful wool at the festival inspired me to keep trucking on my own crochet blanket, and after an Easter weekend with nothing to do but relax and keep hooking away I’m now on square 108! My lovely Grams has treated me to more beautiful ivory coloured alpaca wool use for the border as an early birthday present, so I can’t wait to finish the squares to start using it.

So, that’s all our happy happenings. Did you all have a lovely lovely Easter too? Was the Easter bunny especially generous this year? Did anyone else eat one too many pieces of chocolate?  (no? just me then!)

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Make: Cupboard Renovation

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Cook Quilt Make and Bake

Hey all!

Well it’s been a couple of weeks of fixing all that breaks in the life of Sam and Phil. Over the past fortnight we’ve seen our car die (twice), our fridge decide to start warming food rather than cooling it and our shower entirely stop providing any water at all.

Being a bit of a sucker for a challenge, this has meant that in the last two weeks I’ve also learnt all about whats going on under my bonnet (that’s a hood for our american friends :P ), the ins and outs of fridge freezers and the wonderful world of electric shower wiring. Meaning I managed to fix the lot myself with the exception of the first car breakdown. (An entire engine sprayed with oil and more warning lights on the dash than I care for felt like a job for a real mechanic!).

Feeling all empowered by my man job related successes, it didn’t take too long to feel like another power tool related job should be tackled. Which meant this weekend I finally (after 5 years in our little apartment) got around to sorting out our hall cupboard and building some much needed storage.

Until now our hall cupboard has housed an assortment of  random things, from shoes and coats, to paint cans, cleaning supplies, our towels and well I guess pretty much everything we could squeeze in. Much to our shame however, in our otherwise fairly well organised lives, most things just lived piled high in a heap, with paint cans down low, towels up high and just about everything else somewhere in between. We had no sensible storage solution in sight.

What we really needed were some shelves for everything to live in. But the big complicating factor was that, in addition to everything else, the cupboard is also home to our boiler and it’s associated mass of pipes. This means buying anything pre-made was always going to result in lots of wasted space. Time to build some bespoke wind-around-the-pipes shelving!

First things first we cleared everything out of the cupboard. I avoided getting a shot of the space before this happened to save mine and Sam’s blushes. Which left a big kind of sad empty and seen better days looking space.

We knew that rather than solid boards, we wanted our shelves to be slatted to allow the warm air from the boiler and pipes to circulate nicely and keep all our towels nice and toasty (kind of like an ad hoc airing cupboard), so I ran off to the hardware store and picked up some lengths of 2 x 1 (wood) and some screws. Sadly modern houses in this part of the world are made almost entirely of plasterboard so I also needed some rather pricey but very necessary wall fixings to make sure my shelves could withstand some weight. Over the last few years of hanging shelves, towel rails and you name it on these plaster board walls we now swear by Black and Decker’s Piranha fixings.

I stated by marking up and fixing batons to the sides of the cupboard, mitreing the fronts of each baton so they’d be pretty invisible once the shelves were up.

Next came making the shelves themselves. As I was making slatted shelves this step was actually pretty easy, cutting lengths of wood in turn to fit the space, making shorter lengths where pipes were in the way and running the whole length of the space where there was nothing in the way. Once I had all the slats laid out for each shelf, I cut a two cross beams to screw all the slats together.

You could skip this last step and just screw (or nail) the slats to the fixing batons on the wall, but I was keen to make the shelves removable in case we ever had a boiler related problem which would need easy access to all those pipes.

With the shelves finished it was finally time for a quick lick of fresh paint (which actually took waaay longer than we thought as just about every piece of wall had some wire or pipe which we had to paint around), a little wait while everything dried and then we could now load up our newly organised and totally awesome looking closet! We think so at least.

We’re not entirely sure why it took us sooooo long to get our cupboard organised but now it is, we can’t help but smile every time we put away our shoes and coats or grab a towel…. We’re sad like that :D

Hope everyone is surviving the current round of snow just fine and dandy, has everything been generally falling apart in your world too or is it just us this week?

 

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Life: Spring Weekending

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Cook Quilt Make and Bake

Phew! It’s Monday we are tired out after our busy busy weekend. Sometimes I think our weekends are actually busier than our weekdays.

We have so many projects on the go at the moment I thought that rather than devote a post to just one tutorial I would give you a quick snippet in the form of a weekend timeline of what we got up to this Saturday and Sunday! So here you have it, a weekend Sam and Phil style :D Enjoy!

Nb. Our wedding planning is well underway! Yay. But this means we have about 100 secret projects we are working on which we will of course share with you as soon as possible, but we have to firstly finish them, and then share them with our families so sorry if we are a little vague at times :D

Friday Night

Friday nights in our house are always movie night. It’s a tradition which we have had for a long time. But, occasionally we get so wrapped up in a project that we end up swapping it for a Saturday which is what happened this weekend.

5:30pm We both get home from work and head out to drop off the dry cleaning and grab a coffee.

6pm Phil cooks dinner. Meatloaf with roasted tomatoes and crusty bread. Yummy. I do laundry, boring!

7pm Phil puts the finishing touches to a graphic design secret project (wedding related!) we have been working away on for a while and need to get a sample of printed in the morning so he sets to on it. I quilt (and do a few extra bits and pieces related to the secret project!).

8:30pm Phil’s project is taking a little longer than planned so we stop to have a coffee break and turn on the radio to see if anything fun is on to listen too. Movie night is looking less likely but thats OK because we are both happily wrapped up in our projects.

10pm Good news, Phil’s thing is finished and ready to go in the morning. Bad news, it’s now too late for our movie so we call it an early night instead and curl up with a box set to watch in bed. Night night.

Saturday

8am  Up and at em. We have plenty to do today, and we wanted to get an early start (Edinburgh on a weekend gets busy and impossible to park in by lunchtime!). The good news is the sun is shining and our very first crocus is out. So we decide to head out and treat ourselves to Krispy Kreme for breakfast. Yum!

Here’s a quick side story about Edinburgh and doughnuts. So, we got our very first Krispy Kreme store in the beginning of February. Wahoo. Actually its the first one in Scotland, so we knew it would be busy the first few days after it opened. Infact, when it first opened it was so busy people camped overnight in the snow to be the first ones in line. A few days later Phil and I decided to give it a go and head down there for a naughty post dinner treat. We were totally shocked to find that the queues were (not even kidding) around 100 cars long for the drive through ….. it had actually backed up so far it was back onto the motorway and the police had to set up cordons. Even for ‘not drive through’ the queue was around the building and into a queueing system like they have a Disney World with bouncers on the door. Crazy times! So we decided to give it a miss for a while until the doughnut fever settled down. A full week later we tried again one evening and saw that the queue now only had about 50 cars in it but was still estimated to be around 2 hours. The same thing happened 2 more times each a week apart and each time the queue was no shorter. Now, don’t get us wrong, we love Krispy Kreme, but not enough to sit in line for 2 hours. The problem was, now it kinda felt like a challenge ….. the more we got turned away the more we kinda really wanted a doughtnut, even just for the satisfaction of being able to say we had been ….. so we listened to the advice of one of my good friends Judith who had more success by being there when they opened on a Saturday morning and bit the bullet. The good news is we finally had doughnut success!!! Yay. Actually, there was hardly a queue at all. So, that was my doughtnut story, sorry, kinda a long sidetrack.

9:15am Head over to the printers to get our sample printed. We weren’t totally sure about the final product so decided to make a few tweaks at home and try again later. We decided to stop in the grocery store on the way home to stock up.

10:30am We get home and Phil tweaks the design we were working on. I carry on work on a book binding project I have been commissioned for by the Haylands School on the Isle of Wight. They are looking for a golden book to write extra special achievements of the children in. Golden buckram is pretty hard to find so it has taken a while to source all the bits and pieces, but I am so pleased with it now it has arrived! Last weekend was all about folding and sewing together the paper inner, and this weekend is time to make the covers and bind it all together ready to ship. Phil helps me to cut the grey board (its 3mm thick which is takes a fair bit of strength to cut) and I set to cutting the buckram to size ready to bind the cover and pasting the end papers onto the book.

1pm We stop work for a cup of tea. Phil’s project is ready to head back to the printer and my book binding has got as far as it can get without a trip to the craft store to get a piece of thinner grey board for the spine so it will have to wait for a little while. We watch an episode of our boxset and I might have a mini afternoon cat nap (it was an early start!).

3pm Phil has a hair appointment and we have a few errands to run like picking up our dry cleaning, a trip to the craft store and going back to the printers so we head out again. We even stop in to Costco while we are out and about to pick up some bits and pieces (and have a snack, we skipped lunch!).

6pm Phew, finally home and done with chores. We decide tonight is movie night but Phil also wanted to bake a loaf for tomorrow, so he does some bread dough mixing while I  clear away our crafts

7pm We have supper of boiled eggs with asparagus and toast soldiers.

8pm Movie time! Put away the lap tops, put away the crochet and quilting and book binding and projects which are otherwise on the go all the time. Phil makes his famous movie night drinks, which are a virgin cocktail of grenadine, lime, mint and pomegranite, delicious. We are working our way through all the James Bond movies at the moment in order, so tonight we are onto Thunderball. It’s pretty good!

11pm. Bed time. Zzzzzzz

Sunday

8:30am  We have church at 10am so Sundays are never really a lie in for us. We have a quick breakfast and head out. The tricky thing about getting to church this morning is that the Edinburgh Meadow’s Marathon means all the roads are closed so we are almost late, oopsy.

11am We need to head back to the printers a third and final time this weekend,  but the good news is everything is now in order so we are pleased as punch. While we are out we decide to get some lunch (we missed it yesterday) so we head to one of our favourite brunch spots in Edinburgh, a little deli called Victor Hugo which is right next to the Meadows so we watch the runners while we munch.

1pm Once we get home I have my book binding project to work on so I set too gluing my buckram with Phil’s help (that part of the binding project takes two hands). Once it is all done we set it under a press to dry flat.

2pm Mother’s Day is coming up next Sunday so Phil and I sit and sort out plans for that while I work on my crochet project a bit. We have a book on tape on the go at the moment so we have a nice quiet couple of hours working on our own projects and listening. Phil spends a while taking blog photos of the projects we are working on and of his bread baking from the day before which we baked once we were home.

4pm Time for afternoon tea … we have tea and peaches.

5pm We both have some pre-work things to do before Monday so we sort those out and get some more laundry done (how can two people create so much laundry!) and have a tidy round before work tomorrow.

6pm Time for dinner. We have Phil’s homemade bread with antipasto cold cuts, tomatoes, basil and grilled courgette.

7pm Tonight is designated as ‘Create a Wedding Photographer Shortlist’ night so we both sit down on the sofa with our laptops and ping links at each other to look at when we find someone we like. After a couple of hours we have a pretty long list for a short list of people we want to meet, but there are lots of lovely looking photographers out their so we are happy that we will be able to find someone we like. We also make a note of ones we would like to contact before we meet them as they don’t discuss prices (and it turns out wedding photographers can vary from around $2000 to upto $11,000 as the top quote we have got so far. Yikes!!!!)

9pm I sit and start drafting out tomorrows blog post while Phil does the washing up. Then there is just baths, a show and bed.

Phew, busy weekend!

We hope yours were as happy and productive as ours!

 

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