welsh hills again

I do love a good project and living somewhere like this means there are always things on the go. Inside there is usually something on the needles or on the sewing machine, especially in winter. Outside is ignored when it is cold and wet but it begins to call about now and I have spent a couple of days working in the garden.  So just for the record before inside gets abandoned for the spring and summer, here are this winter's projects plus a new one cast on yesterday. Here are some curtains made from dinosaur material for grandson number two, aged five.  The material comes from textile express , a great business based in Oswestry with a really good website and web presence.  I make lined curtains about once a year and every time I have to go back to square one in terms of reminding myself about the order of events.  Last time I did it I made three pairs in one marathon effort for the holiday cottage so I took the time to write down all the th...

A couple of months ago we decided to buy a shepherd's hut to sit in the corner of our field.  It is to be a refuge, a private place, a place to sit and read, a place to write.  We visited and talked to the makers and we are now only a week away from it being delivered. I am quietly very excited indeed.   It is being made for us by hutsnstuff ,  a father and son business in Powys on the Welsh borders.  It should look something like this: This is one of their photos and there are lots of others on their website and flickr page.   Our hut should be the same colour as this one with similar windows on either side.  Inside there will be a sofa which converts to a double bed as well as a wood burning stove so the hut can be used when it is cold.  We will be making or finding a little table and it will have a wicker chair and a little writing chair too. So this week is the week of making curtains, covering mattresses, making cushions and preparing ...

Have you heard of the mass observation project? At the end of the Second World War and for some years after thousands of ordinary people throughout Britain kept diaries about their daily lives. While we were in Newfoundland I read a book called Our Hidden Lives in which five of the diary keepers' stories were told. It sounds as though it might be dull but it was oddly compelling and you became fond of them all as you followed them through rationing and failing to win prizes in the allotment competition and buying new hats and riding London buses. The most vivid and most shocking thing in reading the book was the sense of how little they had and how careful and constrained their lives were: an amount of butter to last a week no more than I put on two slices of toast in the morning; recipes without eggs, without butter, without sugar; terrible food of the sort which sent Elizabeth David stomping off fuming to France and the Mediterranean; no waste, no packaging, no consumerism. And y...