I heart lunch in the park

I'm very lucky to work next to one of Londons finest green spaces. I visit daily at lunch times and the park and I are great friends.



I heart lunch in the park.




I had a wonderful weekend. The wedding was glorious, I saw my family and oldest friend, crocheted three squares on the train, rushed back to see our friends in London, watched the embarrasing performance of our football team, whilst at the same time not really caring about it, then had an amazing evening with my mister.

Now another week. Ah well, at least I have the park at lunch times...

Did you watch the football? Did you get whipped up in the frenzy? Or dont really care?

Happy Monday to you all!

X

Summer time

Time seems to be melting away in the heat at the moment. Slow close days give way to mercifully light and long breezy evenings. Windows wide open. Crochet. Precariously stacked plates full of food that tastes of summer. Eating dinner in the garden. Staying outside until the mozzies rouse. Reacquinting myself with my mister who has been on the mother of all jobs the last few months. Talking excitedly about our hopes and dreams. Again.

This weekend holds good things. Seeing my oldest friend. A family wedding. The outing of my favourite blue and white floral 1950's dress. Seeing my baby brother and all 37 of my massive marvelous family. Can't wait.



(The photo's are of some sort of multicoloured rose bush in the garden. Looking lovely next to a discarded crisp packet...hmm)

Wishing you sunshine and good times and plates full of summer!

Hannah x

Wishing....

Oh how I wish that instead of sitting in my hot muggy and airless office today, I had been sat in my breezy garden. On a rug.  With a book. And a cold glass of juice. Looking at the trees.Yes.

Instead I wrestled with a spread sheet. Swore at my computer. Felt sweaty. Wondered why I wore jeans.

Ho hum.  

(my garden and the sunlight. By me)

P.S Thanks you for all your very kind words about our Pretty Handy craft stall on Saturday! I am still in disbelief that people actually vaguely like it!

Summer Fayre, the verdict...

Windy, wet, a little disorganized, but generally a lot of good old fun.  My sewing marathon is complete and the summer fayre is done. We stood like excited school girls as our first visitors came by, and grinned  madly at everyone because we didn't really know what else to do. We almost fell on our first customer with cries of joy.  And, the best news? We managed not to make a loss! A profit, even. gracious.

The stall was an acid test, and its relative success meant exploration of future stall opportunities, the planning of the website and alot of other excited discussion and debate.

I have shamelessly stolen the following photo's from Ray, as my photo's were beyond terrible.

Here is our pretty stall!

So Pretty Handy didnt fall at the first hurdle (massive phew), lets see what the future holds.

Hurrah!

Another snippet.

Today? More sewing. More ironing. A trip to the junk market to stock up on vintage fabric for the fayre on Saturday. Worrying a bit about the fayre on Saturday. Drinking black coffee. Having a welcome break from sewing to make some very last minute Fathers day cards. Running to the post box. 

Bopping around the flat to the Shangri-Las. Brilliant 60's poptastic music, full of teenage angst and longing for boys and being lonesome at school... 

To illustrate, here are some lyrics typically found in a Shangri- Las song:

"You wake up every morning, go to school every day, 

spend your nights on the corner just passing the time away.

Your life is so lonely like a child without a toy. Then a miracle; a boy. And that's called "glad." 

Now my mom is a good mom and she loves me with all her heart.
But she said I was too young to be in love and the boy and I would have to part. 
And no matter how I ranted and raved, I screamed, I pleaded, I cried-
she told me it was not really love but only my girlish pride. And that's called "bad.""

Genius. 

Also listening to this very informative and engaging debate about who has done the most to put women on the political map in the UK.   

Caroline Flint MP speaks for Labour's  Barbara Castle (Caroline Flint was once called a 'butchers dog' by Rod Liddle. Oh how I hate that man)  Louise Bagshawe MP advocates for Britain's only woman Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (boooo); Director of Liberty Shami Chakrabarti (I love this woman!) argues for the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst (legend); and Professor Mary Beard puts the case for the 'mother of feminism' Mary Wollstonecraft. A show of hands by the studio audience decides which characters are thrown out of the balloon and which one remains.

I loved it. A very accessible, light hearted introduction to some of the UK's historical feminist icons.

I love being sat at my sewing machine listening to music and podcasts and learning about new stuff too. 

Anyway, Must spend less time on blogger.... My sewing machine is calling me back to work.

See you on the other side...

P.S For now I have deleted the twitter link on my page, this seems to have got rid of the pop up box problem, but leaves my blog without a twitter link. Bums. 

Vicky, yes I changed my twitter settings so that people have to request to follow me, like on facebook. Promise I wont think your a stalker! I didn't like that any shady character could find and follow me, which they did. I didnt fancy being followed by ' IHAVEXXX4U'. 

A snippet...

Off work to prepare for the summer fayre on Saturday. Sewing, sewing, sewing. Ironing. sewing some more. 

No make up, jeans. Eating an odd but surprisingly tasty combination of leftovers. Pottering. Looking out of the window for quite long stretches of time. Moving a chair from the lounge to the kitchen. Plucking my eyebrows. Talking to myself a bit. Listening to all of the Radio 4 Womens Hour pod casts. And to 6 Music on the radio too.  

And sewing some more. 

A good day. Industrious, leading to backache and sewing machine eyes, but good. 

x

Pretty Handy...

Image

So, the news I hinted at earlier this week is that In January I finally got my shizzle together. Along with  some of my craftiest friends, we have started a craft collective. It involves man craft and people not in blog world (apparently they do exist. Freaky, I know.) but it also Includes some familiar folk you may recognise; Fay from Baby and Wool,   Ray Makes Do  and Mama Wolf. Our name? Pretty Handy.  We'll sell handmade wooden, woollen, fabric, screen-printed and china goods. We have tried really hard to price our stuff very reasonably. And, where possible, our materials are second hand, vintage or reclaimed.

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When we get our website up and running there will be an almighty song and and an epic dance, along with give aways up to our eyeballs and a lot of exciting blogging from we at Pretty Handy. But the reason we are announcing it now, sans functioning website, is that we have our first outing is this Saturday. Pretty Handy will have a stall at the Hilly Fields Midsummer Fayre. This is after months of sewing, crocheting, anxiety, excitement, one or two false starts and an awful lot of discussion (we are a democracy loving lot, I tell you).  Its paid off.  We are ‘out’. Onwards and upwards! (Also very scary too!)

If your down South Easterly (In London) We’d love you to come along to the Hilly Fields Fayre!  I'd love to meet some of you local peeps. Pretty handy will be joining  lots of other stalls, a bouncy slide, animals from Surrey Docks farm, a vegetable modelling competition, a community sing (?) an extreme falconry display,and (the best bit) a local dog show!

Image- ours! (poss a temporary graphic- maybe not. lots still to sort out!)

We'll be right at home.

Cant. Wait.

See you there? (Eap!)

R.I.P...

I've been working on this baby since our pancake party in February. It is finally finished. 

RIP criminally addictive Nutella.

My waist line is breathes a sigh of relief, my taste buds salivate frustratedly. 

Not to worry cherries, dry your eyes.  It is joining an elite group of carefully selected jam jars in the glasses cupboard in the sky...

What's your food vice? The dirtier the better in my books.

Hannah x


P.P.S Hurrah for you fellow yellow satchel loving people, very pleased to have spread the love!

P.P.S to those of you who have asked for more on the summer  make do and mend project, I shall endeavor to provide you with satisfactory level of detail this week, very good questions though.

P.P.P.S Something really exciting is happening this week, leading up to something exciting next weekend.... ooooo.....

Also- do you all keep getting an irritating dialogue box pop up when you click on my blog? Its to do with twitter and its driving me dooleally.

The Good Life....

Tom: "You know that ‘it’ business I was talking about? I think i've defined what 'it' is. Its breaking the cycle: Going to work to get money to translate into things which you use up which makes you go to work again etc etc; in other words, the norm. What we should be doing is working at the job of life itself!"

(Image)

Barbara: "This isn’t some sort of religious conversion is it?"

Tom; "Yes! And your going to ask me how to put it into practice. Here goes; I quit work and we become as damn near as self sufficient as possible.  We’ve got bags of garden; we grow our own food, we keep some animals, chickens and pigs, we produce our own energy, recycle rubbish, design the things we need; I’ll show you what being a draughtsman is really all about! Now, Somethings we cant make, right. Something’s we cant grow, right. So we flog our surplus and buy stuff with good old medieval barter! It’ll be damn hard work. We wont have much in the way of mod cons, but we might even enjoy discovering what we can do without. And we wont need the world and his wife to give us the yey or ney. It’ll be just us, doing it, for us."

(Image)

My mister and I are almost finished re-watching the first season of The Good Life. Yes, the iconic British 1970's sitcom about self sufficiency in Surbiton. And I am really quite in love. The brilliant 70's clothes, the posh english accents, her fringe, the smoking. And then there's the self sufficiency, oh! The chickens! The goat! The effluence digester! The stove!

Have you see it? I think you should. I really do.

There is a new 'future dream house' label (on your right, up there) which i've started in order to document our aspirations, inspirations and many, many ideas for our future home. We want to either build new or seriously renovate an old quirky building and turn it into a 100% self sufficient home. This has been our dream for a long time, and although we are miles away from buying our house, I can at least start documenting our hopes and plans for it, and what eco measures we want to incorporate, cant I?

 But for starters? Tom and Barb? You are our heroes. True story.

(Image)

Three cheers to The Good Life! (in both sesnses of the word)

And a very happy weekend to you all!

We'll be baking bread (so far my mister has conquered lots of types of loaves, french baguettes and naan), hanging our with friends, and I'm off to an exciting and quite posh baby shower. Hurray!


P.S Above is the speech that Tom gives to Barbara in season one, episode one to convince her to ditch their old lifestyes. I couldn't find it anywhere online so I transcribed it for you, making regular use of my pause button (much to the annoyance of my mister.) I can almost recite it by heart (ahem.)

P.P.S I mentioned this to my sis in law Ray and, totally separately, she and PD just happen to be watching it at the same time! Crazy eh? Great families think alike. Actually- you should pop on over to her blog, she has written a lovely post about their wedding planning. I am a bridesmaid and can confirm that so far its been a breeze, and a very exciting breeze at that.  The dresses are superb.

P.P.P.S Wow- lots of blogs this week, no? I guess Im having lots  of ideas and inspiration at the moment.

Strawberries, Lavender and Rosemary

It makes me happy that the Strawberries and Rosemary and Chives and Lavender in our window boxes are blooming and thriving. It feels as though our flat is surrounded and enveloped by flowers and deliciousness. 

When I water my strawbs, it releases a plume of sweet fruity fragrance. The smell of lavender wafts in to the lounge when the windows are open. The purple heads of my chives bob in the breeze. And lovely fat fuzzy bumble bees visit us often, tapping at the window and feasting on our flowers. 

Yes. These things make me happy.

All pictures taken with my new favourite Iphone app, Plastic bullet. 

Which is a ridiculous, slightly misleading name for an app. Steady yourself before you google it....

P.s. Peonies is pregnant WITH TWINS! Sweet mercy mother of all things good. My ovaries are jealous of hers. Im not going to lie. Go say congrats!

He made the bed

 My mister surprised me the other week by immaculately tidying the bedroom, making the bed and moving the mountain of cables that had developed by his side of the bed. He knows how to make a woman happy. I took photographic evidence, it may come in handy in the future.

He choose three layers of contrasting florals, all on his own (he loves them!). I was very impressed. 

But chose to finish it off with Mr T. 

Well, he had to protect his manliness, didnt he?!

The summer make do and mend.

June. Nearly half way through the year. Disbelief that its been nearly 6 months since the snow and central heating, and my January resolutions. I decided to read over them to see how many I had failed. 'Buy less stuff' was one of them, and only vintage or fair-trade when I do buy anything.  I have surprised myself by actually sticking to this one. Party.(So the satchel bought last week was a deeply pleasurable, extra treaty treat.)

(Image via)

I am hoping that the heavy dose of  ‘new bag’ induced endorphins I have been  riding on all week will last me through the summer. Because I have set myself a new challenge. Nothing new- not a single thing-   until the end of September. Possibly longer if its successful. This is down to a number of reasons  including tight finances, a looming tax bill and as an ethical experiment. My mister and I are also furiously saving for something really exciting, something we talked about on our honeymoon 5 years ago, something i'll reveal a little later. And after a year of squirreling money into savings, we are nearly ready to make it happen. HURRAH! There will be much MUCH more on this in the coming months. Just you wait.

So, the summer experiment. I won’t substitute ‘fashionable’ for ‘ethical’. No. I want to look sizzling, gawd diggidy. But I have enough lovely clothes, undies, bags and shoes to last me a pretty long time. I don’t need any more.

I want to learn to take in, let out, dye, and shorten. And I want to use my fabric hoard to actually make some new dresses and tops, instead of buying new ones. Since we decided to try this, therefore halving our usual weekly money, and with a clear vision of our impending exciting purchase in my mind, I have found it weirdly easy to not buy anything.

(Image of the ever amazing Tom and barbera Good! Via )

Our economy needs us to need stuff, and is very clever at creating in us deep ‘thing’ based desires. I used to be queen of rationalising my purchases. I needed a new dress for a wedding (because everyone has SEEN me in the blue one, doh) or another pair of summer shoes (it will prevent daily wardrobe melt downs! Dont you care about my mental health?!) or how I really need some more work shirts (I have to look sharp, I simply don’t have a choice!) But now, I don’t do that anymore.  Something has switched in my brain. I actually feel quite excited about using what I have in new ways and of saving some moulah.


(Past Hannah is like ‘who the hell ARE you?!”

Present Hannah is like ‘ Dude, get with the program. This is GREAT')

Crazy eh.

Its been a slippery slope. From beginning to recycle, and trying to waste less.   Learning about the labour practices of the high street retail chains. Wanting to be original, to stop seeing 5 girls each wearing my Topshop dress. Finding new ways to make do, to stopping buying stuff all together! (not forever I dont think. But for a while.)

(Image via)

So enough of the mushy, striving, slippery slope talk.

Guess the point of this is to put it out there in an effort to make me see this thing through. And to say that so far making do is do-able. I am saving money and raging against the machine. See?!

Have you ever tried anything like this? Were your reasons similar? Fancy joining me? Too much faff?
 
As always, would love to know your thoughts cherries!
 
Hannah x
 
P.s Gracious, what a rambling blog post.... apologies

Lalesso, how I love thee!

They had me with their Maxi dress. And the fact that Lalesso sources is cotton through an eco and ethical clothing production line in East Africa. Yep, as soon as the email popped into my inbox this morning I knew I had to post.

I had been waiting for the new Spring Summer Lalesso range to come out since I discvered them at some point last year. And gracious,  I wasnt disapointed. Each of their designs can be ordered in a range of amazing print options.

Info from  their website: Lalesso is an exclusively summer clothing brand which uses the traditional attire of the Swahilli women of East Africa, the khanga (also known as lesso) as a trademark to all of their designs.

Lalesso strives to involve as many talented local artisans within their designs. The coconut buttons are hand carved by unemployed beach boys, the beaded bracelet that you will receive on your swing tag is hand made by masaai beadsmen, the crochet is made by Zimbabwean refugee nuns, the brass embellishments are made by the disabled people at the Bombolulu workshop and so on.

(Wow!)

For me, this is the future. Genuinedly stylish and fashion forward garments constructed in a way that properly supports the people that make them. This really stirs my cuppa, in fact. Really.

(Love the ruffles and the brightly coloured prints)

Perfect summer dress. 

I cant actually buy any of it though. This is due to a no spend experiment (which i'll post about soon) so this post is a tad ironic. Only a tad though. Perhaps you could click through and I can buy vicariously through you?!

Anyho, hows things for you? 

The right decision.

After a faltering start, and after very nearly not buying it, I am falling in love with my yellow satchel bag. It has generated unexpected compliments from strangers, envious glances form colleagues, keen enquiries from friends, and of course gushing adoration from me. It is from the Cambridge Satchel Company, if you want to join in with the satchel love.

Of course the little label bit had to be filled with liberty paper!

(pics taken with my new fave app, Plastic Bullet)

It has sat between my mister and I on the sofa for the last week. It has joined us at the dinner table on more than one occasion, and It nestles right beside my bed at night, its heady leathery scent sending me to sleep and its sunshine yellow hue greeting me in the morning. It may have also been kissed.

Yes. This must be love.

Wishing you a lovely sunny weekend one and all!

Have you purchased anything recently thats made you go a bit gaga?

P.s I hope my bag love lasts, i am about to embark on a no spend experiment, more in my next post!

P.P.S- if you haven’t already, i would be very grateful if you had a min to pop on over to Amelia’s magazine and check out my new column in the earth section, and if the desire so grips you to possibly maybe leave a comment?! Thank you cherries!



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Envelope rage...

My next article for Amelia’s magazine  is up. (Uploaded stupidly late last night. Juggling full time job, and trying to write once a week for Amelia’s plus have friends and a functioning marriage is a tad tricky at times... Anyho) It’s my craft column, and this time it’s about reusing envelopes.

I don’t usual ask anyone to illustrate the craft column artcicles, but I did this time, and I think I may do again because I really like them.


Farzeen Jabbar provided 2 lovely illustrations to go along with my article.

 If you have a min, pop on over and let me know what you think.

P.S Thats why I was baking banana muffins over the weekend!