the year of living frugally bombs in spectacular fashion...

I did get to the end of May! I excused myself buying some t-shirts for my holiday, couldnt really get away with replacing a pink lambswool cardi which I felted by accident but  the new camera and Amazon Kindle were a purchase too far!
To be fair, the shutter on the old camera was sticking badly and I am hoping to raise a good contribution towards the cost of the Kindle by selling my old ebook reader on ebay.
I just want to rave about the Kindle, it is streets ahead of the Sony reader - and that is saying a lot. Woke up yesterday morning to find the Daily Telegraph had been delivered wirelessly and a lot easier to read than fighting the paper in bed! Missed the pictures though, will definitely still buy the paper when there is a big news story or event. There is so much content for the Kindle on Amazon, lots and lots of free books and books for under £1 but the best thing for me is I can play my Audible downloads on it and it's so much easier to carry around than my trustee but rather big and ugly laptop.

I love Sundays

I know it's naff but I couldnt resist it! £2.00!

Flyer from a local village pub about the wedding party. Love it...

Fabric bought today

Books 50p each - I love car boots

Peter Rabbit - husband says he has to go on ebay :-(

Dog brooch made with free applique pattern off t'internet

Vintage pinking shears - gorgeous and sharp too

Never seen the clematis flowers as big as this year

My very small herb garden

10p each -like I said I heart carboot sales

7.30 Car boot sale
9.30 Tea with my mum
10.30 Read the paper eat bacon butties drink more tea
12.30 Think about doing some gardening, drink wine and sort out craft room instead
1.30 Husband makes dinner (shop bought pizza - who cares I dont have to cook it)

Bag mania

Ive been making bags like mad, my mind is buzzing with ideas for them - often way beyond my skill to make them. Im in love with some gorgeous fabrics from fabricrehab.co.uk so I have to use up some of my stash to justify buying them!

The turquoise bag is from the super-cute tote in pattern in Meet me at Mike's, the red Cath Kidston fabric one I made up - v.straightforward, and the other one is made from 2 old jumpers which I felted and bag handles from a boot sale bag - roughly following a pattern in Felt So Good.

On my needles

Still working on lots of purses, hoping to do a table top sale at the end of the summer with these and some felted bags. Im also making a doll based on Laura Long's Polly Dolly but very heavilly modified, I will post the modifications when she is finished.
Bought a gorgeous vintage pattern for a dog and cat from ebay - their faces arent too cute but I think I can sort that out. I want to make toys of my 4 cats, Mr Max, ginger, Geoffrey The B*stard (cus he's so aloof), black, Stupid Alfie, grey and white with a touch of Siamese, and Molly O'Dolly, black and white.

cute footstool

I wish Id taken a 'before' pic of this footstool I painted and recovered. It cost 50p from a carboot sale and was covered in vile brown draylon. The fabric Ive covered it in was an absolute bargain - £4.90 a metre from The Range. I went back the next day to buy more to make curtains but it had all gone - not surprised!

This is what a feminist looks like

Ive spent some time thinking about politics lately.
I was a feminist first through a sense of natural justice; later I became embroiled in socialism. Many years later, idealism and romantiscm honed by experience, I would call myself a liberal democrat (small l, small d).
My youngest daughter, almost 18, thinks of feminists as hairy legged, butch man-haters. This made me so sad and also made me think a lot about how the far-left adopted feminsim and distorted it into their creature as they do with any passing popular band wagon (take the stop the war coalition - the strangest of bedfellows).You dont have to be a socialist to be a feminist, feminism and capitalism are not mutually exclusive.
Feminism is ' the radical notion that women are people', and what it has given me is choices, the ability to work and earn the same as the man standing next to me, the choice to stay home with my babies when they were small, the choice to have an education, to be treated as an equal and finally the choice to retire from it all and be a homemaker when the time was right for me.
Feminism doesnt force me to work in a traditionally men's job, though women scientists (like the afore mentioned daughter) and engineers are there because of it, it doesnt force me to have an abortion, though it ensures I could have one safely if I had to make that terrible choice, it doesnt force me not to nurture my family and knit and cook, but it means no-one expects me to if it's not in my nature.
 










 
 
“For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft...” —1st Samuel 15:23
 A badge we used to wear in the 80s said ' Wicked witches were invented by frightened men'. How secretive and frightening women must have seemed to men historically, excluded from child birth and its mysteries, and the vaguaries of the female body. Not party to the vast knowledge of herbs that women shared - it's easy to see how some women were thought to be witches. Feminism is not just about women, through it men have been liberated too, to truely share the world together - different therefore equal.