The Other Side

Yup, Aerosmith in my head again.

The boys went back to school yesterday, but I still have the husband under my feet and destroying the kitchen. He’ll be putting it back better than before (hopefully) but in the meantime I’m still not back into my routines, so today’s post is a quickie to reveal my part of the recent swap.

I really struggled with this one because of the whole chicken pox thing, but I managed to get my package off on time. I normally cut it close, but for the first time ever I actually posted the day after the swap deadline, but I sent it first class so I think it still counts as on-time. Maybe.

My swappee has two children, so I embroidered a T-shirt for each of them:

That was the easy part. I’ve mentioned before that machine embroidery is much more tolerant of interruptions than either knitting or sewing. These designs may have taken the best part of a day to stitch but most of my work is in the planning, colour choice and hooping. The actual stitching is the machine’s job and it is happy to wait patiently for me to change threads, unlike my children who rarely wait patiently for anything.

I had plans to make something for my swappee too. She knits but doesn’t sew, which would normally be my cue to make her something knitting-related, but time just wasn’t on my side this time, so I sent her some sock yarn instead. I ‘shopped’ from my stash from necessity, but luckily her favourite colours were not hard to match. I choose to focus on the similarity in our taste and not the size of my yarn stash. I also covered a few buttons with similar coloured fabric so she at least had a little something handmade, and there should have been some chocolate too, but that was another casualty of my house arrest. ;_;

I think my swappee liked the gifts and she certainly guessed me quickly enough – along with half the board by the sound of things. I’ll have to be sneakier next time!

Swap Goodies

I mentioned in my last post that I’ve been doing another swap. Swappees are still top secret so I can’t share what I sent, but we received our package today so I can share what we got.

Here’s a photo of everything in the parcel. Lots of lovely goodies for me and the boys. My husband sadly doesn’t get to play in these swaps because he’s boring and hard to please.

My older son is a big Batman fan, so he was thrilled to bits with his purple bat pants and batman bag. He has been gabbling away to me about his plans for the bag which is lovely to hear, especially since he’s been down and grumpy with the pox for most of the past week. He has put both items safely away into his drawers because he’s like me and likes to treasure precious new things.

My younger son is a Tom and Jerry fan. From his birthday cake, you’ll know he loves Mario too, but when it comes to TV he always, always asks to watch Tom and Jerry. The first week of his chicken pox was non-stop T&J in our house! As he started to unwrap his gift he was just beginning to whinge about his present being clothes and not chocolate, but then he opened them up enough to see his cartoon heroes and all complaining stopped. He was so delighted with the pants that he ran upstairs to put them on straight away (well, as soon as I’d finished taking photos) and is now wearing them, along with his T&J T-shirt that we bought in the US last year. It’s a long-sleeved shirt which is a bit warm for the current weather and looks a little odd with his shorts, but he wouldn’t be deterred. He is not like me or his brother in treasuring precious new gifts. He is all about the joy of now in everything he does, so putting his pants on straight away is the highest indicator of praise he can give, just as putting things away properly is the ultimate in appreciation for his brother.

More pants pictures:

And finally, I received some beautiful fabric and a lovely little bag full of chocolate eggs, which I suppose I’ll have to share with the children. The fabric is all mine though. I’m not sure quite what it will become, but it needs to be something for me. I always try to use gifts of fabric for personal rather than WAHM use, although sometimes that might be to make something for one of my loved ones. This time though, there’s little chance of that! The boys are also only interested in eating the contents of the bag, so the bag itself is all mine too.

I cannot express enough how much this parcel made us all smile today. We’ve had a miserable few weeks with the boys being ill and me being cooped up at home with them, so it’s heartwarming to think that somebody I’ve never met can go to this amount of effort to make and send us lovely things. She’s gone to a lot of effort to match up the kinds of things we all love too, which makes it extra special.

Now all I need to do is work out who my mystery swappee is. I have a couple of clues, but her identity is still a mystery…

Round Two

It has been a strange week. I should have been neglecting my blog from Rome, but unfortunately we had to cancel our holiday thanks to the dreaded pox. Connor was just about recovered enough to fly out by Wednesday, but we had decided that spending a week away from home with one spotty child and one likely to come down with the pox any minute was not a good way to spend money. Luckily we were able to cancel without it costing us too much money so it’s just our collective disappointment that we have to deal with. Sure enough L did come down with the pox on Friday, so it was definitely the right decision.

So we’re now in the midst of chicken pox, round two. Another spotty child wanting non-stop TV to take his mind off the itching. This time I have my husband in the country so nipping to the shops isn’t totally out of the question, even if it does need to be planned around his work schedule. He initially planned to take the leave he’d booked for our trip, but after spending most of Wednesday replying to emails and answering phone calls he gave that up as a bad job and went in to the office for the rest of the week. Not quite the week any of us intended to have!

So again my craft time has been swallowed up by parental duties. I’ve made some progress on the February Lady – finished the main body and knitted most of the first sleeve. I haven’t picked it up for a few days so I need to make sure I do before it slides back into UFO territory. I’ve also been working on some bits for another swap – one I signed up for just before my children began their month of tag-team illness. It’s all still hush-hush for now, but I have photos which I’ll share once the swap is complete.

I also managed to get a little machine embroidery done. It takes a lot longer to get anything completed when I’m not distraction-free, but at least I feel like I’m making a start on my BBM projects. I had good intentions of being prepared for once, but I think my next projected peaceful day at home alone is Tuesday 3rd May, so being ready for the start of next month seems unlikely. I’ve never been happier to know that there are 31 days in May!

So here’s my sole effort so far for BBM.

It’s not even a completed item, but it will be a project bag eventually. I have all the fabric cut and I can practically sew these in my sleep now, so I don’t anticipate any problems as long as I can actually spend some time with my sewing machine at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Sari Cottons

As promised, here are some pictures of the pretties my beloved brought me back from India. These are the ones that I like the best, but the rest can be seen here in my flickr album.

And my absolute favourite:

Pox

Just as I thought things were getting back to normal, we have been struck by the pox! C came down with chicken pox last weekend, which has meant another week of staying home with a poorly child. He’s really been miserable with it too, so I feel guilty about complaining over my loss of freedom, but he’s definitely perkier today. The sun is shining and my husband is back from India so things are looking a bit brighter. L hasn’t had chicken pox, so I’m watching him carefully for signs.

Obviously crafting opportunities have been severely limited. I’ve grabbed a couple of chances to knit, but sewing has been totally out of the question. This means that my planned project list has grown exponentially whilst my actual project list has remained static, so I’m itching to get back into things. The timing could be better, with two weeks of school holidays starting from tomorrow, but I’m ever hopeful that I’ll find some time.

On a related note, I  have noticed that my husband is a smart man. He realises that his travelling leaves more work for me back home – I think the fact that I remind him of this detail on a regular basis may have something to do with his enlightened view. He also knows that coming home with gifts does a lot to win back my favour, and fabric and yarn based gifts are never unwelcome. He told me that he didn’t have any room in his case, but he managed to squeeze in many metres of cotton sari fabric, some of which is pre-washing in my machine as I type.

Of course, lovely as the fabrics are, they haven’t helped with the problem of the evergrowing planned project list. A couple of the prints are just my thing and will almost certainly be made into skirts or dresses for me to wear this summer, but I’m not quite sure about the rest. He brought back 3m each of 8 different designs (he wasn’t sure what I’d like and it was cheap) and some are not the sort of thing I’d wear, so who knows what they will become. Suggestions welcome, as always, and tomorrow I hope to have photos to help with that.