Hiding from the chaos

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At the moment my cottage is all upside down.  The reason is the long awaited transformation of the dining room (read junk room) into a study / spare bedroom, so there is furniture all over the place.  I can’t even see my sofa in the lounge let alone sit on it!

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All this has the effect of driving me up the wall, add in a beautiful summers day and I obviously had a pressing need to be somewhere, anywhere, else.  So where did I go to hide?  Well the doggies convinced me that we needed to explore one of the local woods.  After all they reasoned, some nasty person might have stolen it so we needed to go check everything was still there.  It was the only responsible thing for two doggies and their human to do…

Unfortunately I couldn’t take my main camera as it’s buried somewhere near the sofa.  However cameras on mobiles have come a long way giving me a good excuse to play with the phones panorama setting.  Yeah I know it’s a bit of a gadget gimmick, but hey aren’t most things in this modern world?  Doesn’t stop me enjoying playing with them.

I’m sure once the study is done I’m going to love it and all the hassle will quickly disappear into the recesses of my memory.  The dogs however will find other reasons to go down the woods, and while the sun is shining I’m sure I’ll find reasons to agree with them ;)

Pay it forward…

A while ago I signed up to Pay It Forward on Sew Quine Nikki’s blog.  Well a few weeks ago I received a parcel from her containing the most wonderful, delightful, grin inducing treats for someone like me.  Nikki had obviously put lots of though into this amazing little bag. 

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Can you think of anything more appropriate?  Nope, neither can I.  There was squealing in delight, which is relatively rare for me, and immediately trying it out.  That’s when I discovered what else was in the package.

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I love pin cushions and as you can see I have a bit of a thing for having my pins grouped together by colour.  This wonderful pincushion even has my initial on one side and on the other side there’s another camera.  There were even pins for me to play with.  Thank you Nikki, they’re so wonderfully me :)

More about those sewing machines…

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Some people see nostalgia as a dirty word, one used by old people unable to keep up with the times.  I think we’re very fortunate in the crafting world that this doesn’t hold sway.  We know that newer doesn’t always mean better and we can appreciate craftsmanship from the past.

sewing 2Don’t get me wrong I love my modern sewing machine, but I can certainly appreciate the beautiful of some of the old completely manual machines.  They are objects of beauty in their own right.  So when I found all of these being used as a display in a shop on Portobello Road in London, I thought I’d died and gone to sewing machine heaven!

I took quite a few shots with my main camera but I couldn’t resist taking my mobile out and playing with it’s panorama features.  These shots are straight off the mobile phone and not as good a quality as I normally like to share.  I do think however that the give you a better idea of the numbers of these gorgeous machines.

There were hundreds of them and all designed to be operated without the benefit of electricity.  As my companions were all photography rather than crafting people they saw the attraction initially but soon wandered off for other photo opportunities leaving me dribbling in the shop. 

I can’t help wondering what tales they could tell of sewing exploits.  Most were in immaculate condition although they did show signs of wear and a little rust in places.  There is certainly no way my Brother machine will last anywhere near as long as these.  Don’t get me wrong I love it to bits and probably should have replaced it a couple of years ago when it first started giving me problems – but it’s not crafted the way these beauties are.

Nostalgia…

I’ll do a longer post about these later (when I’ve finished going through the photos) but I just had to share with you……

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