Sauce, Soup and Sewing

Be patient with me. This is the second time I've written this post having accidentally hit the close button before it was saved to draft...

So, where was I?

This year was a bit of an experiment when it came to growing tomatoes. At least it was supposed to be . Unfortunately, here in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter pointedly refused to exit stage left as per its script, and hung around far longer than it was welcome. This meant that the tomato plants couldn't go out when they should have and were far lankier going in the ground than was ideal. Still, in they went and after some feed and only one demise, they romped off and have been fruiting for a while. It's getting to that kind of time here when the harvesting period starts in earnest and today's chore is to pick some of these...

 

The idea this year was to try an experiment to see which varieties performed the best so that we could concentrate on them another year. Unfortunately, with the weird weather throwing a spanner in the works, this hasn't exactly gone to plan. And it seems that ones that have completely underperformed for me have been doing just fine for my Dad. So, we'll see.

 

I'll also be picking some of these...

 

 

I just wash them and freeze them whole. This enables me to grab one whenever I need one for something. They take moments to start to defrost and are easily chopped up in the early stages of this process. Actually it's far easier to do it then as they can go a bit limp if you let them defrost entirely prior to cooking.

 

I also wanted to share some new fabric with you...

 

 

 

LIBERTY!

 

Back in May, I had a letter printed in Sew Magazine and as a prize, received a £10 Sew Box voucher. I finally got around to spending this and put it towards some Liberty fabric. Being pricey, I only got a metre but I'm hoping to make a simple skirt out of it. It's cotton lawn so should hang nice and floaty. I may well do a toile version with something less precious before snipping into my lovely prize. I'll keep you posted, but just thought I'd share the joy of Liberty in the meantime!

 

In the meantime, happy sewing and harvesting! 







 

New Fabric for New Project

I don't know about you but the heat we've had this summer has made me not feel like doing too much of anything! I know we shouldn't complain, as it's the best summer we've had in years, and I'm not complaining - honest! :) I'm just saying it's made me feel a bit more lethargic than usual!

However, I have been doing some scrapping and the Smash book I bought at Ally Pally earlier in the year is getting nicely full with little mementos of the year. Not that we've done all that much but even small things, like going for a cup of tea and lunch at the adorable tea shop we found in Brighton is definitely something I like to record and pop in there.

I also finally got around to recording the story that surrounded a funny picture my husband had. It took me a while because I wasn't involved in the story so I needed to get it from him and him finding the time to sit down and tell me about it wasn't the easiest. But we got there eventually. I used this paper, because it was about a helicopter flight.

 

I jazzed up the heli itself with some diamond stickles and there's now a 4x6 photo in the bottom left corner with a few embellishments and a title. For the most part, the paper is covered in journaling as there was quite a long story to tell but it made the picture make sense and was really something I wanted to put in the album. I think it's important to try and include other people's days in your scrapbooks. Even if it means you have to really work at trying to get the story out of them, it's worth it in the end! :)

 

 

And sticking with the helicopter theme, I recently bought this fabric:

 

 

 

Hubby has asked me to make a cover for a mini tablet type thing and I knew about this fabric, so thought it would be fun to use. It comes in a blue colourway which was what I originally wanted, but unfortunately couldn't find any in the UK at the time, so I've gone with the cream background instead.

 

The project itself will be along the lines of the Kindle cover I made here, just slightly different in size. I'll post a picture when I'm done. It's a case of trying to find a time when he's not using the thing in order to measure it at the moment! Also, I have to admit, it's been a case of trying to finish the above layout and find my desk in order to be able to make space to sew.

 

It's going to be a bit of an adventure, because for those of you that follow this blog, you may remember that I got a new sewing machine last year. So far, I've sewn precisely two small things on it. One was a super quite felt cover for hubby's phone when he cycles and has to put it in his rucksack and the other was blind hemming a lined wool skirt from a suit my Mum had bought for herself that was longer than she wanted. That was my first project on the machine and I wish I'd kept going because my confidence has plummeted again now. I don't want to mess up this project so it'll be a case of fingers crossed!

 

Wish me luck and any tips would be much appreciated!