Settling In

A PCS (military move) is such a long process. Especially when you are moving from one side of the world to the other and buy a house. We left England April 22nd and moved into our house June 15th, it was another week before we got our household goods. We are getting settled in, most of our main floor has gone from drab like this

to warm and cozy like this.  This photo is an in progress as we still has a storage shipment that had not been delivered so be looking out for more updated photos.
It's nice to have color on our walls again after 4 years of renting.

My studio is set back up as much as it can be.  It's in our unfinished basement.  We hope to be able to finish it over the next couple of years.  Until then I'm working with what I have. 

I decided a few months ago to finally go with my heart and do clothing.  These next few dresses are the start of that.

I also have theses feather hair clips with flowers and button bling.  The dresses and hair clips are going with me to a craft fair tomorrow, the first one I have done stateside.  Hoping for some good weather and maybe a little lower temps as the heat we have had here in the Midwest has been very hard for us to acclimate too.

Keeping it Real

I've been MIA for a while, fall keeps me pretty busy.

First there was preparing for the big Bazaars the base here has every year. I needed to fill a 10x12 and 10x10 booth at each one. September was filled with sewing for the first Bazaar that ran the first weekend of October. That one went well and I sold out of a couple of bigger items so October and the fist part of November were spent sewing for the next bazaar in the middle of November. Add to that my husband had to go out of town for 6 weeks and I was a busy mamma.

Here are some pictures of my booth from the November bazaar.

And now the keeping it real part.  This is what happens to my sewing room when I spend the better part of 4 months being productive with my sewing machine.  This is actually after I had spent some time cleaning.

Pub Bench

When we moved into this house we bought a great OLD table and 8 chairs to go with it. We are still a small family but we love to have people over so a big kitchen/dinning table and lots of chairs are a must.

The chairs were old, some of them have started falling apart, one broke when I sat down on. Gorilla Glue has been one of our best friends but when you have glued the same joint 10 times in a month you start to think about getting something a bit more sturdy. We have only lost two of the chairs but we were still finding ourselves short on chairs. My solution was to find a church pew or pub bench to put along one side of our table.

I searched and searched, do you know how much antique church pews sell for??? Lets just say a little more than I had to spend. Then one day I was stalking browsing a site for local second hand sales and there it was a pub bench for about the price I was willing to pay. Justin was out of town at the time and so I had to send him e-mails asking him what he though.

Side note, I like to rearrange things in my house, my husband likes things to stay where they are/where. A purchase of a major piece of furniture means I need to explain to him what I want, why I want it, and how I'm going to fit it in our house. The last because well we are running out of room in this house and have no storage space. When he is gone, even for a day of work I usually send him a photo of what I have done so he isn't surprised when he gets home.

Back to the bench. This piece is great, at 7 feet long it will seat a lot of people for gatherings. Someday it will go in a pub themed man cave but for now it works in our kitchen.

This is the before, the fabirc is very pub like, not very child friendly this needs to change a little.

Fun cooking themed cotton and a vinyl table cloth will help that.

Looking forward to lots of gatherings around our table with plenty of seating.

We still plan to fix up the wood on it.  It will probably wait until we have a home with a garage though, or if we just happen to find a weekend with no rain and no plans to be out.

For those of you who are sitting on the edge of your seats to see more of my house (Hi Mom!), I bring you the living room.  I mentioned in my little rant about head boards that I'm not a fan of who long and narrow my living room is.  It's 18 foot something by 11 foot something, sounds like a decent sized room right?  Yes and no, lots of space but it's cut up kinda funny between the old fireplace, a stare case, and doors and windows it has taken some creativity to come up with something that I can sorta like.

Here is looking into the living room from the kitchen.  See those THICK walls?  The kitchen is the new part of the house, this is going into the old part of the house.  Want to hear some interesting facts about our house?  OK I'll tell you.

Right side of fire place

The old part of our house was originally two cottages, it's very hard to imagine living in a house that has two 18'X11' rooms and that's it.

Left side of fire place

At some point the two cottages were combined into one house, the old cottage part of our house is not a bad size.

Stair Case

At the time that our landlords acquired the property the cottage had sat empty for 10 years, they stripped it out re did it and added a large addition to it that makes up our kitchen and bedroom.

Play area

Doll house

More toys, and my tea trolley

Living room looking from my sewing room

I would really like to re-do the nooks on either side of the fireplace.  I want some color and/or pattern on the wall of the nooks.  I also want to get some IKEA expedite 2x2 shelves for storage (and to get the fish tank down to kid level) and then floating shelves above for books and decorations.  Would also help to make the area look symmetrical.

The drawers have Olivia's Littlest Pet Shop collection and a few of Erik's toys

Game Cabinet

These are suppose to have pictures of the kids from new born to one year, I have to rescue some photos from a dead laptop though.

And that is the living room.

Brighten Up Dreary Days

On my last trip to IKEA I randomly bought some pillow forms.  That's a problem with IKEA I buy a lot of random things, good thing I don't live closer.

I bought them and thought I could make cute covers for them, and then they got stuck in my studio, and buried, and almost forgotten about.  Then I remembered and an idea started to come into my head.  I had umbrella and rain drop fabric I had bought ages ago.  I don't even remember what I was going to make with them but I knew I could come up with a  very cute spring pillow with some of it.

Oh goodness did I really just type all that without showing a picture? Sorry about that.

I have been wanting to do a Union Jack project for a while, they are all over the gift shops here and I thought it would just be fun.

I used wonder under to fuse the ribbon and rick rack to the rain drop back ground.  Applique and piping are new for me.  I have no idea why I have not used piping before, it really adds a great touch to the fabric.

Perfect for sitting in the window seat and watching the rain fall.  Don't tell Olivia this is done, the whole time I was making this she was ready to claim it!  If I can sneak it into hiding it might just be a birthday present.

I designed my own sew in labels the other day.

I also got over my dislike of zippers, this one didn't fight me at all, but then I was not trying to hide it like I do on clothing.

Hand embroidery along the umbrella adds a special touch.  Now go out and do some puddle jumping!

I'm joining the Blogger's Pillow Party over at Stitched in Color, go on over and check out the other great pillows.

Corners of My Home

I started to do a home tour on my old blog ages ago so I'm sure that family out there will appreciate this post, mostly I'm just putting off folding laundry by playing with taking pictures and editing them honing my photography skills.  Our house is a pleasing mixture of old and new.  Part of it was originally two flint stone cottages, that is cottages built out of flint rock not built by the Flintstones I'm pretty sure it's not THAT old.  In recent years a modern addition has been added to the house to add a very nice sized kitchen bathroom and a room to use for whatever you like (a bedroom for us because the actual bedrooms in this house do not accommodate adult furniture).

Today I'm going to show you our entrance.  The layout of our house is interesting as there is no "front" door.  The house is a U shape around a large patio (or court yard if you want to sound fancy).  There is a proper entrance door along with two sets of french patio doors, we don't use the small door as it goes into my sewing studio.  The doors we use are the patio doors from the kitchen.

This is almost an entire wall of windows!  I love it, this kitchen has the best lighting on sunny days, not as good on dreary winter days like today but still brighter than the living room which is in the old part of the house.  I have done some changing here recently.  I had the curtains on rods and had them on all the windows and the birds of paradise plants were in the narrow windows.  I got tired of that, for one the curtains just created dust bunnies, for another I really wanted to be able to show off and use those tall narrow windows.  My fix was to buy a couple of shelves from IKEA, they fit perfectly.  If I ever remember to go pick up some potted herbs I will have them on these shelves, I have visions of green peeking out from these shelves and possibly even spilling out.

In theory this basket will keep things that I need to grab when going out the door, my coupon book is in there right now, along with a couple of packages that need to be mailed.

This is for my mom.  Mom just so you know there is no shortage of clocks in my house now, as long as you don't go to the kids rooms, but hey they can't tell time anyway.

I bought these birds of paradise plants the first summer we were here so three years ago.  I had wanted some for the longest time but could not bring myself to pay for a mature plant, they are lots of money and I was afraid I would kill one.  One day we were at Homebase, a chain here like Lowe's or Home Depot, and they had little ones on sale for what worked out to be about $4 each.  Score!  I could totally not feel guilty about killing a $4 plant unlike killing a $100 plant.  I got two of them and they are still alive, they love the light in this kitchen.

You can see the tall narrow window here.  Total sun trap in the summer, not so much in the winter.

Since we walk right into our kitchen and practically right on top of our dining table when we enter the house we have to find a way to corral all the coats and shoes. Around the corner down a small hall way we put this wardrobe. It's holding our shoes, hats,, gloves, scarves, etc.  Next to it we have a coat tree and next to that is a dog kennel that really has no good home.  I had a picture that showed more but I don't know what happened to it.

Hope you enjoyed!