When I visited the Knitting and Stitching Show on Thursday I just walked straight into the venue, but on Saturday it was much busier and the queue to get in snaked all the way back to the car park. Luckily it was a beautiful sunny morning and it provided an opportunity to talk to some lovely crafty ladies who were in the queue. Continue reading
So the London Knitting and Stitching show is over for another year. I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy going to this show and last week’s offering didn’t disappoint. The autumn show is held at Alexandra Palace, or Ally Pally as it is lovingly known. The venue is a short distance north of central London and, with it being up on a hill, it has a spectacular panoramic view of the city. It’s set in 196 acres of parkland, which every year I promise myself I will go and visit. I was lucky enough to be able to visit on two days this year, which meant I could take a more leisurely pace looking around everything.
View of London from Alexandra Palace
On one of the last sunny days of summer I visited the Museum of East Anglian Life in Stowmarket, Suffolk. I had visited once before and loved it because it’s full of local history, with lots of old buildings and open space to explore.
There’s a programme on the BBC called Money for Nothing. It’s about saving items that are about to be thrown away and instead turning them into something beautiful, functional and profitable by some of the UK’s finest craftspeople. I’d like to think that I’m pretty good at recycling, but since I started watching the programme I’ve really thought differently about what items I throw away and what items I might be able to repurpose. Perhaps it just satisfies my inherited desire to hoard things because ‘they may come in handy one day’.
We’ve had some beautiful weather in the UK this summer and during one such spell, I set to work clearing an area at the bottom of the garden, which had become a bit of a dumping ground for anything and everything. How I wish I’d taken some ‘before’ photographs so you could see what it was like. There were lots of terracotta and plastic plant pots, a dismantled concrete coal bunker, two old plastic dustbins, lots and lots of different types of stones, plants that had long since died and an old wooden, ahem, ‘chair’ that was covered in bin bags. Continue reading
My first attempt at making soap was not good. After attending a taster session held at a local college, I ended up spending a Saturday evening in A&E, followed by a trip to a specialist burns hospital and a visit to a plastic surgeon! Undeterred by this, I was still keen to make my own soap the ‘safe’ way, without using any of the nasty chemicals that can burn your skin.
It’s difficult to find the words to describe the awfulness of what happened at Manchester Arena last month. You feel so helpless in such a dreadful situation. So when I saw a request asking crafters to help fill Manchester with hearts, I knew that I wanted to get involved.
Last December I attended a Dementia Friends session. These free dementia awareness sessions, organised by the Alzheimer’s Society, teach you a little bit about what it’s like to live with the disease and what steps you can take to make your community more dementia friendly.
