Transition Leytonstone Recycled Craft Group

The second meeting of the Transition Leytonstone Recycled Craft Group at my house this afternoon, with 5 of us.

Roger is going to organise the Make Do and Mend event in September. Hurrah!

Four of us will meet at my place for a rag rug session.

I have volunteered to circulate information around my email contact list, but we will not be setting up a committee to run the group unless someone else volunteers for this task!

We will concentrate on the Make Do and Mend event and see what develops!

Sewing machine for curtain linings

I haven't had a working sewing machine for years, but I have two thermal curtain linings to turn in at the sides, hem, and sewing tape onto which would take ages and ages of TV-watching to get sewn. I also need to clear up. I have a meeting in the dining room on 4 June, the boiler being replaced in the bedroom on 7 & 8 June, and the wood burning stove being checked and the chimney swept in the sitting room on the 7 June. Two curtains and two thermal linings are taking a lot of room on the spare room bed which I need for stuff from the bedroom so the plumber can move!

So today I bought a small (fuchsia-coloured!) sewing machine for £59 from John Lewis.

I only trimmed the late summer canes of the autumn raspberries to get an early crop, and picked my first this morning!

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Thermal lined curtains and the worm and the caterpillar

I replaced my old door with a solid wood one. I wish I hadn't. The panels have split leaving space you can see daylight through! My handyman said he could fill the gaps, but it could be as little as a fortnight before the wood moves and I have the same problem.

So delighted when Transition Leytonstone put on a workshop for putting thermal linings in curtains. This afternoon I made a separate lining (that you hook on to the curtain). As the old curtain I use as a door curtain had only a thing strip allowing only one row of hooks, I have started putting curtain tape on that.

We were using old hand sewing machines that Roger from Forest Recycling Project renovates. It reminded me of my childhood where when my mother was sewing sheets sides to middle,  I would be turning the handle while my mother guided the sheets.

I also brought blackout, thermal linings for the spare bedroom curtains.

This morning when I emptied an old pot into a raised bed so I could fill it with fresh soil and plant a tomato in it. I found it the soil a worm in a knot. I carefully untangled it and put it on some damp soil. It was very flabby so I hope it had enough strength the feed.

I told this story to Jan Ashford who was leading the curtain lining workshop. She said she once had some empty window boxes on her windowsill fill with water. She found a little caterpillar marooned in the window box, so she rescued it to put it on the nearest plant, a russian vine. The little thing was so hungry it started eating before it left her finger!

Transition Leytonstone Craft Group & tomato seedlings

There were 8 of us in my dining room on Sunday afternoon for an exploratory meeting on setting up a Transition Leytonstone Recycled Craft Group.  One person didn't show up and one person had warned me she might not have been able to make it after a lunch-time meeting in Hackney (and with two main routes blocked locally and the diversion routes full of traffic as a result, even if she had finished her meeting on time, the bus journey likely to have taken ages!). So, instead of a few of us around the dining room table as planned, I had folded the table down and put out an oval of chairs gathered from around the house and out of the conservatory.

We are still feeling our way about we should/can/have the time and energy to do, but we have supported another "Make do and mend" event in September and are thinking of compiling a recycled craft directory for E11. Not sure this will work, but nothing ventured nothing gained. I will be hosting a second meeting at the beginning of June.

It was nice using some of the china I have collected over the years from charity shops and bric a brac shops.  Normally I have only one or two visitors at a time and they just get handed their tea and coffee in the kitchen mugs, and my mother gets the same, very pretty, pink rose tea cup each time she comes because it's nice and large and she likes her tea and doesn't like it in mugs.

My tomato seeds on my office window ledge have germinated and I have 10 seedlings so far.

E11 Crafty Knitters and perpetual diary

We have stopped the craft group at work.  There were 8 of us, but often only Sarah and I were there, and it was only the two of us the last 3 weeks, so we decided it would be best if the group didn't continue.

Luckily a local knitting group - E11 Crafty Knitters - which meets at a Salvation Army Hall on Tuesday afternoons and a local vegetarian cafe on Thursday afternoons has just started to meet at a cafe on the last Monday of the month in the evening.  I went along and it was very good - the sort of group where I don't feel self conscious that I don't knit very well even though everyone there is far better at it than I am; and everyone friendly. Margaret, who lives opposite a friend of mine, was there and she's a great character.

Some of the group are knitting plants for a knitted installation of a garden, which is going to be exhibited in Bournemouth shortly.  Margaret is knitting a tree trunk on her knitting machine, and Carol brought some chrysants she had make, a knitted cup as the base of something like a tassel which is then brushed.

I will miss the March group as my herbalist is starting a herbal tea course and I will be at that, but I hope to be at the April meeting.

I have a perpetual diary I made (a blank book with over 366 pages so I can have a page for each day). I then put in seasonal things, like the first daffodil in the garden, my first home grown tomato, etc, and some weather notes.  So I know that on 28 February 2006 it snowed and on the 4 March 2006 I was kayaking through thin ice above Tottenham Lock. Today was wet, but much colder than yesterday afternoon.

Craft Group

The email has gone out!  I am having an exploratory meeting with the idea of setting up a Transition Leystonstone (recyled) craft group.  I'd got the house reasonable for Christmas/New Year but now will have to get it sorted again in time for this meeting.  It's at the end of March, but already thinking about bits of housework, "I won't do that now, I'll only have to do it again before the craft meeting."
I hope I get enough people to make it interesting and not too many to fit into the room!

Craft Group

Last year we started a craft group at work.  It meets once a week alternately on Wednesdays and Tuesdays (as two people work with us part time).  There are 7 of us, but with holidays, committee meetings, meetings out of the office, forgetting to bring stuff, it is sometimes only 2 of us and rarely more than 3. This is a shame as it is much more fun when there is a little group of us.

I am knitting a bolero. I have a velvet bolero as my "patrtern" and am knitting rectangles and triangles to sew together.  I am using mohair wool I got from a charity shop.  It is two stranded - a green mohair and a black thread with pink and blue bits everynow and then. This is impossible to knit with and not knit twice into the same stitch by accident, so as I knit I am winding away the thread bit.  This presumably was why the wool was given to the charity shop in the first place!