When is a PHD not a PHD?

I’m not talking about the academic PhD here (aka Doctor of Philosophy). I’m talking about something I have a lot of experience with – my PHD refers to this:

Projects Half Done.

I have a lot of PHDs. I personally prefer PHDs to UFOs. As we know, a UFO is an Un-Finished Object. It’s a ‘glass half empty’ sort of description, don’t you think? I reckon we need to think more positively – be the ‘glass half full’ type of person. So from henceforth, my UFOs will no longer be UFOs. They will be PHDs.

So back to my question – when is a PHD not a PHD? When it is finished! Yay!!

Here is a PHD that has been sat on my desk for ages, waiting patiently for me to give it some love and attention. It is a zipaway tote – in Amy Butler fabrics.



The outer shell / base is Garden Maze in brown from Amy Butler’s Midwest Modern range. The body of the bag is Full Moon Polka Dot in Camel from Amy Butler’s Lotus range. The handles are a plain quilting cotton in brown.



I didn’t have quite enough of the Full Moon Polka Dot fabric for the facing so I used a strip of the Garden Maze.



I am off to tackle another PHD.
Have a great day, friends.

A family day out

Mr Crafty Ady and I took Dinoboy and Missy Moo to Stratford-Upon-Avon for the day. Stratford-Upon-Avon is famous for being the birthplace of William Shakespeare. It is also the home of the Stratford-Upon-Avon Butterfly Farm – our main destination on this trip.

We took the train from our local station and it was a quick 40-minute train ride to get to Stratford-Upon-Avon. The kids were very excited – a day trip out is always greatly anticipated and hugely enjoyed.



The Butterfly Farm is a huge greenhouse packed with lush greenery and a lot of butterflies! I didn’t anticipate it being quite so warm and humid – it reminded me of the Malaysian rainforest. We saw lots of gorgeous butterflies ....



Dinoboy made a new little friend who liked his shirt



And we saw even more butterflies ...



We had packed a picnic lunch and since the Butterfly Farm did not have a picnic area, we headed off to the riverside to find a picnic spot.



It was lovely and sunny (albeit with a few clouds here and there)



We did the tourist thing and went on a quick ride in one of the boats. The kids were delighted. The Royal Shakespeare Company Theatre was still having it’s facelift ...



The Butterfly Farm ticket gets you in as many times as you like during the day. Dinoboy wanted to head back there after lunch to see the butterflies one last time before we headed home. On our way back to the train station, we found Shakespeare’s house ...



Apparently his father, John, built it in 1556 and this is the house Shakespeare was born in.

We were pretty lucky with the weather. It didn’t start raining until we were very nearly home. Ooo - and I road-tested my fold-away shopping bag on this trip. It was stuffed with a camera, a change of clothes for Missy Moo (better safe than sorry), wet wipes, bottles of drink, small snacks, a magazine to entertain Missy Moo on the train in case she decided that looking out of the window was too boring and other small necessities. It coped very well and the wide handles made it comfortable to sling over my shoulder. I shall start working on my tutorial soon.

Hope your weekend is going great, friends.

The fold-away shopping bag project

I have been playing around with a pattern for a fold-away shopping bag. It has a gusset in the side like those plastic carrier bags you get at the supermarket which makes it a lovely roomy bag for carrying your groceries about it.

I used this lovely brown decorator-weight curtain fabric I had in my stash. The edges at the top of the bag are finished with bias binding and it has this little flap which closes the top up a bit.



It’s a good sturdy bag which folds up into this neat little pouch-like thing when you don’t need it. Cute, huh?



I used poppers set with my Pyrm Vario pliers. I wasn’t sure how much strain the fabric would take with these poppers in so I sewed small squares of fabric on the reverse sides to reinforce the closure points before setting my poppers in. I’m rethinking the closures and looking at other possibilities like self-cover buttons and an elastic loop or even sew-in poppers.



I’ll work out the wee issues I have with this bag before turning out a tutorial.

It’s the long August Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK with Monday 30 August being a bank holiday for us. A bank holiday is a public holiday and this one held on the last Monday in August is the last bank holiday before Christmas and the last one before the start of the school year. Local schools in my area will resume for the new academic year next week. Mr Crafty Ady and I are taking DinoBoy and Missy Moo on a day trip to the Butterfly Farm in Stratford-Upon-Avon tomorrow. DinoBoy has been before and he’s very excited. Missy Moo is very excited too and was loudly reciting the animals she hopes to see tomorrow (including giraffes, lions, elephants, tigers and snakes). She will be sorely disappointed as it is just a butterfly farm – so the only creatures we’ll see are butterflies, other bugs and arachnids.

Have a wonderful weekend, friends.

My creative space

I’ve been playing about with another fold-away shopping bag. I’m almost done with it ... just a lot of bias-binding to sew on now. This one has no zips but has poppers. I’ll show it to you when I am done. I’m probably going to make a tutorial for this as I have been taking some photos along the way.



Elsewhere in my space, UFOs lurk still and the granny shrug project is crawling along at a snail’s pace.

Find other lovely spaces here at Kootoyoo’s blog.

Wishing you a wonderfully creative day, friends.

Wordless Wednesday - all that's left of summer?

More green, anyone?

Following on from my green Malaysian baked pudding of sorts a couple of weeks ago, I decided I was going to try to make some more green edibles from my homeland. One of my friends actually made this for me last week (thanks Bee!) and introduced me to the recipe. This is Kueh Dadar – it is a pandan and coconut flavoured pancake filled with a sweet coconut mixture.



The recipe can be found here.

I substituted dessicated coconut for the grated coconut in the recipe. I also didn’t have any palm sugar (gula melaka) in my store cupboard. Instead I used dark brown soft sugar (I used this one).

I didn’t have fresh pandan / screwpine leaves so I used the same paste I used beforefor my Kueh Bakar. I think it worked out rather well. The crepes are made from a pancake batter made with coconut milk and pandan essence. There’s no sugar in the batter. The coconut filling was rich and sweet, making it the perfect filling for the fragrant crepes.



This is a surprisingly easy Malaysian kueh to make. And it is very yummy indeed.

Have a great week ahead friends.

A wonderful surprise from a faraway land

I recently started corresponding with a fellow blogger named Clair. Clair, who blogs at Tea & Bickies lives in Victoria, Australia. She is funny, talented (you totally need to see her anime quilt – it’s awesome!) and so very generous.

When I saw Clair’s anime quilt on her blog, I asked her about the anime fabrics she used and where she might have gotten them from. I was only familiar with Alexander Henry’s Thunder Flower fabric - having bought some last year. Clair said that she had been collecting them for years and some were out of print.

Clair asked for my snail mail address and said she’d pop a few small bits into the post for me. It’s been crazy busy at work of late and I had completely forgotten about Clair’s offer until the postman left me a card one day to say that he’d try to deliver a package whilst I was out at work and it would not fit through my postbox so please could I collect it from the local sorting office.

I picked it up on my way to work the next day and opened it as soon as I got back to my car. Clair’s ‘few pieces’ turned out to be almost a dozen amazing pieces of fabric, a few cute metal zip pulls and a gorgeous purple dragonfly keyring. I was so surprised, so very touched and astonished by the generosity of this amazing woman whom I have not met in person and had only corresponded by email with.

Here’s what she sent me:



How cute are those Betty Boop pieces?! And check out these lovely ladies – I’m going incorporate these two pieces into a tote bag for myself.



And here are the anime print fabric pieces Clair sent me.





There was a piece of the Thunder Flower fabric in blue in there too which I didn’t take a photo of. I haven’t the foggiest idea of what I am going to make from these gorgeous pieces of anime fabric – I might take my cue from Clair and make a quilt (albeit a mini one) out of them ... not sure yet.

One of the pieces Clair sent me was this one which has these cute illustrations with such funny quotes on them.



I am so thrilled with these pieces of fabric. It was such a wonderful surprise parcel to get in the post.

Thank you so much Clair. *Hugs*