a dose of kitchenalia

 I've got a healthy dose of enamel, glass and - finally!- wicker in this bundle.

I'm sure I've seen these enamel napkin rings before on somebody else's blog - aren't they the epitome of shabby chic? They are charming but also fairly useless in our home; we don't usually throw dinner parties, and the only person we entertain at the moment is the baby. So they will just decorate a shelf for now.

More practical finds are the blue enamel Hackman wok and the yellow Finel bowl. The latter is rather precious, so actually it won't be used in the kitchen much. At the minute it's holding soft yarn for a little knitting project I'm doing.

I couldn't quite believe it when I came across yet another jadeite bowl, and what more, it had a little Fire King two tone bowl with a gilded rim nestling in it! Fire King might be a bit like buses - for a while nothing, then two comes in the same time.

For absolute ages I have been after a proper good wicker basket. Finally, I snagged one that was not overpriced, is not broken and is clean and sturdy. Its weave and shape takes me right back to my grandma's and the summer holidays we spent there as kids - she had a basket just like this one, carrying home in it fresh groceries and a few small pots of strawberry ice cream for us.

And to top off the post, I cannot resist including a couple of representatives from a large bag of little plastic figures we picked up for a coin or two. Can you get more domestic idyll than a farmer's wife feeding a goose?

lightspeed

February whizzed past at such a speed, I constantly felt like chasing my own tail. Finally we have a routine (yay!), daytime and nighttime are in place for everyone. The only downside to such strict(ish) schedule is that sticking to repeating activities more or less on the dot makes the days go way too fast.

There have also been many visits to doctors and injections and stuff, and a lot of clinging and crying. All a bit stressful, but a lot of time spent closely together. To make things a bit lighter we tried to squeeze in as many nice walks and snuggly singsongs as it was possible.

So, making and thrifting-wise I didn't get much done. I managed to embroider baby's initials into one of his blankets that I made for him last year, and framed a nice card that we got from a friend when he was born. Seriously, finding time to put a greeting card in a frame and hitting a nail into the wall above the nappy changing table counts as creativity, in a month spent with must-attend-to tasks.

Cannot wait for the weather to get warmer, and for baby to be able to do a bit more, like sitting up and such. Being stuck in a small apartment with a bored five months old is not as much fun as rolling around on the grass in the sunny park where there is a little zoo and various playgrounds suitable for all sorts of ages. (Have I just said all that? Sometimes it still feels very new and a bit strange to be this mommy character, head preoccupied with mommy concerns...it's hard to remember what I was like before the mother angle took over.)

Luckily the snow is melting so at least spring is easier to remember now. And the sunny days carry on - sunshine, such a bliss!

once upon a shadow

Love the sunny days of this ice-crusted February.

Taking a picture of our shadow on the wall reminded me of another picture I took about a year ago, in this post. Back then there wasn't yet a little shadow attached to mine like now.

I hope you guys are having sunny days too!

a towel and a top

Let's squeeze in a thrifty post before January finally comes to an end - January always goes on forever, doesn't it?

It's all rainy and grey again, and shivering cold... But hey, look at this bright old towel I found down at our local Red Cross store. I don't normally buy hygiene products second hand but got to love this 60s or 70s beach towel! Can't wait to set it down on the sand and sit by the sea in the summer (which is four long months away still...boohoo).



The second patterned find is almost as cheery in black because it has cute little smiling cars on it. And it's made in terry towelling fabric too, just like the beach towel. It's by Tutta, and it's my second such find for baby - do you recall the chicken romper?

this little dinosaur...

This little dino has been an unfinished project for over a year. (He is also the newest member of a line of small felt animal characters that I started making years ago, just for fun, but I'll tell you about that more another time.)

This month's blog theme of 'Pattern' was the perfect motivation for me to pick up this little guy and finally draft the completing pattern piece for his feet.

Because I make up the structure of these creatures in felt as I sew, it doesn't always work out right straight away. With Mr Dino, I ran into a bit of a puzzle near the finishing line about the foot bit. He got put away in the sewing cupboard for further consideration, and then forgotten.

Now remembered, I figured out his feet and stitched him finished too, with bigger arms and blue eyes. He is finally able to join a small felt moose (the other creatures were gifted to a friend's kids) to wait for this little boy sleeping here in his bouncer to grow a bit more and play with them when he's older.

our baby-shaped universe

Our universe has been totally reshaped by this little guy in the last 4 and a half months. It's a huge change, having a tiny tyrant living with us. I say tyrant jokingly of course but it's also very true - he is the boss, and he makes us work around the clock.

He himself is changing all the time as he is growing and developing. There is a new thing he does pretty much every second or third day, and he looks slightly different every week... I swear sometimes he visibly grows a centimeter overnight. The best thing is that amidst of all these fast changes we are greeted by the same sweet smile each morning, without which I cannot imagine our lives now.

It's a joy to see him thrive and discover the world he landed in bit by bit, a new thing each day. He is very vocal about his wants and needs. He sings and chats a lot too, in his own little baby way of course.

He seems to like my songs and my singing as well, which somehow miraculously flow out of me in key - who knew I even had a singing voice? Old nursery rhymes and songs I used to hear as a kid emerge out of the recesses of my memory. It surprises me every time how fluently I recall lyrics and melodies I never thought I knew.

He is transfixed by music, and things that make a noise - the crinkly plastic in fabric books, clicking fingers, the instruments daddy has around the home, his pull-down musical toys. We tried the ripping of paper trick on him, he laughed a bit at it but not as much as this little girl.

He started playing on his tummy only recently so now he has a new angle on his collection of rattles. By the way, the crinkly fabric star in the second picture is made by the clever Steph of Mini Matriarchin.

snow white

A fresh, thick blanket of white, crunchy snow and temperatures around the -10C mark is my favourite type of winter weather. When not enjoying it from the warmth of our indoors, I like wrapping up warm in my favourite winter woollens and go breathe the crisp air outside. The way snow makes the otherwise bleak, dingy landscape brighter and muffles the city noise is something I think everybody misses when it all melts away.

A week ago or so we've had heaps of it, and I went for a couple of longish walks pushing the pram around, mainly on efficiently cleared and gritted pavements but then sometimes through unspoilt patches of thick snow. Call me mad but it was a lot of fun. The little man in the pram slept soundly, bundled in his many layers, which was also nice. A few days later, seeing a snowman in the slowly melting park made me look forward to next year when our little pram-dweller will be able to enjoy a snowy winter more.

dishy patterns

Not so long ago I found an enamel bowl with a loooovely sprayed-on pattern (remember?) to join my much plainer vintage-enamel-on-a-shoestring collection. There's a new, similar addition to report!

A smaller enamel bowl, with delicious colours in my opinion, and a funny pattern - a band of lace in minty green topped by autumn leaves in orangy tomato reds. It's such an odd combo yet somehow quite charming in a quirky way.

It's made by Bumper Harvest, just like the other one.

Nice vintage Pyrex in decent condition and with a new-to-me pattern is always a highlight of any thrifty outing - I'm sure I've already said that before somewhere around here. The vintage Pyrex gods were gracious again and I bagged this perfect one. My go-to site on Pyrex lists this as a mystery pattern from '74.

halfway

Halfway through the last month of the year, actually more than... This year has come and almost gone in a blink of an eye, don't you agree?

Gearing up to Christmas now, we are still thinking whether to get a real tree or buy a good quality fake one that we could pull out each year. Either way, it will be a special tree, although probably a sparse one. Special because of our little one, and sparse because we don't have that many decorations. But now it will make sense to begin collecting baubles for our very own family spruce, be it real or faux. I'm imagining adding something nice each year, thrifted or maybe shop bought if really nice. (The other day I fell for a special porcelain snowflake, to mark baby's first Christmas - I'm amazed how having a child is turning me into more of a consumer... a conscious one I hope.)

Got those wooden trees in the picture above from the thrifts, along with some colourful wooden blocks. They now make lonely little thrifted plastic deer a little forest to frolic in, on top of the sewing machine. It's hard to find a spot in this apartment with good lighting this time of the year...The postcard was sent by a relative, the design is really lovely.

Winter has been really warm so far - there were some days when it felt like springtime. Luckily we sleep in the night and are awake in the daytime now, so enjoyed some nice walks, mitts and sunglasses and all.

How is your December? Have you got your tree yet? Do you have snow?

night time living

Baby is boss. He seems to still live in womb-time, sleeping long hours during the day then being much more awake and demanding during the night. So we live just like that; resting in the day when he does, all activity saved for later when normal people go to bed.

Our 'morning' starts at 5pm at the moment... just in time to put a wash on or hoover, go to the shop, cook. It's winter, which is dark and quite boring anyway - kind of like the desaturated pictures. The colours don't come out right in the available light, for long months.

Hopefully the sleep pattern will move towards normality by spring - that'd be perfect actually. The only worrying thing about the vampire rhythm is that our houseplants are wilting - they don't really get any daylight. For me, the blogger, not a lot of chances to capture things in nice crisp images either.

I've been doing a lot of pondering about the blog; being awake at night seems to still inspire my creative juices... I will share in another post about my ideas and plans. I'm excited about them. I think - I hope - they will revive things around here a bit. Until then, here we are: the ones who get sleepy at dawn because they've been partying (feasting on milk, filling nappies and being cute) all night.

dreaming of sleep

We dream of more sleep while we catch those few winks in the morning hours...

Our little boy seems to have forgotten how to sleep like the proverbial baby. He just blinks heavy eyelids unendingly or stares tiredly forever from over my shoulder while I try to sway him off towards the luscious fields of snooze in a slow dance in the dark bedroom.

The other day he was so utterly cranky from exhaustion that the only thing left to do was to go for a ride in the buggy. So we trundled through the deserted streets in town at night - baby finally snoring, and mommy carting him, putting one tired foot in front of the other for two whole hours. It was the last time we did that - with the weather soon to turn this place into Narnia and the town being so quiet and abandoned after 9pm I'd need a big old snowsuit with pepper spray in both pockets...

Since that dingy outing we figured something out after all - we've parked the pram in the bedroom and our little boy sleeps there nicely to the soothing shhhh sound of a detuned radio. As a friend said recently: whatever works...

chatty

I had a thought the other day while baby was happily cooing to the Monstera and I had a rare moment to myself (which I spent slurping a hot cup of tea and fixed the fastenings on a tiny top). I thought that my chatty rambling style of blog writing might have to change in order to fit blogging into our busy days.

I'll try pruning down tangents and meandering words to make time to keep a little buzz on the blog. I guess the how-it-will-be outlined in this post best be excused and forgotten... The same way I had no idea what my life will be like when baby is here I have no idea what Idle Needle will be like written by a baby-wearing, breastfeeding, sleep-deprived new mom - but I'll endeavour to find out!

PS. It snowed last night!

one handed finds

Browsing amongst narrow shelves in a shop trying to spot thrifty gems with one eye and keeping the other eye on a - is he still asleep? - baby in the pram is an acquired skill. So is taking pictures with one hand with a cameraphone while the other hand is holding a suckling baby on the breast.

As I've found out by now, both can be learned, and moreover, can yield good results as the above (one-handedly captured) picture shows. Let me elaborate them then:

The first find my one free hand picked off the thrifty shelves is the little brother of this fat lava vase already in my possession. It's made by Strehla, and as usual it was a steal at a euro.

My enamel collection also received a nice new member - it's in perfect nick although I need to find the time to scrub it clean from the more stubborn stains...it looks like the previous owners were baking in it.

Our 'thumb mug' collection has also been extended - this chunky pair in a super 70's glaze are our new favourites.

And lastly, a board book entitled How the car works. When I spotted it on the shelf among the other used baby books I had a giggle to myself: a book for under-3's about petrol, combustion engines and pistons...? Then I thought why not, it's quirky and I don't really know myself how the car works.

Besides, this board book is unchewed and free of saliva stains or rusk crumbs. Actually it looks unread and the illustrations are gorgeous. I'm sure Jeremy Clarkson would pat me on the back for this purchase for a seven weeks old baby boy.

I'm patting myself on the back right now for typing this post to completion with one hand - while baby is sleeping so nicely in my arm held by the other.

I have plans to go out today to do the grocery shopping and I might pop in to the thrift shop briefly - if baby is happy about it too.

See you next time!

cuddling season

Autumn, autumn, how much I love thee... the blazing reds, yellows and rust against the blue of the sky. The fog in early mornings. That nip in the daytime air, which tingles my fingers to knit something warm and cosy.

Despite the carpet of colourful fallen leaves beckoning for a walk on the pavement below our balcony, we are doing a lot of cuddling indoors. We spend all our time with breastfeeding, sleeping and some baby wearing - just for half hour or so; the c-section scar mustn't get too strained...

The other day daddy went and bought the coolest pram from the secondhand shop that our money could buy. So now we can go outside for a spin to enjoy the weather and kick some autumn leaves covering the path.

It's quite unbelievable that baby turned 1 month old yesterday... time does go fast. It's lovely to spend all this time together, just us three - baby, daddy and mummy - cuddling and getting to know the little one and learning how life is going to be from now on.

Thank you for all your well-wishes and congratulations! We are so very lucky to have this many friends and that he is loved and welcomed by so many people.

Hope your October is being as lovely and cosy as ours!