Room for improvement: reversible bedroom cushions

I'm starting a new occasional series on the blog today. It's called 'Home Improvement'. What is it and why?

• Our house is in a permanent state of un-finished-ness (yes I know that's not a word!) I want to feel it's done. I want to feel proud of it.
• We never have time to decorate, and we certainly never have the money. I want to move it up our priority list, and this series will act as a motivator. I want to be more creative with what we have and where we source things.
• I love to make and to sew and I do it for my job, but I would love an excuse to sew more for our home. I want to have at least one thing I've made in every room.

I plan to tackle one room at a time, and give myself (or, let's be honest, ourselves, since I'll be roping my husband in) one month for each room. They won't always be completely finished by then (far from it), but they can certainly be improved. Hence, Room for improvement.

I'm starting properly with August in our youngest's bedroom. But until then, I've dipped my toe in the water with some new cushions for our bedroom. I love these prints and didn't want to sew and give them away. And I needed to time myself making cushions. So they became a sneaky project just for me!

Sewing just for me! Yes, it's both my husband's and my bedroom but he would never say "Do you know, we really need some cushions," so it was definitely a selfish project. I was inspired by Things for Boys' #selfishswap and though the deadline was the end of June, I haven't got around to photographing and blogging these until now.

What do you think? The good news, or the bad news depending on how you look at it, is that I'm inspired to sew a whole load more for our room.

For those who are interested, I recovered the chair in Raindrop Poppies Bronze from Anna Maria Horner's Field Study line and blogged about it here. I made the cushions mostly using fabric from The Village Haberdashery, one of my most favourite online fabric stores. The fabrics, top to bottom (in the picture below) are... well I shouldn't have said top to bottom as I can't remember the first one! But I really love those Arabic-looking trees, so do tell me if you know. After that, it's Lizzie House's Pearl Bracelets in cosmonaut, Hothouse Flowers Seeds in pink, and Michael Miller's Brambleberry Ridge Flight in gold & white.

Days out with the kids: West Green House Gardens in Hampshire

Let me pique your interest with these beauties...

Come for a walk with me. We're going to West Green House Gardens in Hampshire, a third of the way down the M3...

We'll potter along formal garden paths, boxed by hedges and planted with such an array of beauty that your heart will sing, while your children run around excitedly playing hide & seek...

We'll explore woodland paths too, tickled by ferns and sheltered by boughs laden with all the shades of emerald...

We'll find nooks and outdoor rooms, and every now and then a peek at the house we wished we lived in, the chicken coop that is fancier than any we've ever seen, the statues that surprise us...

And if we're there in spring time, the blossom, oh the blossom. And for tulip lovers (like us), every shade, every form, every delight we could imagine. The children will hop over the channels of water while we soak it all in...

We'll take note of the colours we see, the flowers we love, and vow to take our mothers one day, who would love it so much...

We will show the children the flowers they can smell, the insects buzzing around in spoilt gluttony, let them run down the paths and play hide & seek some more...

And every corner we turn will bring us a fresh view of elegance, of artistry, of wonder. We'll imagine sitting by that fountain in the thirties, cocktail in hand, band playing in the distance. Or pushing open those formerly unlocked gates and strolling, Victorian dress swishing around our ankles, with someone we hope likes us back...

Our families will rest by the lake, searching the depths for signs of fish, watching the ripples as they dance away, looking at their reflections...

If we're there in early spring, the magnolias will be out in all their gravity-defying beauty. We will muse on their bold promise of warmth and daylight to come...

We'll grab an ice cream from the cafe, or sit at one of the pretty little tables, adorned with little pots of flowers, and drink coffee from a filter or tea from a teapot - served as it should be, - drunk with birdsong in the air...

If we're there with our husband, we'll hold hands and talk about life and our plans, delight in our children as they play, and think how lucky we are, and how many blessings we can count...

If we're there with our friends, we'll note the hellebores and bluebells hidden in the flower beds, plan our own gardens, tell each other of how our lives are changing and blossoming too...

Perhaps we'll be lucky enough to be local enough to visit again. Perhaps we'll plan trips to the opera there, staged in the summer, or the garden parties with strings. Perhaps though, like my family and I, we'll know that the chances of us ever passing by again are so very small, and instead we'll take photographs, breathe it all in, and then write a little about it to tell you that if you can't come with us, go with your own loved ones instead. It is heavenly.

On winning, instagram, and the pursuit of popularity

I resisted Instagram for several years but, in an attempt to get better at mobile photography, I started using it last summer. I'm such a convert. The photo (below) I took of my Thursday Breaktime  won a spot in Little Maldod's #mythursdaybreaktime roundup a fortnight ago. And I like to think I'm the sort of person unaffected by popularity or awards of any sort, but it turns out I am. It put a skip in my little heart that day.

I also published this picture of our winning May Queen window on Instagram. Our village has the longest lasting uninterrupted May Queen procession in the country (since 1928), and each year we enter the 'best dressed residential window' competition. Last year's won second prize, which was nice but didn't seem to affect me. This year's, on a space theme and featuring my sewn star garlands and the boys' homemade rockets, alien pictures and various space toys, won first prize. And again, to my surprise, I felt a swagger in my step. As a child I needed validation and as an adult I once turned my nose up against it. But it turns out that need is still there.

I'm working on some cushion covers for a competition, and it's my opportunity -although through random chance - to give someone else the feeling of winning. But I know, deep within, that it's also designed to validate me too - exposure, the number of people entering, eyeballs on this blog or my business site - all these things will be totted up in my head. Is this a bad thing? I'm not sure it is. As a writer, lovely though it is to write just for yourself, you have a symbiotic relationship with your reader. Can you really be a writer without a reader, or are you just a literary version of Schrodinger's cat? And as someone who sews for business, I do not exist without customers, and satisfied ones at that. I think it's possible to seek validation without decrying it as vanity, because it's an independent judgment of the value of your work, of the strength of the effort you've gone to and the result you've toiled for. And I can't deny that on a very basic human level, hearing someone else tell you that what you're doing is good, lovely, liked - or whatever - feels good.

And I originally planned this post as a quick one to let you know I can't actually take any photos at the moment as my phone's broken!

'Bringing colour into your life or, 'Cheering up a dreary May'

Either title to this post could do really. As I write this...

• Almost every day in May so far has required jumpers and raincoats. I have only legitimately worn sunglasses once, other than when we decamped to Southwold for the weekend.
• No ice lollies or ice creams have been ingested. No hosepipes have been played with or even - distant memories - banned. The water pistols lay idle and dirty from a winter on the ground.
• There have been no weekend trips to farms, gardens or up hills. Weekends have faded away in errands and to-do lists, and quiet moments with the paper (yes, our kids are old enough to do that now!) while rain tickles the outside of our windows like reminders from the transgressive imp that is winter. 'Yes, I'm still here' it says. We don't bother to tell it to go away any more. It never listens.
• And today, the one day with no rain and a touch of warmth in the fleeting moments of blue sky, we've been mostly holed up indoors while the youngest fights, and loses, a battle with a nasty bug that has seen repeated sickness in the night, and wearing a wooly hat indoors when the shivers set in. He's such a listless little love, and my heart aches for him.

So I'm bringing a little colour back. Every bright and brash piece of clothing will be getting an airing. If it pairs with another for a greater slap of colour, then great. Yes, I will be wearing that tomato red sweater with that fushia top and, no, it's not warm enough for just one or the other.

And everything we do will have a crashing of colour in it too. Rainbow brights for thank you letters (that's the Tiny One making a sliver of an appearance down there, in his happier, healthier days). Every vibrancy we can find in the vegetable kingdom to grace our plates. Fabrics sewn together to make wild coloured cushions. Flowers gathered from the wayside to make they gayest, most carefree of posies. Yes, I'm saying yah boo sucks to this damp squib of a May.

Arranging by colour : a rainbow to counter Blue Monday

Today is supposedly Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year. Depressing? Bah humbug.

I have a solution! Now that's a bit of an exaggeration. You can't fix your life by organising by rainbow colour order can you? But you can brighten it. And if you can bring together order and conformity on the one hand with expression and creativity on the other, so much the better. So I removed all the books in our bookcase (arranged by genre and in height order because I am a card-carrying very-slight-little-bit-obsessive-compulsive-in-a-creative-organised-not-turn-the-lightbulb-on-and-off-thirty-six-times-kind-of-way. And then I took said books, and put them back in said bookcase, in rainbow colour order. And suddenly life was better. Organised but bright and cheery.

And because I was also in a bit of a clothing funk, I did the same with my wardrobe. Oh how I wish I could get you a picture to show the bright shiny goodness of a wardrobe arranged by rainbow colour order, but my wardrobe is next to my bedroom window, in the shadiest part of my bedroom, batting the light back even more with a wardrobe door that opens across the window. So this grainy picture will have to do. Or I could use a flash. But apparently that would be the photography equivalent of taking a vegan wholefoods food blogger into a McDonalds for dinner.

So here's a collage of close-up and less close-up bookshelf pictures instead. You can't see a whole other shelf at the top full of white books and another shelf at the bottom full of black. But you can maybe read a few of my books and play spot-the-book-I-have-too with it. If your life is really exciting just like mine.

I saw an actual rainbow in a snow cloud over the weekend but my phone wouldn't work in the below freezing temperatures. No matter: I get a rainbow every morning in my bedroom and every time I walk through my hallway. Yah boo sucks Blue Monday.