yellow fever treasury

listening to a splendid early R&B spotify playlist compiled by m while drinking tea and making an etsy treasury. i love yellow and all these things...

topsy & tim

i bought this book in a charity shop for 20p. it's a classic! love the original topsy and tim much more than the updated versions. jumble sales obviously don't feature much in the 21st century childhood as this book is now out of print. boo.

o-o is round at his friend o's house having a play. i really must crack on with painting the front door. 

bowl cuts

at last! big chubby raindrops are falling and blitz and donner have arrived. i may be risking life and limb typing this, hopefully will not be incinerated by ball lightning coming through the computer screen. we've been all hot and bothered the last few days, the blood of the vikings makes us ill-suited to hot weather. yesterday poor o-o woke up early from his nap in a sweaty grump so he sat on the sofa with a melting mini milk ice lolly and watched mr benn.

then i gave him a haircut with an on trend short (and slightly asymmetric) fringe. here's some bowl-cut inspiration, me and my cousins in the early '80s. i may have to crush little frank, he has exceeded all reasonable levels of cuteness.

have added some monkey slides to the vintage shop.

vintage treasures

the dusty church hall, the piles of stuff on rickety tables, the being forced to breathe through your mouth because of the stinksomeness of some of your fellow shoppers, nothing beats a jumble, few better ways to spend a saturday morning. moseyed up to the car boot on sunday so it was a weekend of junk shopping. returned from both laden with treasures (sneak preview above; assorted dice, slides, two aprons, butter knives, an amazing swimming cap adorned with plastic flowers, book about norway with excellent photos, cosy real wool coral coloured blanket, wooden easels, seersucker tablecloth of many colours, yellow raincoat in my size (HURRAH! eases the pain of this not fitting) with co-ordinating waders, folkloric lidded pot for the housekeeping money and cute wooden box containing a mysterious mechanical device amongst other things) some of which will be listed in the sianuskavintage shop soon.

and and and... some tiddler sized birkenstocks, dennis the menace hand knit jumper and posh linen trousers for o-o.

m made a delicious jamaican ginger cake from this book, perfect with a cuppa. we all enjoyed having my sweet sister here for a few days. everything in the garden is lovely.

sketchbook monday

cosy tea time

well polyvore could prove quite addictive... 
even in june my thoughts turn to having a lovely cosy tea time. wouldn't it be lovely to cwtch up here? i'm off to a jumble sale tomorrow, hopefully i'll find some treasures. have a super weekend. x

babies must wear wool

o-o wears a lot of hand-knitted clothes, he has several pairs of woolly trousers. it is my view that babies should wear hand knitted, woolly clothes as much as possible. cosy, stretchy and one-of-a-kind, so lovely. i made some orange trousers when i was pregnant using the instructions in this book by elizabeth zimmermann. here's tiddler o-o wearing them whilst doing a spot of radish leaf ripping (please excuse the depressing, student house carpet, it has since been removed). circular needles, they're the future. there are instructions in the book for adult sized knitted leggings, i would dearly love to knit m a pair but alas, i am slow of needle and it would take me the rest of my natural lifetime to make them.

i've spent the last hour trying to put up our 'hang it all' (ish, bought on ebay for £30, not the real thing) coat racks. i've given up; our house is made of some kind of crumbly substance similar to wensleydale cheese, the wall is now pock marked with many holes of varying sizes, none of which will accept a rawl plug. harumph!

animal husbandry

i know we're up early when i find myself listening to farming today on radio 4. o-o has been busying himself with some early morning animal husbandry.

clogs

o-o has been clomping in his new clogs. i love. 

ghostsign

i've walked past this painted advert many times and always thought how lovely it is. never actually had a camera with me to record it until last week. thought i'd better take a photo before some eejit paints over it. love the layers and the different typefaces and the word CHOPS. such a skilled trade, hats off to the signwriters of old. makes me a bit sad that now it's all about internet pop ups and horrible typefaces and shiny temporary mega adverts. boo.

i like the word ghostsigns and the fact that people care about recording and preserving this kind of advertising ephemera. lots more examples and information here.

sketchbook monday

i've been keeping a sketchbook for ages now. you should start one, i heartily recommend it. anyways, mine are all on a shelf in my tiny print studio, i use seawhite landscape A5 ones. every now and again i take one down and have a flick through. i thought i might make it a regular montag thing to share a sketchbook spread with you. so here's the first one (technophobes, double click on the image to make it bigger)...

o-o has been in a grump all morning. maybe his teeth are giving him gyp? he's got some mini canines a-comin though. just bought him this necklace, hopefully it'll do him the power of good. also, this is a good idea for a smaller tiddler. 

amber teething necklace from amberforsale

a cosy corner

cwtch is a welsh word that means something like 'safe place'. i've always loved cwtching up and now, in this cosy corner of t'internet i invite you all for a cyber cwtch, grab yourselves a nice warm blanket and a brew and have a read.


here i am (in the pink t-shirt, all serious like) in the mid 1980s with my siblings & our neighbours outside our tea crate make-shift home. that summer there was a glut of fruit on the big pear tree at the end of the garden. velour kids clothes, extreme blunt fringes and cloudless skies, those were shirley hughes days!

den in the garden with the pooles

this playhouse is much more deluxe, i love it but there was always something so nice about constructing your own without any grown ups bossing you about. here are some nice houses.

house blanket by donna wilson	cardboard playhouse
theoakleaves on etsy	spreadthelove on etsy

seems you never grow out of den building. hurray.