Bags of Busyness

March is almost over, gone in a whirl of busyness, a good happy kind of busyness, it has felt shorter than February!  I thought, when I sat down to write this post that I had not done much creating and making this month, but as the list grew I realised there was plenty, it has been all about small projects.

My jumper has grown and I hope will be finished soon, after my last project I knitted for myself ended in failure I have been trying this on regularly to ensure it fits!  It is cool enough here to wear wool knits all year round and I chose this colour with that in mind, it will go with both my summer and winter wardrobes.  Just a few more rounds on this sleeve and the neck and hopefully a ta da moment soon.

I wanted to make 2016 the year I sewed something that I could wear, I have been talking about wanting to for the last couple of years.  I don't have a dedicated space for sewing, I am a nomad using which ever space is best for each project.  There is a lot of effort involved in getting everything out and putting it away, which I have to do each time I want to sew.  It has hindered larger projects as I always want to start and finish in one go.  I have made peace with the fact that that isn't going to happen and learnt to break down projects into bite sized chunks, the issue then is where to store the work in progress.  This is only the second time I have bought and followed a pattern, I usually just make up my own.  It is not quite finished yet, I just need to make some bias tape to go round the armholes.  I say just I have never made it myself before, I couldn't find any that matched.

I am entering birthday season here which is why I thought I had made little progress on projects.  Between the end of April and mid June we have 15 birthdays amongst family and friends for most of these I send a present. In the past I have tried to make them all but to give myself enough time I have to start in January which meant that with the Christmas makes I was spending nearly all year making presents a rather ridiculous state of affairs.  I make what I can sewing, rather than knitting, as that tends to be quicker.  I try and have a theme, so that they are all fairly similar which saves on thinking time!  This year it is all about games in bags.  I will reveal the contents of the grey bag at the top in a separate post, these colourful bags are for my twin nephews, a bag of beanbags, I shall be making two more this month for a friends children and one other for a June birthday.

We haven't marked Easter in our house before, inspired by my Advent project, I have started to build a project for us to do each year, stories, crafts, songs and poems.  We have been making use of our crafternoon time each week to make some small pieces for our seasonal table.  We now have two hares, a knitted chick and some decorated eggs hanging from the plant that also sits on the table, they have joined Mother Earth and her root children (who are replaced with flower fairies as they come into season), a snowdrop fairy and a sheep with her lamb.  I have wanted to decorate eggs for a number of years, I tried blowing eggs with disastrous results, the shells just kept breaking.  Then I chanced upon a new, to me, blog with the perfect answer, decorating polystyrene eggs with fabric, I have lots of scraps of fabric!  We wanted to hang ours up so I threaded a loop of cotton through the last piece of fabric we glued on.  These will keep for years to come, I hope!

My socks are still as they were last month and the balls of yarn are waiting in a bag, they will get some attention once the birthday season making is over, it is Alice's presents on the top of the list now.

Joining Jennifer for the last Winter Linky Party of the season.