So far, so good!

See, not even a week later, and here is my second post of the year. The Stashbusting Sewalong was so popular last year that it is running again for 2014. My pledge this year is to make at least 2-3 items out of stash every month.  As soon as I have wrapped my head around it I will update the button on the right of the screen. All the stashbusting group action is taking place on facebook, but I will also be blogging about the (hopefully) interesting stuff here too.

There are themes for each month again, but the emphasis is on stash busting rather following the themes if they don’t fit. For example this month’s theme is “Itty Bitty Scraps”, but my two January makes have used up about 2 1/2 metres each!

First up this year was Robert’s Birthday Shirt - not to be confused with his birthday suit ;-)  This just about counts as stashbusting – I bought everything intending to make it for Christmas, but reality got in the way again, so it got deferred to January. I used the Colette Pattern Negroni, which comes with a really detailed book of instructions. In addition the ever entertaining Peter of Male Pattern Boldness ran a Sewalong with this pattern a couple of years ago, and this was really helpful in giving all those hints and tips a first timer really needs, plus some extra photos of the complicated bits. Plus of course his recommendation of the Singer Buttonholer attachment, which I bought last year, and means that Robert doesn’t have to make do with velcro or popper fastenings on all his clothes!

Very satisfied with the first go – especially as it was a secret from him, so I didn’t measure Robert, just his shirts to get the fit right. In fact Robert asked if I can make all his shirts from now on! Now I feel I just need to work on my photo skills – and Robert on his poses!

Well, hello there.

Turns out last year got quite busy, and I utterly failed to post anything after the start of October.
To put this into context, the rest of October was spend frantically sewing for the wedding including the essential, if last minute, aprons for the bridesmaids. This was followed by the frantic baking of three different flavour wedding cakes, and then a convoluted system of travel to get everyone and everything from Dorset to London plus two days of church and venue decorating.

Wedding was lovely.
From London we went directly to Cornwall for our hectic and ridiculously stormy half-term holiday, and once we got back it was Christmas all the way! Christmas was a personal stash-busting special, so I will be posting about that separately, but suffice to say, with 20 presents to make over two months I was a bit busy. Especially as it turns out that the whole family still wanted feeding on a regular basis! Oh, and I have been running our church choir, so we had 3 “events” to prepare for, and I accidentally invited them all home for a Christmas party so had to do housework too! If I wasn’t so haphazard I might even be accused of overachieving.
On top of all that we spent Christmas out in the countryside and the storms knocked out the phones and internet so we had a low-tech Christmas (no bad thing) followed by more hospitality back home before the children finally went back to school.
I have every intention of now being much more organised and consistent, but we all know how that one goes…