Hello Geronimo

 Hello everybody,

Thanks so much for all your good wishes after the wobble the other day.  It's bucketing down today and we're threatened with a tropical storm over the weekend.  All we need now is a plague to round things off...

And welcome to new followers.  Lovely to have you here.  I'm having a lovely time catching up on old blogs and finding new ones at the moment.   So much creativity out there.

Have you seen these button pictures?  Aren't they just the business?

Don't they make you want to reach for your button stash?

(I love that daisy button.  And the chandelier!)

And isn't this just lovely?

(Isn't that a fawn button for the eye?)

But my favourite one is this:

Just lovely.

These all come from Hello Geronimo (all images from their website).  My sister, niece (hello Isobel!) and I went to the South Bank while I was at home and they had this map in the window.  (I want I want I want.)

So which is your favourite?  And what picture would you make with your buttons?



C.x

Home sweet home

LOOK!

I have clearly gone into nesting overdrive since we found our house.    And today I made this.  I had these lovely buttons among the treats I bought in Sydney at All Buttons Great and Small which I wrote about here.

And a lovely old jumper that I'd bought two winters ago for $5 in a charity shop.

It's cashmere and was always a little two small for me, but I wore it anyway until the elbows gave out.  So I decided to try my hand at felting.  (I know, boiling cashmere is more than a little decadent, but I reckoned it had probably had enough life as a jumper and might like to be something different now....)

It took three boil washes to get it to a point that I was confident enough to cut into it.  But today I'd had enough of having a doll sized jumper in my wardrobe so I snipped a sleeve off just to see what would happen.  And miraculously, the line held and nothing unravelled.

I already had the photo frame and was a bit bored with the flower photo that had lived in it for years.  And the creamy white backing is a section of course weave cotton from a much bigger piece with red blotches on it (more of which another time).

If I'm honest I wanted the pictures on the buttons to line up nicely with the holes for the thread.  But they wouldn't.  So I've made do with roughly aligning the washing line instead.

But all in all, I have to say I'm chuffed to bits with it.  It'll definitely be coming to the little old lady house.

The dip

Wednesday today.  Over the hump of the week but still not Friday afternoon.  It's bitterly cold out and there's still no sign of Spring...

My crocus has bloomed though and the flat is filled with the scent of it...

... and I've bought myself these to brighten up the place...

I do love tulips, don't you?

But I have a touch of the mid-week blues (or maybe it's just that I'm feeling a little delicate after last night's celebration of my flat sale), so I thought I would evoke our holiday one last time by telling you about a little shop two doors town from A Coffee and a Yarn.

All Buttons Great and Small is an amazing little treasure trove.  They have everything.  Old lady buttons...

... and flowery buttons...

... mad multi-coloured buttons...

... and rather cool sea green ones...

... retro buttons...

... and even a button man (instructions for how to make him are on their website)

As I write, I realise that I've forgotten to photograph the stash of buttons that I bought - one of those days I'm afraid...  I have some ideas as to what I want to do with them (these lovely orange shiners came from there...)

 But you'll see the rest another time.

It really was a lovely shop.  Sydney-siders are lucky things living near all that craftiness.  Off now for a sip of wine to chase my mid-week blues away.  Nearly Friday.

C.x

Not quite slack Alice

You might be forgiven for thinking that this blog has lost its way somewhat in the last few weeks, and should really come clean with its intention to tell you little about my attempts at crafting and lots about my gallivanting and my capacity to drink coffee and shop.   But I have been a little less idle than that.  Really.

Remember this?

Well, now I have made these!

Nine whole squares!  Okay, so they probably wouldn't withstand too close an inspection from the crochet police, but I think they're pretty good.  A king size blanket is out of the question - I would have to give up work, or eating. or sleeping, or pretty much anything else and just crochet until I was 489 and still not finish it.  But I have a throw that I measured these against, and by my estimation I would need over 200 to reach that size.  Still very daunting.  But we'll see.  For now, I'm just going to concentrate on making a square when the mood takes me.  And if all I end up with is a cushion cover, then so be it.

I also felt spurred on by my knitting fit...

 ...to try my hand at something with two needles.  And I have made this:

Yes indeed.  It will be completely obvious what this is.  But just in case...

Still none the wiser?  Well. its supposed to be a coffee cosy.  The trouble is, I'm not sure I have any cups the right shape.  Here it is on a glass...

Yes, well...  I can claim no credit for the pattern.  I found it in a book that I'd bought for a friend, and came across the pattern as I was flicking through it.  It really is a lovely book.

Even if, perhaps, knitting is not its forte.  Or mine, come to that...

I got the lovely shiny buttons in a really fab shop that I need to blog about another time.  But now, we are getting on with it in the house of noknittedknickers.  We are washing...

... and determined to find some Spring on this grey, grey day...

There's a definite air of back to school.  Work tomorrow.

A lovely holiday, now over.

Hope you have a good week.

C.x

Are buttons male?

Whenever I buy something new, I tend to hang on to the little packets of buttons that come with the garment.  For ages, I kept these packets in a battered old tin that at some point had got squashed in one of my many moves so that the lid didn't sit right and was always bursting open.  And it wasn't as though I ever actually remembered that I had the packets whenever a button came loose.  The tin and its content just sat neglected in a corner of my bookcase.  So, last weekend I succumbed to the obvious and decanted all the little packets into a glass jam jar.  (I love jam jars).  I didn't have a pretty Bonne Maman checkered-lid jar to hand, so had to make do with Frank Cooper's marmalade.

The exercise was like a trip through my wardrobe of the last few years.  Long forgotten cardigans and dresses that I now don't have and must have given away to charity at some point.   But they make for quite a pretty button collection.













And I came across this label which I just can't throw away.

But I have to say, I was surprised that buttons are in fact male.  Not sure why, or if that says more about me than the man who made the label, but (to the extent that I had thought about it at all) I would have said they were female.

What do you think?  Buttons - male or female?

Claire