Once upon a time I had a favourite green jumper. Liking it so much, I bought another two, in different colours. One day, many months later, I popped them in the machine that diligently washes apparel and went blithely on with my day. For an hour.
Rushing back to the efficient washer, my worst fears were met: it was on a boil wash.
So beloved were the jumpers, now the right size for a toddler, they could not be thrown away, or even donated to a toddler lacking a felted jumper. They rested, snuggled together in the gloomy back of a shelf, waiting.
After many moons, a cotton-bodied bunny was discovered and a plan hatched. The first born is sleepy green bunny. His woollen body is kept company by Egyptian sateen cotton ears and a baby merino pompom tail.
The pattern is from Wee Wonderfuls and can be found here.
My second attempt at binding. Time will tell who this is for!
Or if I can possibly part with the butterflies. I bought the fabric nearly a year ago at the main fabric market in Cairo and I couldn’t bare to cut into it. It seems perfect for small people and small things. As much as I’d love it for me, I think I may look a little silly wearing it. So, in the name of me being stylish (ok, people who know me, you can stop laughing now!), it’s going to be fore little people.
There has been a new baby in the family. Not knowing whether a little nephew or niece it would be, I decided to hedge my bets and make something for either. It seemed a rather appropriate time to figure out binding.
If you haven’t tried to sew binding before, trust me, it’s best not to figure it out on your own. After a good 8hrs of stitching and ripping out, restitching, taking a break, re-ripping and a fair amount of hurumphing, I decided to spend more time online looking for some decent instructions. I found them and they’re also amusing. Head on over to angry chicken for them, or you can open the vid from here.
Baby Liondre (really no idea yet how his name is spelled, but this is my first bet!) came a week early, so this is for him.
PS – Perhaps worth pointing out that the button selection in Egypt isn’t anything to get too excited about. As I’m heading to Paris (I know, tough, eh?) soon, I will get one from there. Oh, does that mean I have to go shopping? Any bets that I’ll walk out of the shop with more than one button? 
The latest additions. Yum yum. Salivating. All Egyptian cotton.
It’s been a few months since spots appeared, so here’s another bag.
I’m half way through writing up a tutorial for this bag, so one is coming!
Isabella is a little girl who was born in May 2008. She is the daughter of my friends Suzie and Ramy. I was extremely well intentioned and began to make something for her before she was born. I thought it was going to be great, then I changed my mind. I started to make something else.
Then Isabella was born. Still unfinished, I enforced a ‘no gift, no visit’ rule on myself.
Stupidly!
Soon it was the summer. Holidays beckoned and I was away for two months. Then work started again, coming to an abrupt halt when I started pondering the problems of using the planned sticks as the hanging frame. Who knows what is on the sticks on the streets here (there aren’t exactly forests to visit for stick-collecting!). That idea was binned.
Notions of wire coat hangers, rods, plastic tubes and wire contraptions tossed around in my head and nothing outstanding came to the forefront.
And then one morning, out of the ether, it all fell into place. I jumped out of bed, started ripping and bending and wrapping, and in a few hours, I had fashioned the hoop.
It was downhill from there and baby Isabella will finally be getting her gift in the next few days.
All the materials used in this were bought in Egypt.
It’s past Christmas, it’s even past New Year’s Eve, and the gingerbread house is still standing. It shall end up in the hands of the son of the bowab (concierge/security man) next door, but before it does, a little momento.
It didn’t last the season totally unscathed: first I knocked the chimney off, breaking it into a thousand pieces on the floor, and then I got the munchies and picked some of the sweets off!
