Kitchen island

Note to self: close larder door before taking photos at this latter angle.

8 little bears

Phew - how long did that take?! 

I have finally finished this set of bears.  Four of these will go the Art & Craft Centre and the other four to the Tannenbaum Christmas Barn.  I was hoping to have my bears there by the beginning of October, but I'm rather out of time.  I think I am going to make the three cashmere pandas I had planned, and then take five little bears from the Art & Craft Centre too.

In other news, I have decided to move both the bears and the vintage clothing onto Etsy.  I have been with Easyspace for a long time - mainly because changing the web hosting seemed such a faff.  I have had so many problems with them though, I have finally decided to depart.  I did consider finding a new web host and starting again, but the whole thing is expensive and time consuming.  I might see if I can do a course on the CSS stuff, and try again with the websites next year.

Anyway, so from now on, you can find the bears at www.etsy.com/shop/bigfeetbears, and the vintage clothing at www.etsy.com/shop/dgbvintage. 

Finally, our builder is back and has started putting in the drawers and cabinets in the kitchen, so we can finally start unpacking boxes from the spare room!

The kitchen sink

For the benefit of far-flung relatives, here is a picture of our new kitchen sink!  The surfaces around it are incomplete, there's no draining board or splash back, or cupboard doors, and the pipework is leaking, but it's a lovely space. 

Both the builders who were working on our kitchen units are off work with bad backs - perhaps due to lugging that humungous sink around the kitchen - so further progress will have to wait.

As for the bear-making, I have embarked on the ambitious project of making eight of these bears - the idea being that I will have four at the Art & Craft Centre and four at the Christmas Barn.  I can't say that they were particularly popular among people I know when I first made them, but they did make lots of people smile at the Clare Priory Craft Fair, and the original three that I made have all found homes.

Anyway, it's a bit like treading water - I just can't make eight bears quickly.  I don't think I'm going to have as much stock as I would like for the Christmas Barn (which I believe opens in October), but no surprises there.  Hopefully, I can continue adding to the stock there right up until Christmas.

Talk amongst yourselves for a moment, please...

As you might have guessed from the lack of posting, it has been a spectacularly unproductive couple of weeks.  Let me start with the building work.  We have a few of our new Ikea cabinets in...

They are lovely - really clean and sparkling without looking showroom-y at all.  I guess it's the dirty great chimmney, with bits of old plaster stuck to it, which prevent it looking 'showroom-y' (that will be cleaned up, we're told) but really, showroom-y is bad, in my book.  This looks practical, but still a very light and cheerful place to be - we are quite chuffed about it. 

One of these days, when it's finished, I'm going to dig out the 'before' photos and post them.  It's quite a startling change.

Anyway, this year I am hoping to contribute to the Tannenbaum Christmas Barn.  I have only just realised how late it is - and how much work I need to do to produce some stock for it.  I currently just have one mammoth, Bogart.  He's made from a remenant of mohair, and I didn't have quite enough of it, so he has a black cashmere gusset.  It makes me snigger every time I say it, but it actually looks quite spiffy.

I haven't spent the entire time since I last posted making Bogart though - thankfully.  I have been trying to design a meerkat.  It has taken so long (and it isn't complete yet) that I'm not sure what to do anymore.  I can't really afford to devote much more time to him, and yet I need to make something back on the time I've already spent.  And, I like what I've done so far.  I have completed the head and the body.  Here is part of the head, along with the photograph I'm working from.

It doesn't look like much, I realise, but it is at least the right shape.  I spent ages trying to get that shape via the ordinary method - i.e. two side pieces and a gusset - but it didn't work (and I assure you, I exhausted every single possibility).

I am going to break from the meerkat for a little while, so I can put together some stock for the christmas barn.  It has been ages though since I took anything into the Coggleshall art gallery.  If I can get this meerkat on his feet anytime soon, that is where he will be going.

Kitchen update

This is a kind of 'filler' post, whilst I fight with a bear.  Isn't there some kind of Shakespearian quote to that effect?  "I am gone forever!"  [Exits left, pursued by a bear.] 

Things are not quite that bad yet, but they are getting there.  I had this bear in mind and the actual bear I've been working on for the past week looks nothing like him.  I kind of like the actual bear anyway, but I think that might be just because I've been looking at him for so long that I'm getting used to him.  When anyone else sees him though, they tell me how strange he looks - not a good sign.

So, he will be shelved for the time being, and I will go back and reassess and see if I can get actual bear and abstract bear closer together.

In the meantime, there has been a little progress with the kitchen.  The new floor tiles are down in the extension.  They are much shinier and more glamorous than we expected, but they are quite pale and neutral and have a sort of outdoor-patio-look, which is what we wanted.

The new Ikea units arrived on Friday too, but they won't be put in until next week, so at the moment our kitchen looks like this...

Oh yes, and as you can see, we've had bits of the wall painted yellow (which looks fabulous), and we have a new oven (front of the photo, on the left), but again that won't be installed until next week.

Dark wood floor

The kitchen part of the new floor was put in today.  It is a posh real wood floor, and rather darker than we would usually go for.  With such a high ceiling though, it looks really, really lovely.

Updates

A few updates.  First, the last window in the kitchen - which is tiny compared to the rest of them!

Then the new fridge and freezer arrived...

And, on a side note, I finished a few more bears for the craft fair.

I've been a bit of a failure this time around.  That's, what - seven bears made for the fair?  Seven mini bears no less.  It doesn't seem like very much.  I just got started much too late.  I have today to mooch around worrying about it all.  There's a bear that I started and which went terribly wrong which I need to try to sort out.  And I need to try to come up with some kind of plan for arranging the stall.  And of course, if I can make any more bears, that can only be a good thing.

Then tomorrow, I collect the bears from the Art & Craft Centre in the morning and then we drive over to Clare to set up the stall in the afternoon.

I'm not really looking forward to it but there is a good side.  It has given me something to work towards in the last week - and even if I haven't made as much as I'd like to, I've had a lot more ideas.  And not just vague ideas, but ideas that have become pretty solid plans.  Perhaps this is what I'm lacking the rest of the year round - some definite, concrete target.

Little birds & plaster - an update

Yesterday, the plasterers started putting up the plasterboad.  It looks reasonably white in the photos, but it is actually grey.  We have considered it, and decided against decorating in grey.

Then, today, the guy came to plaster the wall.  It's sort of a vagely pink colour.  Again, we have decided against decorating in pink.

It is amazingly soft and smooth though.  I took this picture to try to show that, but it doesn't really work.

And I have made two cardinals with paper-clip feet...

... and a little bluetit.

I'm not sure he really works.  For one thing the colour - which is supposed to be permanent - has been coming off on my hands.  And, although he is clearly recogniseable as a bluetit, he's not as textural as he should be.  He also looks a little hunch-backed.  He's not very perky for a bluetit.  Anyway, hopefully I will get a few more birds made in the next couple of days.

Electricians' first visit

The electricians have been here the past two days to set up the wiring for the kitchen.  Wierdly for the writer of a blog that so few people read, I feel compelled to show detailed photos of their work - given that they probably had the hardest job of all.  We have an old, Edwardian house, and the wiring is a complete mess.  A couple of weeks ago, the electricity went off in one of the back bedrooms.  Then it went off in the kitchen.  After some fiddling by the builders, it came on in the kitchen and the back bedroom, but went off in the other two bedrooms.  Nobody seemed to quite know what was going on, so eventually the builders took down the ceiling in the hallway to try to get a better look at the wiring.

This was the situation when the electricians turned up yesterday.  They ran up and down stairs for a bit, and moved lots of furniture, and eventually discovered a blown socket in one of the bedrooms.  I'm not sure how this affected the rest of the house, but anyway, they replaced the socket and everything works now.

Sooo, this is the wiring for the cooker...

This is part of the new larder wiring.  That wall was covered in clothing because we have always been short of wardrobe space.  I was surprised, when the clothing was taken away, to find that the wall was lilac.  I don't think I've ever seen it before.  Personally I'd be inclined to cover it up again as quickly as possible.

Wiring for the pendant light in the extension - over the spot where we hope to have a dining table.

Wiring running up the framework to the porch.

Lots of wires in the porch...

I think there are so many wires because - reading them - it appears that a lot of the kitchen lighting is going to be two-way, so we can switch them on both from the kitchen itself and from the porch.

These are coming up through the floor next to the new island.  I think one is an electricity cable; the other a BT cable.  Maybe.

And from that hole came a really sweet cross-section of our skanky old cork floor!  Definitely one for the mantlepiece.

A couple of days ago, the builders dragged some of the old units around to give us an idea of what the new layout will look like.  This picture (below) is looking from the living room.  We're having a sort of L-shaped island.  Those holes in the side of the island unit were just to allow the mice our cats brought in to get into the cupboard where we kept vegetables.

And this is it viewed from the extension.  (On reflection, I'm not sure we're going to be able to fit the cross-section of our skanky old floor on the mantlepiece.)  I was making dinner here last night.  It is lovely to be able to walk straight into the larder, rather than having to run round the breakfast bar. 

I won't be sorry to see that bit of black plastic sheeting go though - I am always bumping my head on it.  Not that it hurts to do so - you just feel a fool when there's someone sitting on the sofa in the living room looking on.

And finally, we are going to have a few units running across the kitchen, between the original kitchen and the extension - partly to divide up what is going to be a big space, and partly because we need the extra cupboard space.  Originally these extra cupboards were going to be on the left side, but by having them on the right, we can avoid the problem of the dreaded corner cupboard.  That corner unit, which can't have a door at the front, will be installed back to front, so it can have a door opening into the extension.

I haven't gotton much done this week at all.  Not only is the lack of nicotine making me dither, but the building work is very distracting.  The one good thing is that I think I have just about managed to come up with a way of doing the legs of the birds.  It's not particularly visually impressive, but it does create the right kind of 'feel' if you know what I mean.

And I have come up with a new card-making idea, which I'm quite chuffed with.  Hopefully, I will have something to show for it soon!

Windows are in!

Our wonderful big windows are in, and suddenly the kitchen - which went very dark when the roof was tiled - is covered in sunlight again.

New back door with controvertial catflap.  Nobody's quite sure about these yet (there's a catflap in one of the French doors too) - least of all Rory, our ginger moggy.  Do we keep these, or would a small dogflap be easier for him with his bum leg?

And, on the bear-making front, nothing really seems to be happening (again).  I'm trying to give up smoking, and it's weird how much I used smoking to organise myself.  In as much as I ever had a schedule or plan for working, it has always been marked out by the cigarette breaks, and now that I'm trying not to, the days seem to have lost all their structure.

I also used to use cigarette breaks as serious 'thinking time' and without them, the thinking seems to be absent entirely!

Progress with building work

The tiling is finished on the roof...

And this is going to be the new back porch... 

View from the top of the ladder...

And on the inside (eeek!)...

We do have hot water, thankfully...

...and all appliances are still usable.

It's been quite a heavy day, and impossible to get any work done with everything that's been going on.  I retreated to our very warm greenhouse to look at fridge catalogues and try to figure out how to solve my cardinal problems.  No luck there unfortunately, but I will get it eventually.