Free Flowers
Posted by tialys in Life in General on May 5, 2025
Who needs a hand tied bouquet when somebody surprises you with a bunch of wild blooms collected from the hedgerow (and the wilder parts of your garden)
Sometimes the best things in life really are free
Hen Dos and Creepy Dogs
Posted by tialys in Life in General, Pets & Problems, Uncategorized on April 21, 2025
I’ve been meaning to write a post but there’s a hen weekend coming up and dressy uppy type clothes have to be unearthed from the depths of my wardrobe and a beautician and a hairdresser must be visited to slightly minimise the contrast between my ‘maturity’ and a bunch of 30 year olds when the inevitable photos are produced after the event. A futile attempt I know but I will have a go anyway.
So, in lieu of a more interesting post I thought I’d share a photo of Flo – another mature lady – who has fallen asleep opposite me and creeping me out by having grey eyebrows that make it look as if she has white eyes.
The hen do is going on for the whole weekend so, if I survive it, I’ll probably have some highlights for you.
When’s the last time you went on a hen do? Did you enjoy it?
Tara’s First Plant Fair
Posted by tialys in Uncategorized on April 6, 2025
The Spring weather is glorious here in the South West of England and we are making the most of the sunshine and warmth by tending to the garden. When I say ‘we’ you will probably already know that my role is mostly supervisory (and mostly ignored).
Anyway, yesterday we went to the lovely Forde Abbey and Gardens which was hosting a spring plant fair. We got there as It opened and it was absolutely packed. Tara received the usual attentions, comparisons with werewolves and teddy bears, questions about her origins and quite a bit of adoration.
She is a real daddy’s girl and didn’t like him to go out of sight. He made her a floral crown.
I’m saying nothing 🙄
We bought a Magnolia tree, a Dicentra (bleeding heart) and another Geum as they do so well in our garden.
Cue some Spring flower pics
How is Spring looking where you are?
A Breed Apart
Posted by tialys in Pets & Problems, Uncategorized on March 30, 2025
Last Summer we asked the vet to come round to help us say goodbye to the lovely Stan. Two days before his 14th birthday, we felt the degenerative disease which had already affected his back legs would quickly start to cause his front legs to stop working and perhaps go on to cause incontinence which, for a dog who only ever liked to do his business out of sight, would have been the ultimate humiliation. He seemed ready to go and the vet agreed.
The plan was to live with just the one dog in our lives, something of a novelty for us, having had four at one time but Flo seemed a bit depressed without Stan to annoy and we (or was it just me?) started to look at rescue centres online.
I came across a charity called Pet Rehomer who don’t take dogs (and cats) in themselves but facilitate contact between people who need/want to rehome a pet with those who wish to adopt. Applications are made for a pet you like the sound of, passed to the current owners who choose an applicant they feel most suitable, an online home check and interview is done by Pet Rehomer and a video call set up between the interested parties. If all goes well and after making a donation to the charity, you go and collect your new pet from its current home .
So, this is Tara a dead ringer for Gnasher or Hairy Maclary or a B- Movie werewolf when we first saw her.
I thought she was going to be smaller than she is. After a lifetime of quite big dogs I quite fancied one I could scoop up and carry under my arm should the need arise but at 15kg that need will hopefully never materialise.
Tara started life in Bosnia, was adopted by a family in the UK who, after a couple of years, decided to go back to Australia. They intended to take Tara with them and had her rabies jab done but, in the end, felt the long journey and the quarantine would be too traumatic for her so decided to find her a new home in the U.K. instead.
She was living up in the Midlands so it was quite a long car ride for her but not the other side of the world.
She didn’t eat for the first four days and barely drank anything. She didn’t want to go out for a walk and wouldn’t make eye contact
However, a month later and she agreed to join in for Halloween.
Three months later, newly groomed, she yielded to the annual festive dog photo.
She loves Flo and puts up with our Grandpuppy Beau when he comes to stay.
We’ve got her grooming schedule about right now I think. She’s a very unusual looking dog and people variously describe her as a teddy bear or a werewolf. When they ask us what breed she is we say a mix of 24 as the DNA test we had done shows that many breeds involved in her ancestry.
Her one fault is she shows too much interest in the cats – especially in their tails.
Hotter Than Ibiza
Posted by tialys in Life in General, Uncategorized on March 20, 2025
For once The Daily Star (a UK tabloid) may well be right with their weather forecast. Cue front page temperature comparisons to hot countries, pictures of scantily clad young women and calls for men to seek out their ‘budgie smugglers’ – a term referring to tight swimwear for men rarely worn outside of professional swimming competitions nowadays for which we can (mostly) be thankful.
Anyway, that was a roundabout way of telling you that the sun does shine on our green and pleasant land from time to time and occasionally has some warmth in it. Today, at least in the South West, we bask in 18° (approx 64.5°F) which may not seem much to some of you but to us, in March, it is a glorious event.
I have celebrated by doing the following:
- Doing multiple loads of washing so I can dry it in the fresh air.
- Shedding a layer of clothing and not turning the heating on
- Leaving the door open into the garden so the dogs can sunbathe and be ready for the postman in case it’s the one who has dog treats in his pocket
- washing the car which has been caked in the splatters from the muck spreaders for weeks
Of course, washing the car is a sure sign it will rain tomorrow, if not later today, but we take our weather pleasures where we find them.
Creative output from the sewing room is zero at the moment as we are decorating in there. As usual, the previous owners of our house (as in every house we’ve ever owned) have painted or papered (or both) without removing any of the previous efforts which means we have to tackle several decades of layers before proceeding. There is nowhere else to move the furniture into so we’re having to do a wall at a time. The pace has not been helped by Mr. Tialys taking a week off work and, contrary to my perhaps unfounded expectations, spent most of it doing stuff in the garden.
This weekend I’m off to stay with Megan Tialys and go with her to collect her absurdly expensive wedding dress. Maybe I’ll return and all the walls and woodwork will be sanded down and washed ready for painting.
But they probably won’t.
Is Anybody There?
Posted by tialys in Life in General, Uncategorized on February 27, 2025
I’ve just realised that I haven’t written a post since January 2024, so over a year ago now.
As my regular readers are aware our family suffered a bereavement at the end of 2021 which obviously knocked the stuffing out of us and, even though I’ve done a little bit of crafting and dressmaking here and there, I’ve struggled to get the blogging going again. This was not helped by the fact that I’ve used up all my free media space and was wondering whether to pay for more storage and be ad free so you aren’t brought up short by a photo trying to sell you haemorrhoid cream or other tempting clickbait in the middle of one of my posts.
Anyway, I decided to go back in the mists of time to when I started this blog and, although I wrote some thrilling posts in the beginning and have been back to admire them, nobody else seemed to be of the same opinion as I didn’t have (m)any followers at that point so, as my digital scribblings were languishing unappreciated, I deleted them in the attempt to get more space.
My plan is to see if I will actually build up my enthusiasm for blogging again and, if I do, I will consider forking out for a paid site. After all, as my crafting output has diminished (though not disappeared) in recent years I need another decent ‘excuse not to do the housework’ which has always been the tagline for my blog as well as for my life.
So, the final test of this ‘re-introductory’ post is to see if I can include a photograph without too much hassle. If I can’t you will never read this as I will probably give up and delete it so, here goes.
Woohoo!
This is Tara, a new addition to our furred family and more about whom in another post which should follow shortly as she is quite interesting and as I’m now positively flushed with success.
Sorry about the inevitable annoying advert as I’m still on the free version but we’ll see how I get on.
Thanks for reading and hopefully see you again back here soon.
Scraphappy Day January 2024
Posted by tialys in Arts and Crafts on January 15, 2024
For the first Scraphappy Day of 2024 it’s over to Mr. Tialys for using scraps to make something new and useful.
For his sister and her partner’s Christmas gift he had made jars of chutney, pickled onions, raspberry jam and also some cordial he made from rosehips, as you do. Instead of a basket or box like the usual hamper he decided to also make a special container.
It so happens that they have just finished having a mammoth, oak framed extension put on to their house as well as having a lot of groundwork done. There were many pallets and crates destined for the tip but Mr. Tialys can’t resist a pallet or six and they found their way to our house awaiting inspiration.
My sister-in-law is a keen gardener so he thought it would be a good idea to use the wood to make a trug for carting things around in the garden. So he did.
He dismantled one of the crates and rubbed the resulting planks down roughly. Then he used his mitre saw to create some joints, used a nail gun to put it together and sanded the corners to round them a little. Then a coat of danish oil and the body of the trug was done.
A piece of an old hosepipe was used to construct a handle which he then covered with braided scraps of leather and used hand peened rivets to attach it to the sides. (No, I don’t really know what hand peened means either – I’m just repeating what I’m told).
A special mention here for Cathy for telling me how to get my photos straight on to the post without going through my media library – which is full. Turns out I might finally have to move over to the block editor after all 😭
Scraphappy Day is organised by Kate & Gun for anybody who wants to make new things from scraps of any kind – doesn’t have to be fabric or yarn. Here’s a list of participants – both regular and occasional – if you want to have a look at the sort of things you can do with scraps.
Contact Kate or Gun (first names on the list) if you want to join in.
Scraphappy Day December 2023
Posted by tialys in Arts and Crafts on December 15, 2023
I have emerged from my blogging torpor to support Kate and Gun’s Scraphappy Day this month. I’ve mostly been reluctant to post as I’ve used up most of the space for photos on my free version of WordPress and, as I don’t really want a paid version, I have to trawl back more than ten years to delete old posts and photos before I can add new ones. Some of them deserve to be deleted but still, it’s a bit of a pain.
As usual I’ve stretched the rules of Scraphappy just a tiny bit and this project is more of a stash buster with scrappy elements. I have hundreds of fabric fat quarters left over from my quilting days and I’m always looking for something to do with them. I saw a pattern for notebook covers, found some reasonably priced notebooks, stocked up on some interfacing and off I went in an obsessive manner as is my wont.
Then, horror of horrors, I realised that a fat quarter wasn’t quite fat enough to make the size of cover I needed and this is where the scraps come in. I slice through the middle of the FQ, rummage through my scraps for a strip big enough to fatten the quarter to the required size and join the three pieces together. The middle section is covered by the ‘spine’ fabric (also rummaged for in the scrap bin) so it doesn’t matter whether it coordinates with the main fabric or not.
Where did I put the iron?
As I didn’t have my act together enough to do a Christmas market, they will end up in lots of Christmas stockings this year and I’ll put the rest in my online shop and I’ll have the stock ready if I do a market next year.
Some cork fabric makes a good spine
In the meantime, I must get on with making my daughter’s boyfriend a shirt from Liberty tana lawn which will be his Christmas present. I am keeping it a secret mostly because he is very fussy and won’t wear it unless it’s nigh on perfect so, if it’s not, he’ll never know I tried and failed and will get a pair of socks instead.
This one is going in daughter’s stocking.
These covers can be removed when the notebook is full and a new notebook slotted in. It’s a great PDF pattern from Diane at Spencer Ogg who makes mostly PDF bag patterns which are also excellent.
I’ve just remembered that Mr. Tialys has made an excellent item out of scraps of wood and leather and I will feature that in the January Scraphappy Day.
I’m off on Friday for the weekend for a family visit so, if I don’t respond to comments or comment on others’ projects for a while, please forgive me and if I don’t get round to doing a pre-Christmas blog (which is all about knitting so I know you’ll try to hold on to your excitement) please forgive me for that also. So, just in case, I wish you all a very happy Christmas/Holidays and a healthy, happy and peaceful New Year.
Scraphappy Day is organised by Kate & Gun for anybody who wants to make new things from scraps of any kind – doesn’t have to be fabric or yarn. Here’s a list of participants – both regular and occasional – if you want to have a look at the sort of things you can do with scraps.
Contact Kate or Gun (first names on the list) if you want to join in.
Pondlife – Scraphappy Day October 2023
Posted by tialys in Arts and Crafts, Miscellaneous Crafts on October 15, 2023
I made a felt frog using one of Cool Crafting‘s designs.
It was supposed to be a lady frog but I couldn’t get the green glass eyes and the amber ones made him look more masculine in my opinion so I decided against the suggested flower coronet and left him naked as most frogs tend to be. I know this because we had thousands of tadpoles in our pond and the froglets I’ve seen so far are as naked as the day they were spawned. However, I have it on good authority that, sometimes, a frog prince is born and he, of course, would wear a crown.
In case you’re wondering what this has to do with Scraphappy Day, I made the crown out of some lining left over from a dressmaking project. It has quite a lot of body in it so I just cut the crown shape out in two layers, sewed them right sides together and turned it out. Then I made the ‘jewels’ by practising my newly discovered (and still far from expert) French knots.
Even though I’d decided to leave him ‘in the nip’ I felt something was missing from the scenario so I made him a lily pad to sit on.
I had a green cashmere jumper that had gone bobbly beyond saving so I had previously put it in the washing machine a few times and saved the resulting felted fabric. Perfect to cut out a lily pad shape.
I backed it with some green ombré fabric from my scrap box and added a ‘something special’ label.
Finally, my friend owns a craft shop and was getting rid of some excess bits and pieces and gave me a couple of fabric flower shapes, one of which made the perfect addition to the lily pad.
So the frog, aided by a little bit of Scraphappiness, is now ready for a kiss to turn him into a real boy.
Or was that Pinocchio?
Scraphappy Day is organised by Kate & Gun for anybody who wants to make new things from scraps of any kind – doesn’t have to be fabric or yarn. Here’s a list of participants – both regular and occasional – if you want to have a look at the sort of things you can do with scraps.
Contact Kate or Gun (first names on the list) if you want to join in.
Birthe, Turid, Susan, Cathy, Tracy,
Jan, Moira, Sandra, Chris, Alys,
Claire, Jean, Dawn, Gwen,
Sunny, Kjerstin, Sue L, Vera,
Ann, Dawn 2, Carol, Preeti,
Nóilin, Viv, Karrin, Amo, Alissa,
Lynn, Tierney and Hannah
Workshop Temptation
Posted by tialys in Arts and Crafts, Mosaics on September 29, 2023
I might have mentioned that I’d become interested in a new craft and promised to let you know what has now grabbed my butterfly mind and necessitated the need for yet more shelves to be created and commandeered by me – although, this time a lot of the supplies can be kept in the garage and not the house. (I have to laugh re-reading that last bit as our garage is already almost full to bursting with ‘stuff’ that definitely doesn’t include the car.)
I do love a workshop but although basic embroidery, wicker work, Dorset buttons, metal stamping and making my own knickers out of a t-shirt were all fun once was enough and, in some cases, more than enough.
I have come to the conclusion that life is definitely too short to make my own apple catchers.
Not my knickers
However, I decided that making mosaics from broken china and found items – or picassiette to give it its formal name – would be something very different for me but, at the same time, right up my street. At least it will be if my street can now accommodate a face mask, safety glasses, protective gloves, sharp instruments and sticky, claggy substances. As I said, something very different for me.
So, as is my wont when getting interested in a new craft, I have provided myself with books, tile nippers, adhesive, grout and all the other bits and pieces involved although, sadly, I left my vast collection of vintage china in France where I used to make tiered cake display stands so have had to begin the search all over again. Charity shops are obviously my first port of call but they have usually disposed of anything cracked or chipped before they get to the shelves and I must admit to feeling bad about cutting up a perfect item. I have put the word out in the shop where I work a couple of shifts to keep anything broken for me but, so far, not much luck. Still, the hunt is all part of the fun I suppose.
As a little sewing side story – the instructor at the workshop told us to bring an apron to protect ourselves from adhesive and grout but I didn’t have one. The shame! Anyway, Amazon yielded cheap versions, some frilly, some nasty but instead I found a free pattern on the Tessuti website and rummaged in my stash for surplus fabric somebody had given me for nothing and made one myself in the time it takes to plough through the offerings online – well, not quite, but it’s certainly a quick make if you’re in need and would look great in denim or a canvas blend.
I suppose I’ll have to do some baking or something now.
My workshop instructor, Judith, has adopted the picassiette style and mostly creates mosaics for display indoors but she had made one on a slate tile which I bought from her to serve as inspiration while I get my hand in – plus it’s a hare and I’ve got a thing about hares at the moment.
My plan is to make mosaics for the outdoors, partly because we have quite a lot of lovely slate tiles scattered around the garden I can use for a substrate (see how I’m getting the lingo down already) and partly because there is no room in our house for anything else so I’ve had to start decorating the outside.
At the workshop we could choose two wooden shapes to mosaic and I chose a couple of fish thinking they’d go in my bathroom although they are far from perfect. So much so that I’m only going to show you one of them.
Room for improvement but it’s quite a forgiving craft and has certainly got me interested enough to carry on.
I now have some sort of compulsion to see every piece of china or glass as a prospective item to take some cutters or a small hammer to which can’t be healthy. Maybe I could get myself invited to a Greek wedding.
I mentioned a doomed wicker workshop earlier. I attended one whilst still living in France and didn’t do too well. I got lost on my way there, arrived an hour late and was so discombobulated that I was in a flap the whole time and made what was supposed to be a hare but could have been anything from a mouse to an elephant. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t make the move back to England. Recently I suggested to Mr. Tialys that he take a break from work and enrol himself in a wicker workshop taking place in a nearby town. He made a heron which, of course, looks as exactly like a heron as can be expected by twisting bits of willow together and now has pride of place by the pond exercising a reign of terror over the fish.
I’ll try to keep you up to date on my progress with mosaics, hopefully there’ll be some worth mentioning.
Tialys 