Kaari Meng From French General (Look out for the Sewing Stash Contest!)



Mary Jane Butters From Mary Janes Farm



And Sally Jean from Sally Jean

Though it was only a short while ago that I was raving about another of the Stampington & Company's offerings, today I am in minor ecstasy about discovering Where Women Create, a magazine showcasing the inspirational homes and studios of some of our most creative women...

"Whether it’s art, food, music, written works or choreographed dances, extraordinary women know that the process of creating is as important as what ultimately gets created. That’s why extraordinary women pay attention to the details of their work spaces... making sure that they surround themselves with visually stimulating inspiration and unique organizational systems.

Where Women Create invites you into the creative spaces of the most extraordinary women of our time. Through stunning photography and inspirational stories, each issue of this quarterly magazine will nourish souls and motivate creative processes"

I do so want my soul nourished and my creative process motivated... and it's mine for the lowly sum of $14.99 per issue. Perhaps a lot for a magazine, but a small price to pay for an intimate snoop around the creative souls of the three inspirational women above...

If I ever drop by and find you dangling sausages from your fake Christmas Tree there will be trouble, do you understand? Because yes indeed, click on the image above and you will see that this darling little vintage advert suggests poking your Hor D'oevres or canapés on to the branches of this stunning centrepiece...

Everyone loves the Wonder Tree.

I have long been a fan of the gorgeous Laundry, but as usual essential information managed to evade me... namely that Gloria, whose scrumptious taste keeps the gorgeous online store stocked with vintage inspired loveliness, has a blog that so absolutely perfectly captures her quirky, ever so English country life...

I do so enjoy happening upon a new to me inspiring voice.

Oh my goodness me. This has got to be the find of a lifetime for Ebay vendor, Burgundy Delights hasn't it? While she is selling it per length of individual monogram, it makes such a gorgeous decorative object all by itself, I'm not sure I could bear to part with it.

But then let it be hereby noted that my tendency to hoard all things vintage is getting out of hand. I sometimes think that the whole point of owning anything old is to understand that that ownership is but  a temporary thing. That we can only be the guardians of yesterday until it is time to pass on their blessing to another collector.

What a pity I'm so bloody greedy. Let's just hope nothing too wonderful falls into my hands...

" The bachelor girl who has her own meals to prepare after returning from the office will find on this page a good selection of suitable aprons. All these deigns have the advantages of being easy to make, easy to launder, and easy to put on, added to the fact that they are exceedingly attractive."

She has only one room but it's home you see
And precious as anyone's home can be.
She's coloured the walls an eggshell blue;
They were drab before - an impossible hue!
And little Miss Smith, with the kindly face
Has sent her some curtains of creamy lace.
She has scrubbed the floor- it was terribly brown-
And now she has put the oilcloth down.
And Granny has sent her a rug - dark red-
It looks so cosy beside the bed!
A cupboard there is for plates and things;
A kettle upon the gas-ring sings.
There's a comfy chair, and a shelf with books,
A chest of drawers and some useful hooks.
She's asked the price at the next street store
Of curtains to keep the draught from the door.
It was her birthday awhile ago,
And the table came as a gift from Flo;
The little brown teapot came from Meg;
The pretty white cups from Molly and Peg.
Somehow or other the whole room's fraught
With scraps of somebody's friendly thought.
And so she declares that, wherever you'd roam,
There's nothing to beat her one-room home!

Lilian Gard, 1918. 

Pumpkins and sunflowers on the roadside along the way...



The most perfect twig fence surrounding the caretakers cottage at Rufford Old Hall...



Autumn ...



Beautiful, beautiful Autumn...

 
Mum spots a pumpkin called Sabrina...



..And another called The Wicked Witch of the West...


The Old Hall...





And two little boys refusing to pose for the camera.

"Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday."

Kabril Gibran

All of you who know me, know that I do not have faith. It is not that I am not blessed with spiritual belief but more that my personal belief is just that: a personal matter, and the very thought of organised religion continues to make me shudder.

That said I live my life sandwiched between a church and the little church school linked to it that my son now attends and it affords me a rich sense of community I would not now choose to live without. However nothing could have prepared me for the influence that community would have upon Finn. While I choose not to believe, as a Mummy I understand that I am responsible for offering Finley the chance to make his own decisions, and thus it is my duty to let him forge his own path through a world that offers conflicting truths at every turn, without trying to influence him in any way at all..

It is half term. Finley has achieved all manner of things, from having his picture in the newspaper with the African children's choir,who, until he met made him quake in his boots with fear (Mummy they are gonna be naked and bang drums so loud they will break the ceiling and even the men wear grass dresses and Mummy they are from SCOTLAND!!!) to winning his green martial arts belt with a performance his instructor described as fantastic, and sitting me down one long evening to tell me about twenty situations in which he had "feelings" (Mummy remember when I got stuck up the climbing frame? I felt SCARED cos I couldn't get down and EMBARRASSED cos all the other kids could. And remember when I fell in love with that lady from Wales on the telly and I cried cos she was sad and you laughed? Mummy I felt LOVE then and I felt ASHAMED for crying and EMBARRASSED cos you knew I felt LOVE...). He has in short been a little bit wonderful and I wanted him to know that I was aching with pride. So yesterday on the first day of half term I told him we could go shopping and he could have anything in the whole wide world and he said...

"I want Lego Batman for my Nintendo, a singing toothbrush and a bible please."

and I said....

"Lego Batman, a singing toothbrush and a pardon?"

"A bible Mum. Jesus's book, so we can read it at bedtime"

Oh hells bells. Of all the people in all the world to have a religious son I was not she, but the heart wants what it wants.and so my little munchkin and I went shopping and he marched into Waterstones and asked a terribly nice man for the Bibles and he and this book selling stranger sat on the floor and chose a lovely illustrated version together and then we went and bought Lego Batman and a toothbrush that beams the songs from Jungle Book right into his brain and I wandered around befuddled by the notion that here was a child the living embodiment of me and yet not really me at all.

You may strive to be like them but seek not to make them like you.

And so I am striving. Because this little boy so very unafraid of being who he is, and so absolutely willing to share his abundance of "feelings" has much to teach me.

I don't really understand why it scares me.

 

Though one would imagine that raising a gluten free child makes life rather impossible, once you get into the swing of things it is really very manageable. Since Finley was diagnosed at the age of eighteen months we have as a family done our up most to make his diet a part of everyday life he has to aware of, but without, I hope, ever making a song and dance out of it.

As a protective Mother there is the temptation to try to construct an artificial gluten free environment at home. To stop eating gluten ourselves, to offer visiting children only gluten free treats and to develop a real paranoia about cross contamination in the kitchen. However we do not live in a gluten free society and it is my belief that Finley has to grow up accepting Coeliac/Celiac Disease as a part of the special little boy he is, while understanding that the majority of society do not have to endure the same dietary restrictions. Such acceptance occasionally causes relative heartbreak. In some ways it has made Finley old beyond his years as in the process of protecting his special tummy from attack by wheat, he has also become somewhat paranoid about danger in many other forms, his very instinct to avoid pain causing him to be over-cautious in many other given situations entirely unrelated to his diet. But these gentle fears of everything from goats to contaminated water in Africa (and thus the water spilling from our taps), have, while often inconvenient, offered much opportunity for conversations we may not have had were it not for the fact that in order to dilute his little phobias we have to talk them to death....

There has also been the temptation to worry myself into a frenzy. To live in fear of accidental ingestion of gluten and to become one of those Mothers unable to resist becoming an ambassador for her childs’ affliction. Yes of course I want my child to be safe at school, I want to know that whoever is looking after him at any given moment knows what he can and can't eat, and occasionally It is necessary to get a bit mouthy in restaurants in order to guarantee my son's safety,  but I don't want the fact that Finley has Coeliacs to define him and I don't want to be known as the Coeliac Mummy- which is why I very rarely write about it here. It is a very small part of our lives. Allowances are made on a daily basis but it isn't a drama. Gluten isn't in everything, there are many, many fabulous alternatives and I certainly don't want Finley to look back on our lives and say my Coeliacs was such a big issue Mummy made a career out of it! I don't want to be that Mummy. I want him to look back and see that Coeliacs didn't matter. That there was never any fuss, no underlying sense of inconvenience and still so many of the scrumptious treats that childhood is really all about that Coeliacs Disease doesn't have to take away...

That said, while bread, crackers, pasta  and biscuits haven't been a problem, we have struggled to find a cake recipe that didn't taste like air filled cardboard. The path to acceptable moreish sponge cake has been arduous and compromised by the fact that most gluten free flours create food that is texturally very different to ordinary flour and has properties that alter the way recipes behave. While there are indeed flourless recipes in abundance they are often rich and do not appeal to a five year old boy who wants to be sitting at his best friends party eating a jelly tot sprinkled fairy cake that looks just like the one the little boy next to him is eating. And so in pursuit of cupcake nirvana I have dallied with cakes made with vegetable oil, cakes made with rice flour, almond based cakes and had the frequent pleasure of faffing about with the mystery that remains xanthum gum. But to no avail, until the day I used my own standard fairy cake recipe with Orgran Self Raising Flour (available worldwide) and created a set of teeny little button topped cakes that were infinitely scrumptiously edible, kept their shape, raised just the way you expect cupcakes should and tasted divine warm from the oven with a scoop of butter cream. 

Ingredients.
4oz (100grams) Orgran Self Raising Flour
4oz (100grams) Caster Sugar
4oz (100grams)  Margarine
2 Large Eggs
1 Tsp Pure Vanila Essence
1Tblsp Drinking Chocolate

Method.
Cream the sugar with the margarine then beat in the eggs, one at a time with a spoonful of flour. Sift the drinking chocolate into the flour and stir into the mixture slowly. Add the vanilla essence and bake in a medium heat oven for fifteen minutes.

Easy deliciousness. And for the record I have since used the same flour in various other recipes and it works everytime. I couldn't be more thrilled.

What shape pinny do you prefer? Are you a waisted apron kinda girl? The ever so sensible sort drowning in a Victorian maids style frilly affair? A flirty dirty kinda housewife in a fluted apron with a heart shaped neckline?  A pretty Cath Kidston floral apron lady?  A smock wearing artist?

While the housewives smock conjures up, in my mind at least, the sort of checked nylon tabard affairs, last seen on my school dinner ladies, it is the shape that seems to me,to be the most sensible when there is work to be done but you don't want to scare the life out of passing gas men who seem to regard women in pinnies as kinky throwbacks or worse, little girls playing house.

While I suspect the perfect apron varies according to the shape of it's wearer (I look like a sack of potatoes in a long apron and still I tra la la around the house in one of my wardrobe of snazzy florals), I have always secretly yearned for an apron that was the modern equivalent of the housekeepers "house coat" something that doesn't look like a dressing gown, protects my clothes, and offers a nod to retro styling without making me look like I'm imitating June Cleaver the day wine o'clock came a little sooner than it should...

Et voila, I happened across this pretty goodness knows what, currently being offered for sale by Etsy seller La Vida Vintage and it strikes me as the perfect answer: an apron top I could slip over a long sleeved T-shirt and not feel too mortified if I forget I'm wearing and make it half way to the school gates with my coat over over the top and my barbie pink rose apron trailing beyond it, as I did the other day.

I know. The shame of it. But I'm from Liverpool. Girls here nip to the shops in their pyjamas and wear curlers around town on a Saturday afternoon...

While I am loathe to recommend a book I haven't yet read, as your resident Vintage Housekeeping, Hollywood worshipping, book reading, boudoir dweller, I feel obliged to pint you in the direction of Susie Boyt's apparently spellbinding tale of what it is to live your life hero worshipping someone as universally beloved and perhaps deeply tragic as Judy Garland...

"At the cinema for the first time with my mother, I listened, transfixed, to Dorothy singing Over the Rainbow. I had never heard anything like it in my life. It was immediately clear to me that Garland’s singing bypassed all the indignity of strong feelings that I was grappling with, and instead she capitalised on her struggles, she absolutely led with them, presenting them as the best things life contains. Since early childhood I have always entertained a lot of dark thoughts-I put out a welcome mat for them, I feed them and clothe them - but Judy Garland, to my small frame, seemed miraculously to transform the harsher truths of life into something wonderful, where all feelings, however dark, are good and true because they’re yours. There was an instant –and I felt it even then-historic meeting between us, a kind of tessellation of spirit accompanied by thick bolts of not just fellow feeling but of fellow being. I wanted to slip right then inside the screen.

As I grew older Judy seemed to confirm the beliefs that I’d all my life held to be true:

* Things that are hard have more of life at their heart than things that are easy.
* The future must prove better and happier than the past.
* All feelings, however painful, are to be prized.
* The opposite of good feelings are not bad feelings but no feelings.
* Glamour is a moral stance.
* The world is crueller and more wonderful than anyone ever says.
* Loss, its memory and its anticipation, lies at the heart of human experience.
* Any human situation, however deadly, can be changed, turned round and
improved beyond recognition on any given day, in one minute, in one hour.
* You must try to prepare for the moment that you’re needed for the call could
come at any time.
* The fluctuations of the heart mark the trajectory of the human career,
but you must try not to pay this too much heed.
* There are worse things in life than being taken for a ride.
* If you have a thin skin all aspects of life cost more and have more value.
* Loyalty to one other is preferable to any other kind of human system.
* Grief is no real match for the human heart, which is an infinitely resourceful organ."

I, for one, cannot think of anything more exciting than reading something that promises to combine autobiography, biography and a tiny sprinkle of self help in a book wearing Dorothy's shoes.

Pray tell, does it sound wonderful or does it sound wonderful?

Next time Clare from Vintage Home goes shopping I want to go in her pocket please.

She always manages to find the quirkiest, most lovely of lovelies, (in just the right colour palette) and every time I receive one of her happy little mail shots, I almost feel the urge to step inside my laptop and go and live in her pretty little virtual vintage world...

Loveliness on a butty it is.

There is a bit of me loathe to tell this story mostly based on the premise that my dear Daddy suspects I get myself into these kind of scrapes merely to give myself something to write about here...

If only that were true Daddy. If only that were true.

But it isn't. The fact is that I am currently sporting a black eye, bruised head and hideously split lip because I spend far too much time running around the house in a giddy fashion, usually in stiletto's, something I feel obliged to state here and now,  because Mum tosses and turns in her little bed, demented by the worry that you will think that having broken my hand dancing on Boxing Morning and now inflicting the kind of damage that does indeed imply I've done ten rounds with Clara Bow, I am something of a drunken lush but this is simply not the case. I was not drunk.

In fact it should be here by noted that I am rarely drunk but often stupid, and having got these minor disclaimers out of the way I shall now proceed to tell the story.

On Friday night I went on the worst date ever. Did you hear that? It was the WORST DATE EVER. Yes indeed, far worse than the ludicrous but funny, date I enjoyed with the Elvis impersonator saving up for a face lift  and much, much worse than the date with a pint sized man who wanted to take me on a cruise with his geriatric Mother. Oh yes dating throws up some of quite the oddest specimens on the planet but none quite as quirky- awful as Dear Mr Friday Night.

So there we were me and him. I was doing my usual smile a lot and in the absence of the possibility of escape, talk the leg off him and he was looking, frankly, absolutely bloody terrified. And so it went on. I  talked and he stared at his pint of beer like he'd never had a drink before and then in a rather unexpected turn of events, developed an American accent after the first mouthful.


So, said I,where abouts do you live? (Manhatten? Texas? What is that accent??)
You're soooo cute, said he.
What kind of music do you like, said I?
You're soooooooooooo cute, said he.
Oh Dear God, said I.
You're sooooooooooooooo cute, said he.
I'm going to the toilet, said I, getting up to excuse myself.
Wow, shouted he, that's ONE GREAT BIG ASS you got going on there!

Game over, I think you will agree?

And so I called a taxi, and me and my fake American friend got into it, and when it stopped outside my house, I thanked him for a lovely evening and he lunged towards me and asked me for some money towards the ride home and then planted the worse kiss I have ever had smack on my lips, before informing me that it would be "cool" to do it all over again. Horrified, and panicking in case out of pure politeness I agreed to see him again, I backed out of the taxi, big ass first and dived into the house.

And that should have the end of that. But oh no, the universe wasn't finished punishing me. It struck me as I put my key in the door that I still hadn't been the loo, so without stopping to remove my ludicrously high heels, I ran up the stairs, down the hallway and this is where it all goes hazy, into the bathroom, whereupon I can only surmise that after skidding down the step I got into a fight with the toilet and had a full on scrap with the floor and finally knocked myself out for who knows how long, finally coming round in a pool of the kind of blood that was spurting merrily from my lip and gathering in my ears.

It could have happened to anyone couldn't it?

But it didn't. Yet again it happened to me. The next day Finley and I attended another kid's party (save me from the nightmare that pass the parcel) with Kath and Eleanor in tow, and as a gaggle of yummy mummies looked at me and debated whether the horror that was on my lip was a very nasty infectious cold sore of the Amy Winehouse kind or that bless me I was the victim of let's not talk about it, domestic violence, I watched the proceedings in a state of advanced concussion, while  Kath delivered the truth and merrily informed them that until she met me, she hadn't realised it was possible for one woman to have so any calamities.

But here I was: living proof that life could be worse!

Crazy but oh soooooooooo cute.

Every evening after the gentle trauma of trying to teach Finley to read with the muddily business that is phonics, I bath him, dress him in flannel pyjamas, and we get snuggled up in his dimly lit cosy bedroom to begin all over again the process of reminding him why books are fun.

At the moment we are reading a mammoth sized book of traditional fairytales and oh heavens what an education it has been. For me.

So there we are, me and my mini innocent little me. We have already dealt with the blood and guts that was Little Red Riding Hood and I have explained that yes perhaps it was a bit mean for the little girl to happen across a sleeping wolf and feel it necessary to slice open his tummy and standing in a pool of blood, pull Grandma out, apparently, alive and well.

Why wasn't she chewed Mummy?

We have done that. I have answered his awkward questions and we have turned the page and moved on to Rapunzel.

Ah, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, in the version of the fairytale we are reading, you let down more than your hair didn't you?

Oh yes.

Perhaps I am bad minded or perhaps we really are reading the slapper version of this cautionary tale.

You see night after night, Rapunzel drags the Prince up into her tower via her excessively long plait and they fall a bit in love and life seems rosy if a little restricted, and then the wicked witch finds them together and after the Prince is gone, banishes Darling Rapunzel to some faraway woods and tricks the Prince into climbing her plaited hair piece. And the Prince shocked to find a warty old crone instead of his beautiful young lady, kills her (but not before she has blinded him!) and set's off to find Rapunzel.

And find her he does, dear Readers.

In the woods, in a clearing, where she has just given birth to twins.

I stop reading, open mouthed. Finley looks at me and I can already see the words "special hug" forming on his lips as he stares at the image of the Prince and his Princess To Be in a passionate clench. (Because he is ridiculously bright and watches too much Emmerdale.) So I start mimicking the action for the letter "T" (pretend me dears, you are watching a tennis match and swing your head from side to side), like some kind of demented monkey, insist he shows me the word "the" on the page and agree that yes, it probably would be a good idea if all the twins in the world were called Cathy and Heathcliff.

And then I kiss my little babba on the head, go through the Goodnight, I love you, God bless, what does bless mean, does God blow you a kiss, yes I love you too routine and walk down stairs shaking my head in minor mortification at the morals of women with overly long hair and indeed what the dear old Brothers Grimm were thinking of!

It's Hansel and Gretel tonight and and who knows what moral dilemmas that one is going to present.

I wish I wasn't so rubbish at it, but I am. While nonsensical Mummy talk seems to come naturally to many of the other Mums at the school gate I stand feeling puddled, not really caring about the organic quota of the school dinners (Just tell me he ate something!) or whether my son managed to put ears on his self portrait (and what this says about both his psyche and potential as future prime minister) and instead embarrassing myself by saying hello to passing dogs. Out loud. And looking for all intents and purposes like any minute now I'll be put in a strait jacket, so truly bonkers is both my hair, and the "outfit" I have cobbled together in between singing the praises of gluten free crumpets so Finn will eat them, yet again crawling around on my hands and knees banishing the slug trails that are the bain of my laundry room and remembering that tube yoghurt and anything even resembling a biscuit are lunch-box no-no's, because ours is both a healthy eating and a church school and it wouldn't do to say thank you to God for the kind of yoghurt that spurts all over our little one's uniform and rot's their teeth in the process. 

How do they do it, these immaculate women? How do they wander up the school path looking like they have just stepped out a Boden catalogue? Did they get up at four o'clock in the morning? Do they employ an army of helpers? What in heavens name are they on about? Can you buy smugness at the supermarket?

I've never been good at the element of competition that comes with middle class motherhood. I couldn't do the wailing that all new mums seemed to revel in when their babba's were newborns. (I was too busy being in love with my little bundle of joy to discuss his sleeping habits). I couldn't get interested in the salt content of anything, didn't flap if my son had pureed carrot in his hair and generally performed the role of inattentive Mother with aplomb. But nothing could have prepared me for the level of one up-manship that exists at the "big" school gates.

It is of course all in my head. Perhaps a reflection of my own insecurities as a Mummy (Should I care about which reading system the school prefers? Should I know the curriculum inside and out? Should I have inspected the toilets and asked Gerad's Mum to make sure he washes his hands after he goes to the toilet to prevent nasty Gerad spread germs from infecting my precious baby? Is Finn's shirt always hanging out his trousers because he is from a one parent family??) or as a woman (Do people know I've shoved my feet in these boots because I ripped the bottom of my trousers when I fell down the stairs this morning? Is the teeniest hint of cleavage inappropriate? Do nice women wear padded cagoules?). Perhaps all Mums feel the same?

But it is hard and this morning was no exception. I stood nodding enthusiastically as one mad (immaculate) mummy detailed the merits of drawstring welly bags and another flapped about the child to teacher ratio- and a bit of me floated off back home, safe in the knowledge that my child was safe and happy and yes I look like Mad Mary and having been blessed with an untidy face will probably never manage to look calm and efficient, but that Mrs lovely Carr seems to know what she's talking about and having a child in full time fulfilling school means I get to go home and sit down for the kind of blissful breakfast I haven't enjoyed since way back when.... 

I might not be in league for a Mommy merit badge and I doubt the invitation to become a member of the PTA will be forthcoming... but we are not the ones in school any more and saying the right thing only matters if you care less about who you are than you do about what you are.

Lets think of the school gates as one more test of our authenticity. And say be damned to toxic mummies everywhere.