On my other blog, The Daily Stitch, I’m giving away a copy of Fresh Quilting: Fearless Color, Design and Inspiration by Malka Dubrawsky.

Fresh Quilting is full of beautiful, inspiring, colourful projects and has become one of my favourite quilting books. If you’re an experienced quilter or just wish you were, Fresh Quilting is a wonderful book to have on your shelf.

Go over to The Daily Stitch and leave me a comment to win a copy!

Entries must be in by end of month and the winner will be chosen at random. UK residents only please.

This sounds so obvious, but for some reason it’s a relatively new trick for me: cutting the tops off product tubes. I used to squeeze and flatten and try to smoosh out everything I could get from a tube and then just chuck it. What a waste! Now I cut the top off and there’s usually a good 5-6 uses left in the container.

Here’s how it works.

Step 1, cut the top off.

Step 2, dip into the remaining product!

Sometimes you have to trim one or two more times to get to the bit at the very bottom.

Side note: This is GoodSkin Labs Exten-10 Youth Boosting Moisturizer SPF 15. I got a free tube at BlogHer last year and I am NOT kidding it made me look 10 years younger. Seriously. I think so anyway! Now it’s come to the UK and you can buy it at Boots (at least I have bought it at Boots but I don’t see it on the website. And I’m out again, so go figure).

Richmond Habitat got in touch about the Spanish-themed shopping event they are hosting today between 5:00 and 9:00 p.m.

During the event you’ll receive 25% off any purchase plus there will be complementary wine and Spanish tapas served and a live Spanish guitarist until 8:00 p.m.

As lovely an invitation as this is, it is making me SO ANGRY at myself because just two weeks ago we bought floor lamps for our flat. They weren’t all that expensive in the grand scheme of things, but Habitat had just raised their prices. So the floor lamps, which had been on sale for 20% off two weeks before we bought them, were not only not on sale but they were priced HIGHER than before – £27 for the shade and base vs £20 previously and £16 on sale. I was already annoyed with myself for not buying them when they were on sale but now I’m REALLY annoyed because I’ve chucked out the receipt so now that there is another sale, I can’t buy them again and return them with the original receipt (which I guess is kind of a scam but I think alls fair when it comes to overpriced homegoods).

If you can’t make it to Richmond tonight you can still save 20% until the end of the month throughout the store or online with voucher code S1CVE. *bangs head against wall*

The lesson here, everyone, is to save your receipts. Obviously. God.

Anyway, here is the lamp (crap photo is due to my poor Paint skills). It’s the Suryo floor lamp base in Silver + Tipp small shade in Beetroot Purple. They tie our blue sofas together with my homemade pillows sewn with Jay McCarroll’s Habitat collection (no relation). Now if only I can do something about the drapes…

If you’re going to the Spanish party at Habitat in Richmond tonight, maybe I’ll see you there!

I’m so inspired by the quilts Ashley makes at Film in the Fridge. Recently she’s done a load of strip quilts and I decided to try one. I’ve only started, but I wanted to share the update.

I haven’t finished DSD’s Heather Ross quilt yet. I only just pinned it last weekend. It’s huge. I’m scared to sew it. So I took a break to work on this new project. It’s also excited because I mixed collections which, for me, is scary!

The fabrics here include designs from ‘Modern Meadow’ by Joel Dewberry, ‘Kumari Gardens’ by Dena Designs and ‘Nature Walk’ and ‘My Happy Garden’ by Cloud 9 fabrics. I love the colours and I’m so excited to see it finished. I have no idea what I’m going to back it with but maybe an Anna Maria Horner voile?

The pictures don’t really do the fabrics justice, but I’ll try to take more when I get a little further with the project.

I was at my local fruit and veg shop (that’s George’s if you live in West Hampstead – he’s the best) stocking up for the week and I saw that George had got in tulips and daffodils! I love Spring flowers. The best part is, they are cheap and George was selling daffodils for a mere 50p for 10 stems. I bought three bundles and this is my lovely bouquet in a vase painted by DSD. I love seeing them there, bright and cheerful, every morning!

Apologies for the lousy pic – I snapped it on my phone as I was walking out the door this morning. But you get the point!

Also, those creatures next to the vase are cute little aliens my cousin sewed me for our handmade Christmas this past year.

On Sunday I finally got back to working on DSD’s quilt and as I was sitting there sewing while streaming an episode of Glee at the kitchen table I realised that I should share my free TV tips with all of you.

This post is for you if you want to watch telly while you’re cooking, folding laundry, getting ready for work, in bed or anywhere you don’t have a TV. Or if you want to catch up on old episodes or old series of shows you missed. Or if you want to watch particularly crap American telly that hasn’t made it’s way over here (or American shows one series ahead of where it is here!)

This is also for you if you’re not that bothered about quality. There are clever ways to download pirated video and other methods I haven’t figured out yet – but this is about watching online and sometimes there’s awful quality out there. But if you’re only half watching while you do dishes, do you care? I don’t.

The free TV revelation started when a friend turned me on to SurftheChannel.com. She was living in France and now she lives in Spain – places where it is pretty hard to find Glee and 30 Rock, I would imagine. Now I have a few go-to sites when I can’t find the links I need! Here is the cheat sheet:

SurftheChannel.com – Good site, very community driven – which I like – but sometimes poorly organised as a result. I tend to head here now more for films.

Sidereel.com – My latest favourite for telly, although they seem desperate to monetise so you’ve got some annoying videos and adverts popping up. Well organised. A bit crap for films but great for telly.

Yidio.com – Similar to Sidereel but seem to have fewer links. Also a bit crap for films (I think this is because they don’t want to annoy studios.)

Blinkx.com – Great for finding films but I can’t work out how to find telly on here.

Now before you go trying this I have a few more words of advice. These sites basically aggregate links to the shows that are around the web. Some you pay for, some are free. I always look for links from Megavideo. Why can’t I just search on Megavideo? I don’t know, but you can’t, search is rubbish on the site. Megavideo only lets you watch something like 120 minutes at a time before they ask you to buy a subscription or wait an hour. Sometimes I buy a subscription.

The companies that make these shows have caught on to this stuff and now pull a lot of links down so you may get some “removed due to copyright infringement” messages but don’t be discouraged – keep clicking the next few links and you’ll almost always find one they’ve missed.

So what should you watch? Check out Amy Poehler’s Parks & Recreation if you want to fall of your chair laughing or Hellcats with HSM’s Ashley Tisdale playing captain of her university cheer squad for a seriously guilty pleasure.

Any sites I’ve missed? TELL ME NOW!!

It’s been a long time since I posted so I’m bringing you something special! It’s my latest favourite money-saving hack: half price coffee at Starbucks every single day with no voucher necessary.

Step 1: Get a Starbucks card

Step 2: Register it

Step 3: Put some money on it

You can now get a tall filter coffee for 99p when you use your card to purchase. But to take it to the next level…

Step 4: Bring your own cup

You now ALSO get 25p off for doing your part to save the planet (and saving Starbucks money on cups). You’ve now spent just 75p for a tall filter coffee. No voucher. Every day. Yay!

We bought Starbucks design-your-own cups and let DSD decorate them. One is an oil painting and the other is this one – a picture she drew of her father and me “at our wedding.” The wedding is not until September – I love that E is wearing a silver suit and I’m wearing a red dress.

I’m giving away a copy of Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals over here. Go enter!

On Thursday we tried our third recipe from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals, meatball sandwiches with pickled cabbage, chopped salad and banana ice cream. I don’t know if I was just tired because it was almost the end of the week but I just couldn’t make myself work quickly. I also let E help me the whole time because it’s nicer having him in the kitchen with me. We clocked in around 40 minutes.

I have to say I was a bit disappointed with this meal. The meatballs were nice, even though I made a mistake and they were falling apart, and the combination of meatballs, pancetta, jarlsberg cheese and olive oil on ciabatta was gorgeous, but I wasn’t a very big fan of the pickled cabbage. And that’s not because I don’t like red cabbage, for the record. The chopped salad was fine, but the banana “ice cream” was a miss. It was made of frozen bananas, plain yogurt and honey (which actually tasted really nice on it’s own) but then you’re supposed to coat balls of the “ice cream” in chopped coconut and that was messy, awkward and took forever. Then you froze it again. It was a bit odd.

Based on the three recipes I’ve tried from this book, and it’s philosophy, I’m a big fan. I learned a few new fairly quick recipes and I think they’ll only get quicker when I cook them again. And I learned how to use my liquidiser for more prep work, which is great. But once I go back to cook some of my favourite things I’ll definitely do a bit of mixing and matching rather than going strictly by the book.

For more thoughts on this cookbook, my friend A wrote a post here.

Want to win one? Visit the first post in this series!

I’ve been given two copies of Jamie Oliver’s new cookery book, Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals, one for me and one for you! I’m really keen to give my giveaway copy to another blogger, so I can read how you get on with the book, but that’s not a requirement to enter. If you’d like to win, just let me know in the comments and tell me your favourite Jamie Oliver recipe! I’ll draw a winner on 30 November.

Now, if you read the blog you know how much I love Jamie Oliver. His site (and cookery books) are where I head first if I’m looking for a recipe. But he’s been turning out books so frequently even I had to wonder if he really had anything new to offer. And those horrible adverts in the tube with his head on a timer – he winks at you!

When I cook dinner it usually takes a lot more than 30 minutes – and since I have so many projects going on that is frustrating.  But I really want us to eat nice meals, ideally with lots of veg (the very reason I signed up for Abel & Cole). As I read the book’s introduction I started to believe it could be possible to make amazing meals in 30 minutes and maybe it would CHANGE MY LIFE! I picked three recipes to cook this week and see if I could actually do it.

The book is “revolutionary” because of the way it is structured. Jamie gives you an entire menu – usually a main, salad or side and pudding – and then walks you through every step of cooking it in the order you need to do each task. If you can’t picture that, basically it means you’ll jump from main to pudding to main to salad to main, etc. so everything finishes at the same time. It took getting used to but I like it.

The first thing I noticed was how much I’d have to buy to cook these meals. Even with several of the ingredients already in our fridge, freezer or store cupboard, we spent quite a bit at the supermarket to get everything we needed. I suppose I could have made some substitutions – and will in the future – but I stubbornly wanted to follow all of the instructions for the review! The book would benefit if menus were organised by ingredients so you can make sure you use up the various leftover bits and pieces. Shopping lists would then naturally fit in with the menus and I think that would also save time.

Last night I cooked Pregnant Jools’s Pasta with crunchy chicory & watercress salad and (what was intended to be) little frangipane tarts. I finished the pasta and salad at the buzzer (before serving) but had put the tarts in the oven about five minutes behind schedule so that meant I was late. Yes, I used a timer! The pasta was absolutely brilliant and the simple salad was nice. The tarts were a mess (but still tasty) and I think that’s because we couldn’t find the right pastry shells. One suggestion here would be to put a list of required equipment up front so you know what to have close to hand before you start.

All in all, I think I’ll use this book a lot and the first set of recipes I tried were winners. Jools’s pasta will definitely be put into the rotation! Later this week I’m aiming to cook piri-piri chicken and meatball sandwiches, so stand by for more reviews and enter in the comments if you’d like to join me in trying out the book!

Finally, last weekend, I finished knitting E’s scarf and hat. In plenty of time for Winter!

Here is a picture of E in the scarf. Look how long it is – that took ages! I actually love this picture because the red in the scarf matches the red under the umbrella.

And here is the hat. This was actually quite quick:

They are both so cozy and warm. These patterns came from Knit Knack Kit: Simple Instructions and Tools for 25 Terrific Projects by Kris Percival. E gave it to me for my birthday two years ago!