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).

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.

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!

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!

Here is where things stand with my quilt project. I finally finished the star-pattern quilting and the first step of the binding. I think I’ve really made soooo much work for myself by trying to make things fancy with that quilting idea and using two fabrics for binding but I’m in the home stretch, only the hand whipstitching left to do I think!

I used this video tutorial for the binding instructions and found it really helpful. Well…maybe I shouldn’t give credit before I’m finished! If it comes out right it will have been really helpful! Thank goodness for YouTube, don’t you agree?

It’s Halloween week, it’s half term for many of you, and there are so many fun things to do! I am going to try to post as many Halloween events, sales and activities as possible this week, starting with…

Halloween jack-o-lanterns! Yes, we got started a bit early this year and carved up our pumpkins over the weekend. Aren’t they scary?? Here are some helpful tips I posted up last year for your pumpkin carving project.

Now, I have it on the authority of my Abel & Cole newsletter that if you go post your jack-o-lantern snaps to their Facebook wall they’ll send you some chocolate. Here is a screenshot of my newsletter for proof, because I can’t find a mention of this on the site. But anyway, what have you got to lose?

For some reason lately I’ve actually been attracting money. I don’t know why and I reckon I’m jeopardising the streak by writing about it but I wanted to document it. I’m not an exceptionally lucky person so this is noteworthy and exciting. I keep thinking back to figure out if I’ve DONE anything to make this happen, but everything looks different retrospectively. And I’m really not convinced The Secret works anyway…

So here is where the money has been coming from over the past few weeks:

*I found a 50p coin and two 5p coins in different locations on the same day (don’t laugh, it does get better)

*Work-related bonuses (a client renewal and a couple of other bits and pieces)

*A significant and unexpected tax refund (and not the one I’ve been fighting for for nearly a year!)

*I’ve had higher than usual site income this month (mainly advertising)

*I won a  £10 Marks & Spencer voucher at a trade show

Places where the money is NOT coming from:

*My colleagues and I did not win the £113 million Euromillions despite buying 10 tickets (oh well)

With this crazy luck lately, I expect there is no reason why I can’t pay my bills off by the end of the year!

This weekend I taught DSD how to sew by hand and it was brilliant! I’ve tried to teach her to knit, which she likes but still struggles with a bit (she’s five and a half) and we’ve done some sewing projects on the machine that I let her help with (she presses the peddle but I admit that sometimes terrifies me!), but finally with hand-sewing she was able to do a project more or less on her own.

Sewing clothes for dolls and stuffed animals is a great way to start kids out. Our project, as you can see, was trousers for Bear (the top was the one he came with). They don’t really fit him properly as I just cut off a big square of fabric and didn’t do a lot of measuring but I don’t think that really matters – it was more about the activity than the result.

You don’t need to run out and buy fabric for this project – it’s a great way to use up your scraps or even bits of worn out clothes. DSD picked out the fabric from of my leftover quilt pieces that she determined were boy-appropriate (Bear is a boy). We picked a contrasting thread to make it easy to see the stitches and I helped her thread it on my biggest needle. Then I held the fabric tightly while she did the sewing, which made it easy to see where the next stitch would go. She caught on quickly and the level of dexterity needed for this was perfect for her. She tried big stitches and tiny close together stitches and zig-zags.

I highly recommend helping your kids learn to sew! It’s such a useful skill, it’s fun and it really doesn’t cost very much (if anything!) to do small projects like this.