London Days with My Mom

I had a great time while my mom was in town, but, alas, she's gone home now. While she was here though we had a great time. I took her back to some of her favorite places, Liberty being on the top of that list, and my mom also loved Islington, which is a great neighborhood. In Islington we went to a handful of places but the highlights were Ottolenghi (delicious food), the Camden Passage Market (small but nice antique market though too expensive for me), Loop (a wonderful knitting shop!), and Maison d'etre, (which has the best coffee in Islington and is adorable too). My mom loved every place we went to in Islington. We could have easily spent more than one day there. We also went to Ray Stitch, which is a fabric store and cafe and where I look forward to taking a class sometime in the future.

I also got some little crafty projects done like this little patchwork house. I've been wanting to try machine embroidery for a while now and decided to wing it. I love some of Poppy Treffry's work and hoped I could do something with a similar feel to her work in her book Fee and Easy Stitch Style. I (mostly) followed a design I saw in one of my favorite crafting books, A Passion for Quilting and Patchwork and I love how it turned out! I didn't quilt it but just backed it with fabric and will simply hang it on the wall. It's very cute and I'm looking forward to more machine embroidery. These photos were at night and with my phone, so it's a bit darker and more muted here than it looks in person. Instructions I've read recommend a darning foot, which has a sort of guard to protect your needle and your fingers from the needle. Although I didn't use one, I would recommend it. I'm lucky I didn't sew a finger! You have to be careful.

My mom also helped me quite a bit around the house. I've been a little grumpy that we've almost lived here a year and every room to me looks like we just moved in a few months ago (some empty walls, boxes of stuff in corners, etc), so I was happy to have her help to straighten things up and get some rooms in order. Ellie's room, being one of those, is coming along. I just need a few more pictures and some lamps to fill things out and then I'll show some photos. But I made her some fun fabric letters that I've hung from fishing wire in front of the wall with wallpaper (since I don't want to nail into it). Here they are below before I hung them. But I need to figure out how to keep them from falling. I've taped them up, but you can see the tape (though it's clear) and the "E" keeps falling! The ceiling is like our walls, hard as steel, so I can't put a little hook or nail in it easily, so I have to figure that one out. In the meantime, these are the letters. At Liberty in the children's section they had letters like this that spelled Liberty in Liberty fabrics, and I thought it was a fun idea so I copied it when I got home!