It's been a while ...

There have been much goings-on in our little house of late, dear ones. When I last posted, I was in the middle of a 'hiatus' (read: gut-wrenching gap between jobs) and had a list as long as a long-armed person's arm full of jobs and projects and events and other time-fillers.

Alas. Just as my mood switched from panicked about not finding work to being quite zen about general unemployment and my list went from being one of those all-the-things-you-never-have-the-time-to-do-which-somehow-still-don't-get-done lists to the kind where you're actively making progress, disaster struck: I got another job.

*wail*

Kitty Love

Suddenly, I had to go from slowly emerging out of bed at 8am and having beautiful days of sun, gardening, making stuff and kitty-love, followed by quiet nights of snuggling and yummy dinners to dreary 6am awakenings and 10-hour workdays with people I don't like in offices among snooty City-workers. Yeaugh. The exciting part was the my new 3-month contract offered the opportunity to travel to undisclosed locations in Europe for 2 nights a week. Or so I was led to believe.

Turns out, I was expected to devote 4 days of my life, every week, to working out of a godforsaken margarine factory in the dreariest, shabbiest part of Antwerp you've ever had the misfortune to lay eyes on. Occasional travel to other equally unimaginative areas of Belgium & the Netherlands broke up the monotony occasionally, but ALAS. My still new seedlings and garden-in-progress went to shit. Our kitty babies forgot what I looked like ... and the remainder of summer and all the loveliness I had planned for this year went out the window.  I have learned the hard way that whilst I enjoy the occasional bout of travelling for work, I am not the kinda girl who likes a jetsetting lifestyle. Yes, I would like to travel more extensively - on a recreational basis - and I love getting out of my comfort zone for a spell. But living out of a hotel room and spending up to 18 hours a day with your colleagues (eating every meal, excusing every trip to the loo, laughing at every bad joke) is just a whole other ball game! My patience ran dry remarkably quickly, I fear; and typically my notion of self-preservation was overwhelmed by a need to continue earning an income -- so working through the night (or certainly, til the wee hours) became a very regular occurrence while 'abroad'.

Anyhoo. Enough of the whinging. Nowadays, the original project for which I was employed is nearly over (or so I really, really hope) and there are a few weeks of normalcy looming ahead before Himself & I zoot off to South Africa to spend the Christmas holidays with my lovely family. I've dug up my original list and added another few hundred items to the list (bolstered by many hours of eBay comfort-shopping while stuck in aforementioned hotel room) which will be predominantly sewing-based due to the stinky colder weather slowly creeping into our nook of Londahn.

I'm super-excited to announce the following projects coming up:

1) 1st Birthday presents for the lovely little daughter of (one of) Himself's best men whom we've yet to meet ...
2) newborn garments for the son of a friend whose 30th birthday party we're attending - haven't yet figured out how to explain that I'm not making anything for her! :)
3) a winter coat for our ex-next door neighbour's little one-year-old - they moved away a couple of months ago and I swore I'd make the kid something when we was born ... so I'm a little behind!
4) a few outfits for my adorable little 5-year old niece who we'll be seeing in December
5) something (God knows what ... I'll have to figure that out while making all the bits above!) for my nearly 10-year old nephew who is now in love with all things sport-related
6) and somewhere in there, a winter coat for me - loosely based on the white version of this lovely Project Runway Simplicity pattern.