A bad day for stitchery...

Today has been something of a sewing disaster...my Mama had bought swathes of black linen so that I might make a skirt for her...but we both quickly came to realise that a skirt is not like a smock or even a wrap dress....a skirt has to fit perfectly to be acceptable day wear, and a mermaid skirt that fits snugly on the hips, cinches in and then kicks out from the knee is by definition a precision-fitted garment. Blogsters, it went wrong. I had used one of my mother's existing skirts as a template, and even though, when placed one on top of the other, the cut appears identical, once on, my skirt had the effect of making my dear mother look a very strange shape indeed (which is not her way at all, for she is quite lovely!). On discovering that I had temporarily turned my mother into an upside-down pear, I also realised that I had only 15 minutes in which to get to the post office to pick up a parcel before it closed and raced out of the house in something of a fluster, nearly crashing the car no less than three times on my way there (lesson learnt: never drive immediately after a stitchery disappointment...it causes one to make poor judgements). However, on my return I raced up the stairs to find that my sweet mother had tidied up the fabric, pins and lint that only half an hour earlier had been littering much of the floor and there was instead only the happy smell of just-hoovered carpet (a smell of warm cleanness...or is the warm smell just our overheating vacuum cleaner, the result of Mr Teacakes throwing a vital part away when emptying the bag one day?).

I think we were both a little disappointed by the skirt debacle, but if one must draw positives (and yes, one must) then I should tell you how very satisfying inserting a concealed zip can be when you have one of these special feet above....its design means you simply cannot do a bad job...your stitches stay in a perfectly straight line and are as close to the actual zip as is humanly possible, while preventing you from ever going so close as to get your stitches stuck in the teeth. So much fun.

Looking for other positives (for the day was bad in other ways too...poor Dinosaur-boy had to be wrenched from me, and his fingers unpeeled from my clothing when I dropped him off at nursery...his trial afternoon at school seems to have induced a severe case of separation anxiety), then seeing my jeans lying on the bed this evening next to this Missoni foulard scarf would be one of them. This was bought for me several years ago, pre-children and packed away with so many of the clothes that I boxed up the summer that we moved house when I was pregnant with Zebra-girl. It was only last year that I re-found this forgotten piece of loveliness and I have since been utterly delighted by it, for it isn't something that I can imagine choosing now, but there is a youthfulness that I find in the wearing of its lovely strands that reminds me of our old life in London.

But this weekend has not felt so dissimilar from that life, for Mr Teacakes and I went to a wedding, had old friends sleeping on our sofas, read the Sunday papers in bed, enjoyed a long lunch at our favourite restaurant and slept away the afternoon, as the little Teacakes visited their grandparents, rode on the beautiful Christmas (pictured below, a gift that my father bought for my mother a couple of years ago) and visited the seaside on a shell-collecting mission. They returned home tired and happy and full of stories of what they had been up to...but then nearer bedtime full of tears for a weekend that had passed too quickly.

So today after the upset of dropping two crying children off at their respective educational pods, ruining a skirt, and being unsettled by my own bad driving, I am also finding these matryoshka tins (there is also a blue and a red one) to be quite the most perfect thing to gaze upon in order to bolster flagging spirits. Isn't she gorgeous?

Oh, and the rose at the top of this post - I am quite in love with it. I took a picture of it when we were out walking near my parent's house last week - and now it is for Mama....with much sorriness about the skirt and with appreciation (in equal measure) for her laughing with me about it. x