My fabric is here and I am dazzled by it..literally

All that time spent glancing out of our front windows in the hope of spotting a Royal Mail van, when actually I could have settled myself much more comfortably on the doormat and waited instead for the customs notice to be posted through the letterbox....what a wasted week! For after visiting friends in the morning (because I decided that for the sake of my children and my sanity I must tear myself away from obsessive window watching and drying my hair with the doorbell positioned near my ear) and then going to several shoe shops to find the elusive school shoe that would be declared 'comfortable' by Dinosaur-boy, we returned home to find a rather dour-looking grey postal card telling me that my fabrics couldn't be delivered as they had incurred a £23 customs charge that I needed to pay first. I drove quite joyfully down to the collection depot (hugely relieved that they hadn't been lost) and Zebra-girl and I had a few rousing choruses of It's a Long Way to Tipperary on the way, before Dinosaur-boy said grumpily 'What is this Tipperary that you speak about?' and Zebra-girl told him very sincerely that Tipperary was the name of a fairy and implored him to join in....mmm.

If the fabric wasn't so absolutely breathtakingly, astoundingly, deliciously divine I think I would have felt a little distressed by it's sudden price-hike per yard, but thrillingly I don't care at all because it is worth every penny and I don't think I have ever ordered a more lovely bundle of fabrics. You might spot that it is a mixture of Sandi Henderson and Heather Bailey...and the surprise is that they go beautifully together, sharing so many of the same tones. I ordered it from Beth in the States, who is lovely and whose fabrics always arrive looking so crisp and fresh. You can read more on her blog here.

Yes, I arranged it in every imaginable configuration....and then when it was time to pre-wash it I must confess to allowing myself a couple of minutes sitting in front of the glass portal spying the the sweetshop of colours spinning around.

When not involved in that rather characteristically feline activity I set about making a birthday cake for a friend...imagine, I thought to myself, the fun of combining the perfected (yes, they are now pink on the inside and the outside - thank you so much for all your advice) alien meringues set on a smooth pink layer of icing, a top a butter cream-filled sponge sandwich. And so I set to work (an horrific egg splattering incident took place with the blender, but these things don't get a girl down when she has the most perfect fabrics spinning around her utility room...she just breathes a big sigh of relief that they were in the washing machine at the time and not on the breakfast bar where they had sat only ten minutes earlier and sets about de-egging her hair, clothes, shoes and kitchen). I have no idea how , but this rather strange creation took me nearly four hours to complete, and is not quite what I had been envisaging, but I know that it will make my lovely friend, Melon (as Dinosaur-boy calls her) laugh, so that is fine.

I decided to tumble dry my pre-washed fabrics, because it gives them the best chance of remaining stable if they're ever naughtily dried in this way once they're made up into finished items. So by ten o'clock they were ready to iron. The ironing only seemed to take me five minutes and I was quite delighted by the fabrics seemingly anti-wrinkle properties...until I looked at the clock and realised that actually it was past midnight and that they had in fact been no easier to iron than any other cotton...I'd just been gazing at the prints so much I hadn't noticed the time go by.

When I look back on it the whole cake-making/pre-washing/egg splattering/ironing sequence it all seems slightly surreal and now I realise that I may actually have been suffering slightly with pre-migraine wooziness...for I woke happily and made myself a cup of dandelion tea and took it back to bed, but by the time I had finished it the flashing zigzags in front of my eyes had become so intense that I could barely decipher which box might contain aspirin. Our visiting plans for the day were cancelled (which I felt really upset about as it is a friend that I so look forward to seeing, but if I can drive in the morning then we still have it too look forward to) and Mr Teacakes came home at midday bearing pharmaceuticals powerful enough to make me feel that I had lost control of all my facial muscles less than an hour later. Until that time I have memories of the children lying round me in the bed testing my reflexes and heartbeat with their doctor's kit and generally causing my head pain to intensify, but with too little will left about me to ask them to stop.

And then my mother arrived with these beautiful roses, and cards and envelopes so that the Little Teacakes might make me 'get well soon' cards. And now I am feeling quite exhausted by all this typing so am off to bed. Sleep tight. x