hippos for flights

I'm not sure if I mentioned - by my lovely husband is not from Australia. He hails from far across the seas. So with little Miss E in tow, we packed up and prepared to travel to far away lands to introduce her to the family. But before we left, I was a little nervous about how a 3 month old baby would go on long haul flights.

So being it being the Internet age, I googled and unsurprisingly there was a lot of very useful stuff out there. I won't link it all up, if you are interested you can search for yourself I'm sure. I also won't do a list of tips for travelling with babies - there are already heaps out there (for example: check out this list by my lovely friend Lisa). What I will do it show you what I almost made (my lovely step-mother provided the actual crafty hands for this one).

One of the suggestions I read about was to pack each change of baby clothes in an individual zip lock bag - thus enabling you to take a quick change to the plane toilets. I thought more about this, and decided it would be more useful to have a small bag in which I could put all I needed for a nappy change, so I wouldn't have to wrestle the full nappy bag along with baby in the confined space. Seeing I was staying with my step-mother at the time, I asked her about her fabrics and she came up with this:

So perfect!
We then designed the bag together - with button closings at the top and a little wrist strap (leaving both hands free to wrestle baby / hold onto seats as I headed to the toilets). And ta da:



My step-mother did the sewing, whilst I fed little Miss E. And there you have it - hippos for flights.

NB:  I confess, I have it on good authority that the bag was very useful - it turned out that it was my lovely husband not me who did all the airborne nappy changes!

a pillow pal

i did a random and unexpected bit of op-shopping today. and came across this... a CPR "pillow pal". what fun! a pillow case designed to help you remember and practice your cardio-pulmonary resuscitation.

i definitely couldn't leave it there, not with my continuing pillowcase obession. for 99 cents this gem was mine. but what to do with it?

well, a little lace, a little scrap material, and here you have it, the latest addition to my ever-growing bag collection. 

i love the way it looks on the inside too... 

holidays and projects

aren't holidays so much fun! mine were full of all sorts of lovely goodness. much food and family and friends and beaches and hanging round at home and (whispers quietly) cricket and of course, crafting... 

oh the crafting i did - making, sewing, unpicking, threading buttons, crocheting. and as i slowly drag myself back into the everyday, i am keen to share some of my holiday projects...

the owl bag:

see, i got a request for a bag. i thought and thought and decided it should be made out of a pillowcase (ok, a fairly obvious choice given my current obession), lined with the sheet, and with a thread sketched design - an owl. 

see:

and it has a little internal pocket for the keeping of a phone, and a zip to keep the things inside it all secure...

i am really happy with it, and so is it's new owner! don't you love it when you sit down with an idea in your head and by the end of the afternoon, there it is in front of you!