Rainbows

I’ve been working on this during every spare moment since my Scrap or Save post…

Unfortunately, what with Oliver’s ridiculous sleep habits of late and an abundance of work, spare moments have been few and far between. I’ve been snatching time which would otherwise be wasted: journeys in the car (when I’m a passenger!) and as 10 minutes downtime before I sleep at night (to ‘switch off’ after having spent all evening at the screen).

Still, I’m really quite pleased with it. It was a bit of an on-a-whim project; & I’ve only made a few mistakes which is nice :) It’s going to be for my bed, which is a super king, so quite a way to go before it’s finished…

Posted on: November 28, 2012 · Category: Misc 9

Scrap or Save

I have been a little frazzled recently, and in an attempt to get some ‘down time’ away from the screen was planning on doing a bit of crochet again. I say “a bit”, because as it stands I have never actually completed a project. In the cot next to my bed (which is used to store clothes, lest you think I’ve given up co-sleeping) is a project I started for the birth of my nephew. My nephew turned 7 this year.

Anyway, I was going to take my hooks and wool on holiday with me at the weekend but unfortunately couldn’t find them before we were due to leave (note to self: do not ever again try to get all packing done in the space of 2 hours right before you leave whilst juggling a baby and a toddler).

On a hunch, I checked the wardrobe earlier and lo and behold, two boxes of yarn (acrylic) and my hooks, as well as various projects I’ve started from over the years. I am thinking about actually finishing a couple of these, but don’t know which to choose. So I’m handing over the decision to you guys… scrap or save? Pick your favourite two, I will endeavour to finish them at some point in the next millenium and might even photograph my progress.
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Posted on: October 24, 2012 · Category: Misc 10

Turf Wars

In August last year, we bought 21 rolls of turf on a whim to replace a large patch of gravel out the back without a) measuring the garden or b) making preparations beforehand. It took 3 days to de-gravel, de-concrete and then lay the turf which, having been sat outside a local Homebase, was already way past its best.

By some miracle we managed to buy exactly the right amount of turf, and ended up with:

Which, a week later, looked like:

Not bad, eh?

Unfortunately, that lush green look didn’t last. It turns out that if you lay turf on heavy clay soil without digging/preparing the earth first, and then it pees it down with rain for months on end (aka Winter) you end up a mini-swamp and dead grass (hi Flymo!):

It has taken several months of fairly intensive raking, forking (in an attempt improve drainage) and sprinkling handfuls of compost (to hopefully improve the soil) as well as one epic bag of grass seed (10kg “family lawn seed” from B&Q) to give us:

Which, ironically, needs cutting. Again. This grass lark is hard work.

Still. That batch of turf was a bargain.

Posted on: May 29, 2012 · Category: Home & Garden 8

Follow up: February’s Move to WordPress (Again)

In February, I made the decision to move back to WordPress after over two years of using my own blog system / Habari. It was a combination of lack of time to keep things secure (compared to WordPress which has single-click upgrade) and the need to have somewhere I could quickly “just write” without juggling maintenance + toddler.

So anyway, follow-up. How do I feel about it now? Great decision, looking back. Don’t get me wrong, I miss Habari. It was quirky, fast and simple; a well-coded system. The path which WordPress is taking though is fascinating. It would be no exaggeration to say that WordPress stuff has formed the bulk of my work for clients this year, and I have had the opportunity to learn/try out so many awesome things.

One project I’m currently bringing to completion is the migration of an existing e-commerce store to a WordPress backend, using custom post types to power the product section and custom taxonomies to tag/categorise products. This tagging, and the power of WordPress’ built-in queries/functions, has allowed me to create a massive bespoke faceted navigation (think Amazon where you drill down the options on the side … Shoes > Size 7 > Brown > etc) in just a few hundred lines of code.

How is this related to my blog? Well, I’m excited by it, and I don’t get excited by code that often any more. :P I can’t wait until the project is live and I have the time to share some of the neat stuff I’ve written / what WP can do & improve THIS site too. Watch this space…

Posted on: December 21, 2011 · Category: Work

Sat in the car…

…next to Izz, who’s fast asleep in her car seat. Typing feels weird, because the skin on my fingers has been shredded from shovelling gravel and lifting concrete.

We went out to try and buy Isabel a slide yesterday, and while we couldn’t find one (end of season, all shops seem to be swapping garden lines for other stuff) we did find a batch of turf on offer. And so, with our long term plan to turf the garden and the unwillingness to pass up on a bargain, we bought it… 21 rolls. (Note: without measuring the garden.)

And so we’re turning this:

back garden

into (yes, ok, it’s photoshopped. badly. come on, I’m using a touchpad!):

So, as well as not measuring, here’s some other things we didn’t do:

  • Look at/check how much gravel was actually in the back garden
  • Check how the stone patio circle thing was put in place
  • Look up how to lay turf

Discovering that you have an area of about 1.8m x 3m covered by 6 inches of gravel and a patio stuck in place with 3 inches of concrete and another 2 of builders sand, after you’ve already bought the turf? Incentive to work harder, ha. We’re 3/4 done…

Bitten off more than we could chew? Perhaps. But it was a bargin! ;)

Posted on: August 29, 2011 · Category: Home & Garden