The work we had done in the house was to have some super ceiling-height shelves built in our living room. I’m all about the storage right now, and these are perfect for what we need! I’ve had a little desk built in as well which means that my computer could come downstairs, which is really handy. All of my craft supplies (except for the fabric stash) are downstairs as well, which is so much easier than having to go upstairs every time I have forgotten something else. A perfect solution to not having a craft room I think! We are still organising everything (we have a LOT of books/music/stuff) so I haven’t actually taken any finished photos yet, except for one of my rainbow-organised craft books that you can see above. It was a lot of fun sorting them like this!

I haven’t really done that much crafting recently, but I have made Christmas cakes this year using the recipe that my Mum used to make. Can’t wait to try it! I was a bit late with getting the recipe up in time for this year, but I’ll be taking photos to schedule it for 2016. I marzipanned and iced it last weekend, which involved a lot of checking that the marzipan was ok haha!

In other news, I was so excited to see that Pip Lincolne (author of the amazing book Craft for the Soul) has read my review of her book and left me the most gorgeous comment! It really made my day! For those of you wanting to buy the book, it will be released in the UK next year – or if you can’t wait then you can read my review and find out how I got mine…

And finally, I have left my biggest news until the end…I am pregnant! We are absolutely delighted and can’t wait for Baby to arrive in the spring! So, when I first decided to extend my blog holiday I had a lot of morning sickness (which is such a ridiculous name, as it isn’t just restricted to mornings!) and was super tired. With that and everything happening at home, not forgetting a sudden and unexpected move to a new team in my day job, my crafting an blogging just had to give way for a while. I totally underestimated how tiring it would be, and even now that I’m well into my second trimester I still find myself falling asleep early in the evenings (or during the afternoon on my days off!). But I’m pleased to say that everything is going really well and I’m just SO excited about starting our family.

In terms of blogging, my posts will probably be more infrequent, although I am very keen to keep up with my blogging whenever I can. I know that life is about to change completely and so we’ll just have to see what happens! Hats off to all those blogger mums who manage to keep things going – I’m not sure if I’ll have the energy or time for that! But thank you to you all for sticking with me I still intend to blog about the things I make and do so that hasn’t changed. We’ve already decided that we don’t want to share photos of our little one online, so this won’t be turning into a baby blog – there are plenty of other excellent blogs like that already so I’ll leave it to the pros. I’ll try and put together a few more posts before Christmas, so there will be more to see here than there has been of late…thanks for your patience, friends!

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Despite the weather, our wildflower meadow in the front garden is growing really well! This is a photo from earlier last month, and it has filled out much more since then. It must be all that rain with the odd bit of sun that has actually done the trick! My favourites are the poppies and we’ve had a good variety of them. I love that they just grow wherever they like too, especially the ones growing out of the doorstep!

I read lots of great things in July. I really enjoyed reading this post by Melanie at Geoffrey and Grace, which is all about slowing down – life dictates that we do things right now, but it’s good to slow things down a little sometimes. Appreciate the little things. I have also been reading The Crossroads of Should and Must by Elle Luna which has been a wonderful companion to Pip Lincolne’s Craft for the Soul (click here to read my review of that). I’ll get around to writing a review for this one soon too – it’s a great book.

My YouTube channelwent live this month – thanks so much to everyone who has watched so far! I’m currently working on a few more projects to share with you so watch this space. I’ve been doing a lot of sewing recently so hoping to blog about that soon – got a couple of new patterns to try out, including the Bettine by Tilly and the Buttons which I love!

What projects have you been working on?

The post Bits & bobs: July 2015 appeared first on Hello! Hooray!.