Hi, welcome to our little corner of Cornwall. My name is Chloe and I live with my husband Jude and three girls along with a cat, a dog and five chickens who roam around our quarter acre allotment. Having never had a garden of my own before, I have been experimenting with growing vegetables and flowers since we moved here two years ago, with varying levels of success. I'm not quite able to stop buying all our food yet, but gradually getting a little closer to that goal!
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| The allotment when we first moved here. |
Working on the allotment has to fit between looking after three pre-schoolers, so it often has to take a bit of a back seat. Our youngest, Tula is just a few months old, Milly in the middle is 2, Jess is 4 and soon to be starting school! Motherhood has for me meant a rediscovery of my creative drive, something which I thought I'd lost having done nothing since finishing my degree in Printmaking in 2000. I started this blog in an effort to keep track of all our progress, and hopefully meet a few friends along the way!
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| And two years on, with three of our hens. |
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| And lots of planting! |
A friend introduced me to a sewing machine for the first time in February 2011 which led to my first quilt, a traditional log cabin for my eldest daughter, followed by several other projects which are in various states of incompletion, amongst them a wildly colourful crazy quilt and a white handsewn quilty-thing and most recently, an English paper-pieced Jacob's Ladder quilt. As well as sewing and quilting, I've also taught myself to knit and crochet! I would love to be able to make my own clothes but for now I'm sticking to scarves and blankets.
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| My very first quilt! |
We are avid recyclers, and utilise any scraps we can find: the quilt above was made almost entirely out of fabric sourced from the local Cornwall Scrapstore, which sadly has been forced to close due to government funding being withdrawn. Below is a picture of 'Jessie's House', a playhouse built by my husband for our girls, all the materials for which were sourced from Freecycle (the structure was made out of old pallets), and on the right a greenhouse he built the year after, again sourcing all the old windows from a glazing company near Bodmin.
