Introducing the Pointy Nosed Pooch and Finding Balance

It’s funny how sometimes you don’t realise what is missing in your life until it is reintroduced and then you’re left wondering how you ever coped without it.

Back when I started this blog (nearly 7 years ago now) one of the main drivers was because I was feeling swamped by my day job and I wanted to force myself to make the time for all the crafty things I enjoy. It may seem a bit like a backwards way of doing things, but I was determined to actually do some of the things that I was reading about on other people’s blogs, and for me a way to do that as to make myself write about what I got up to on my own blog. Hence Being Mrs C was born.

Since then my life has obviously changed and what I’ve been writing about has changed too. Things are increasingly busy and as a result my crafting had taken a back seat, but I hadn’t realised just how much I was missing it in my life. I was getting much more stressed about things and angry with myself that I didn’t have time to do the things I wanted. As a result I wasn’t actually managing to do the things I needed to as well as I should, and hence getting more annoyed with myself.

A couple of weeks of everyone being ill resulted in me returning to crafting as I couldn’t do much else, and suddenly it’s like I’ve found a missing part of the puzzle. Not only did I make Flop, but also this adorable pointy nosed pooch and I’m feeling a calm and balance that I haven’t had in ages. More about the dog in a minute, but I’ve realised how much I need to make things for my own sanity and once I’m carving out small bits of time in each day to do so I’m doing a better job of all the things that need doing in the rest of my time.

I’m not sure how I got it all so wrong, but I’m determined to make it right again. Each day I will have at least 30 minutes of making – whether that be sewing, knitting, crochet or something else entirely – but I must make that time happen.

So, on to the dog. This little man was originally a cover project with Homemaker magazine (issue 21, August 2014) and the fabric for it has been sat on my desk for a while. The pattern pieces were all pre-printed and I just needed to cut them out, line them up, and follow the instructions to stitch it all together.

The problem I found was that the printing wasn’t quite as accurate as maybe it should have been, so a few modifications had to be made to make it all fit right, but this didn’t take too long. I sewed all of it up on my sewing machine, just leaving the final seam on his tummy to be done by hand once he’d been stuffed. The sewing made me realise how out of practice I am with sewing round curves on my machine – something to try to master over my next few projects. During the stuffing stage I also put a curtain weight in each foot to give him a bit of stability.

I’m quite pleased with the finished result. He’s far from perfect, but he’s going to sit on the windowsill next to my desk as a reminder of my need to make to regain balance in my life. I’m rather fond of my pointy nosed pooch and what he symbolises.