This week is the last week of school before 10 weeks of summer holidays!! So I have had to get myself into gear and start my clean up plan for the summer. So with the time I had this week on my creative day on Tuesday I made a couple of skirts from some vintage finds I found on my travels. This is a super cute project with adding a elastic waistband and the bottom of a dress and the Box pleated skirt was using the waistband from a vintage dress – the top of vintage finds is usually small and tight for women these days. This skirt works with the waistband from the dress and I added a bit of velcro under the button to close up the skirt. These are smaller doable projects as there are many more things to organize this week!

Butterflies flying away!

Box pleats for a school uniform look!

My last sweet 4 hours of my alone time (for the next 10 weeks!) was spent cleaning out my closet using the famous KonMari Method from the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. It took me the 4 hours to just go through everything. After that I then made a huge mountain of clothes I did not want anymore – the clothes that did not give me joy 🙂 I really like this method and I feel it will be good for me but I am not the only person living here and there is constant chaos around me, so whether my plan can be put into action – who knows!!

I like to be organized and I must admit that when I went to find an outfit this morning it made life a heck of a lot easier to just look in the drawer and see everything neatly folded – let us hope this lasts! The closet was lovely to clear out and hang items of clothing together. that way it is much easier to put outfits together. So I spent the 4 hours during the day to clear out and sort and then I spent another 3 hours in the evening putting everything away and bagging and sorting clothes for donation – whew! I am hoping with some time on my hands over the next ten weeks I can look at other areas of the house too while the kids are playing outside happily!! We can all dream…

Nicely folded and organized

Hanging around in the closet

There has been many a goodbye this week and here is the cake top I designed for a favorite teacher who is moving South. We have all been inspired by his class and enjoyed reading Roald Dahl immensely and I wanted to show our appreciation. I used the cover of Fantastic Mr Fox and gave it a bit of a Photoshop makeover with our teacher as the Fantastic Mr Fox himself!

Farewell to our favorite teacher!

At home my haven is my kitchen and at the end of a day of business it is wonderful to come and cook and make dinner with a glass of wine or two. Here are bowls I have purchased from the ceramics studio I play at, plus a couple of bowls that I made – the yellow hand built bowl and the turquoise thrown bowl with nectarines and cucumbers. There will be more made in the future as clay can be addicting. I love using beautiful bowls when I cook!

Ceramics in action