Welcome to Scraphappy Day post for April. Apologies to readers for the long gap recently – any kind of craft work has been a challenge these last few months as I have so little time for myself. As I recently noticed my box of greetings cards is very much depleted I set aside an hour or two to make a few more, so this challenge is about reusing paper items such as old birthday cards and scraps of paper as an alternative to recycling them.
Old greetings cards, thank you notes, postcards and even those art cards you can pick up free at exhibitions and galleries can be turned into new cards. Here are some examples:-
Many of these ‘new’ cards have been made from old cards and the card at the bottom was an ‘art card’ from a gallery and cost me nothing.
I make a little label to stick on the back of the card just to tell people this is recycled.
When I was clearing out the craft room last month (and it is still very much an ongoing project) I found a stack of small colour photocopies I had taken of my own watercolour sketches and turned these into little cards too.
I also came across a sheet of rather lovely printed wrapping paper of vintage seed packets and I have no idea now why I bought this – it must be a few years old – though no doubt it would have been for some craft idea of mine back then and I never got around to it.
Instead of keeping it to wrap up a present I cut around each of the illustrations and together with this pack of handmade 3″ square concertina cards (a find at my local art shop that I bought last year) …..
….I decided to turn these cute little pictures into tiny cards – the idea being that I will send them to friends and family with a pack of flower seeds included.
And here they are in the making – not easy cards to photograph especially with the low light levels at the moment but I think you will get the gist.
It is always worth a visit to all the other ‘crafters’ that take part in the ScrapHappy Day they make some beautiful and inspiring things and below you can link through to their blogs. I am just hoping it is an up to date list.
I have been quite neglectful of my little space here recently….time has just evaded me.
As much as I have wanted to write, and the intention is always there, somehow I just never found that moment….and then when I did WordPress decided it was not going to let me preview my posts. But all good now – I solved the problem before they did.
A lot has happened since my last entry and thankfully I do manage to keep my little journal going that sits by my bed and is a useful memory bank and reminder of why I am not finding the time to write here very often.
I have no doubt that followers, readers and fellow bloggers will be eager for an update just as I am when someone disappears off the scene for any length of time – and I thank those of you who have been in contact, checking I am still here and OK.
And now for the news.
Mum is home now and settled back into her little apartment. It was touch and go whether she would leave the care home or not but she decided to give it a try and in fact we found out during the arrangements that due to the possibility of requiring council funding in the future she had no option but to go back home (*see more details on this below).
She came home on 18th September and from then ’till now she has taken this long to settle in (well as much as she ever will). I do not like to speak ill of people but the social worker appointed was next to useless. One day out of the blue in August I had a phone call from her to say she was going to carry out an assessment on mum and could I be there. Well given I live 90 miles away and she arranged this assessment for 9am one morning, no I couldn’t and my sister was away on holiday too so she couldn’t attend either.
The social worker chose not to rearrange for a time convenient for us and saw mum on her own. Once again she, as the previous social worker, assessed mum as having capacity (which I always question as she cannot retain or undersatnd a lot of information). She assessed her as being able to go back home but NOT requiring 24 hour care even though she had 24 hour care in the care home and required help to get to the toilet in the night. I believe this assessment was more to do with the fact that the council will not provide or pay for 24 hour care outside of a care home if mum wasn’t able to pay her carers privately.
*The shocking side of all this, which mum’s social worker just ‘happened’ to mention and I hope anyone in our situation will take note, is that if an elderly person is assessed as not requiring 24 hour care and they themselves decide they would prefer to be in a care home which is of course 24 hour care and then they become eligible for financial help provided by the local council (once the magic figure of £23,500 of savings has been reached) then the council are not oblidged to step in and pay for your 24 hour care if you were assessed as not needing it. This is very worrying for anyone who does not have enough savings to pay their way privately.
Once the social worker had done the assessment she promptly went on annual leave for 2 weeks without putting in place a leaving date for mum and this cost us another £2,000 in care home fees for a further two weeks delay. It would have cost us over £4,000 as the care home work on a 4 week notice period but the manager decided she would waiver the 2 weeks after mum left because of the failing of the social worker to act promptly.
When the social worker came back from holiday we set a date for mum to leave (Monday 18th September) and she said she would make all the arrangements for a home care package and transport to be in place for that day – which was the following week. Luckily, I rang social services on the Thursday (four days before my mum was due to go home) for an update as I had not heard anything and found that the social worker was not only on holiday again but had done nothing towards getting my mum home. It was now urgent that something was done but social services would not supply another social worker to sort this out so I had to do all the arranging with the care agency and book transport myself with the help of the admin clerk in the social services department who stepped in and was a great help and could only apologise for the social workers lack of arrangements.
Mum now has a care agency going in four times every day as required by the social workers assessment. Her first visit is at 9am when the carer goes in to get her up, washed and dressed and on her last visit at 6pm she is put to bed – which is quite early for mum but the only time the carers had available. She has to eat her lunch around 11.30 and her evening meal around 3.30 when she has the other two visits from the carers during the day. After the last visit she spends 14 hours on her own with no one to help her until the carer appears at 9am again. During this time she cannot get a drink other than water at her bedside, if she is cold she cannot put her heating on -she can just about get herself out of bed to the commode beside her. If she falls or has an emergency she can use the call button she has around her neck. In the care home of course she had a buzzer to summon help to go to the toilet or get a drink made. It is all very sad and this is happening to elderly people up and down the country.
My sister continues to visit her on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday and cooks ready meals for her feezer, does all the washing and cleans throughout the flat. She works full time and has to do her work in the evening on the days she visits in the week. I ring mum every night and visit as often as we can to help my sister and ease mum’s boredom but she is definitely getting worse with her memory and her anxiety levels become so high when my sister is away that she often won’t get up and says she feels ‘off colour’ so the carers will leave her in bed as she feels safer in bed when my sister is away.
Mum pays for her care privately at the moment as she has savings above the £23,500 magic threshold – it costs her almost £800 for the week. Yes you read this correctly! Plus she has all her bills and food on top and the service charge for the apartment and council tax. The care home in comparison was £1090 a week but it was all inclusive and it was one of the cheaper places around Yarm – most of them are about £1,300 to £1,500 per week and this is only if you do not require specialist nursing care or have dementia.
If the local council do have to help with the fees their contribution is of course capped, so if you choose a more expensive place then relatives are expected to put in the additional money called a topup.
My advice is not only to start saving now for your old age but to keep fit and healthy so you can look after yourself as long as possible!!
Our life of course is not all about mum and we have had little snippets of time to take our new baby Chocolate to the park once or twice and we had a free admission day to the National Trust property at Dunham Massey.
During the school holidays we all went to see a local Halloween pantomime called the Haunted House put on by a group of amateur dramatics in the next village. It was exceptionally good – though my back was exceptionally bad and has been recently with a lot of travelling up and down to North Yorkshire to see mum. After the panto we all came back to my house for a buffet tea and the grandchildren had spent the morning making (what has now become a bit of a tradition here) place name cards – in the theme of Halloween.
Granny was a pumpkin.
We had another invasion two weeks later when everyone decended upon us again to celebrate Sweetie’s 5th birthday. She is quite taken with Hello Kitty and my SIL manage to find some stationery from the Hello Kitty era when her girls were young. We made chocolate buns with Hello Kitty toppers and of course more named place cards.
On a cold Saturday evening in November we had a little adventure with master Freddie and baby Chocolate (who slept through the whole event) in Cliffe Woods at Clayton West a village near Denby Dale (of the pie fame and not too far away from us). The event was named ‘Light up the Woods’ – a firework free zone – a trail through woodland that was alight with a wonderful display of recycled rubbish made by local groups and school children.
Since then I have been busy crafting and other such delights and all being well I should be able to give you a glimpse of my ‘efforts’ in the next few days.
Hoping you are all well – I can see most of you are happily blogging away and I am slowly catching up and you may even get a comment or two.
Welcome to the Scraphappy challenge post for March. This challenge uses the tiniest scraps of fabric – those little pieces that you sometimes end up with at the end of a sewing project too small for anything but the tiniest of patchwork – but I save them as they can prove useful as you will see in the pictures below.
For Christmas I made my sister in law and her husband a picnic hamper packed with a few edible goodies, a handy flask and a copy of The Picnic recipe book.
To make it a bit more special and personalised I made them a napkin each with their names on. I used a couple of inexpensive white cotton napkins I bought from Sainsbury’s years ago and that I had stashed away in my craft drawer (for a project that I can’t even remember now!) and machine embroidered their names on……
…..and using an assortment of the tiny fabric scraps appliqued a simple flower design.
I say simple as it was the first time I had ever done any free hand machine embroidery and it took quite a bit of concentration ….but I was quite pleased with the result.
It might even be something that I make again or perhaps I will do a tea cosy or I am sure my two granddaughters would love a personalised pillowcase each – I still have plenty of tiny scraps to go at!
If you enjoyed this post do venture over to the other bloggers to see what they have been making. There are two new members to welcome to the group this month. Just click on each of the names below to link through to their blogs.
This might seem a rather unusual Scraphappy challenge post as it is using up scraps of wood, but I thought you might be interested to see them even though it was not actually me, but DH that made them – I just made the endless cups of coffee.
When our grandchildren came along DH decided he wanted to make a set of Froebel Blocks for them (they are a kind of teach by playing type of thing – you can Google it if you want to know more). So with this idea in mind he disappeared into the garage one day and unearthed a load of off cuts from some lengths of beech that we had once used for the finishing rail along the waist height boarding in the shower room – and once cut into shape these were the basis of the different sized blocks. The boxes with little slide on lids he made from some off cuts of thin plywood. He never throws any bits of old wood away after a project but often finds a use for it.
I think he made a really good job of them and all the grandchildren love them. The only piece we had to buy was a short off cut length of a round piece of beech from a place that we pass in Penrith when we go up to Scotland. He emerged from the garage 3 weeks later with all these boxes of carefully cut, sanded and varnished building blocks complete with a storage box and identification picture pasted on the lid.
If you enjoyed this post do venture over to the other bloggers to see what they have been making.
where the journey takes me 2 