Sew crazy :-)

 

Thanks very much for all your get well wishes on my last blog post.  My arm is getting a bit better sometimes and then worse others but I am sure with time it will heal.  I suppose it doesn't help that I can't just sit down and do nothing - if I am watching tv I have to be creating at the same time.

One of my creations this week includes this little lovely which was designed by Lili Popo.  Quite a few of us are taking part in her princess embroidery group.  We all get sent the same design and then add it to flikr to see how we all interpret it.  This is my little princess:

I really enjoyed creating her and the creative paths it took me down in my head :-)  She just had to have some daisies somewhere and some Mary-Jane shoes.

I also created this brooch for me last week.  It took a while cutting out all the felt shapes which then sat there for a while whilst waiting to have time to create it ....

I added beads in the middle to add some sparkle to it :-)

I also had a go at free-style embroidery on the machine recently - oohh what fun it is, I did manage to break one needle though.

I was rather pleased with the result of my first attempt until I looked on the reverse ......

I then thought I might be because I had the hoop the wrong way up for this technique but it didn't make a difference when I tried again.  I tried to tighten the tension but think I may have to play a bit more to get it right.

With my love of sewing at the moment I invested in a thread sorter - it is so much easier finding the exact thread I need for a job now and all the colours look delicious in their little box.

Whilst on a sewing frenzy I also created some new hairclips - I have wanted to create some butterflies for some time but wanted to make them look like they had just landed on the clip.  This is what I came up with.  I was really pleased when I listed them on my facebook page and they went within a few minutes of me putting them on there :-)

  

As my page is getting more busy I ordered myself some Moo Cards - I have seen other peoples cards and just had to have some myself :-)  I ordered quite a few designs - I love the way you can upload so many images to the site to get them printed off.

The only draw back of facebook and blogging is that you find so many tempting things out there.  I am trying very hard to be good as I really want to get rid of my mortgage before I am 40 having had one since I was just 19 but some things just keep on calling me !  Luckily with Christmas I got some money so I bought myself a lovely new Amber necklace from Giraffe Jewellery.  Actually this was Bears Footprints fault as she had one of these and I fell in love with it, luckily she gave me permission to get one too :-)  It came packaged in some lovely giraffe print paper and a cute little box.

I also bought this lovely keyring for my eldest Sweetpea.  He is getting into beekeeping so I asked Pippa to put a little bee on it.  This is his first house key, now he is at secondary school he can let himself in when he gets off the bus - oh how he is growing up :-(  It has been quite hard seeing him go off on the bus in this snowy weather we have been having here.  I have always been the one to look after him and keep him safe and now I have to trust a stranger to drive him to school on a big bus safely - all part of slowly letting him go I suppose.

Talking about snow, we have had lots of the lovely white stuff.

The chickens weren't sure about it at all !  It took them days to come out of their shed.

The children loved it and I am so glad it fell on a Sunday here so they could play in it all day long.  They made a snowman with the traditional carrot nose .........

But then Charlie took a liking to it when my back was turned for 20 seconds :-)

 

We were snowed in so I couldn't get to work either which was lovely (although I love going to work so missed my usual Sunday fun at the same time). 

Better be good and go now I suppose as my arm is aching - little Sweetpea has fallen asleep in it :-)  Thanks for popping by and all your lovely comments x

Keeping cosy but still having fun outside :-)

It is chilly here in the UK at the moment (well not as chilly as over in places like Russia or Canada but chilly for our standards :-)).  This week the temperatures have been going down to -10 degrees in some areas so I have been keeping the woodburner going non-stop and to save a few pennies I have been popping my kettle on top and enjoying waiting for the whistling sound to call me.

Now I don't usually like cold weather but I have been looking forward to some frosty weather so I can have a play with ice :-) 

Some time go I saw an idea for making your own ice art.   As soon as the icy weather was upon us I rummaged through the cupboard for a nice flat based dish and rummaged through the garden for some arty items :-)

I chose some lovely fennel seed heads and holly berries.  I popped them out over-night and waited until morning came to see if my creations had been created for me by Mother Nature.

They look so pretty swinging in the gentle wind - like rubies set in glass.

I love how they look against the sky and with the sparkle they create when the sun reflects off them.  Little Sweetpea has loved this experiment too, she has bought them in and sat then near the fire to see how they melt slowly.  She then popped bits of ice on her hand and is amazed by how it melts because of her body temperature.  She turned to me and told me how it was 'magic'  - she is right :-)   Obviously I told her why it was melting and how but I like the idea of it being magic.  PS if you are doing this with your children please be careful which berries you use, I was very careful to keep an eye on my little one as I didn't want her eating holly berries and being sick.

Another thing making me smile this week is Eldest Sweetpea running past the window with batons of wood.  What was he up to?  When I asked he told me he was making a bee hive.  He is hoping some of Mr Sweetpea's honey bees will see the new home he has made and move house :-)  I went out to the shed and this is what I found.  He has even carved an entrance hole out for them and put wire mesh on - oh how I love his DIY ways - it makes up for his hormonal outbursts :-)

Middle and little Sweetpea have been busy looking after the chickens.  The chickens are still enjoying pottering around the garden, I don't think my hellebore's are enjoying them being out though :-(  We had one chicken jump up at our dining room window yesterday, goodness knows how it got there as it is all locked off.  She was so happy to be re-united with her mates and they were very happy to see her too - you could hear them clucking about her arrival.

I had better be off , I am afraid I am not allowed on the pc as much at the moment due to being diagnosed with tendonitis :-(  I have been told to take ibuprofen 3 times a day and to limit things that exasperate it.  I will keep reading blogs and love reading your comments too but please forgive me if I don't respond or comment as much as usual. 

Take care
Zoe
xxxx

Goodness me .......................

Goodness me, can it already nearly be the end of January?  It seems that in a blink of an eye we have shot past from Christmas and a whole month has nearly past by :-(  I have also realised that it is 2 years since I started blogging!   oohh I do love this blog world, full of inspirational people - thanks for being here and reading my little blog , it really does warm my heart when I read your comments.   Hhmmm I think I will have to have a little giveaway soon to celebrate :-)

So what have I been up to the last few weeks?  Well ages ago, October in fact, I bought some tulle to make little Sweetpea a tutu for her birthday.  October came and went and on Christmas Eve I decided to create her tutu for her.  It turned out really well and she loves it as you can see :-)

Little Sweetpea mid-jump :-)

I created it with white tulle, sparkly glitter tulle and bright pink tulle.  I then added some apple green ribbon and a bright pink ribbon bow at the back.

She loved modelling this on my bed, leaping all over the place and dropping sparkles everywhere.  I went to work the next day covered in glitter, no one was really surprised though as they are used to me now :-)  She is such a girlie girl which is rather lovely after having an older son and daughter who only wears trousers.  If you want to make one I used this tutorial and bought the tulle from here.

For the Making Winter project this month I thought I would share something I made a little while ago to use up my glut of tomatoes. The recipe came from the River Cottage Handbook no 2 of Preserves - I love this book :-)  I made my tomatoes into roasted tomato passata.   

Basically I roasted the tomatoes with garlic, shallots (so many that I wore goggles when cutting them all up :-)), rosemary, salt, pepper, sugar and oil and then took the skins off the tomatoes (they just peeled off when they were cooked).  I then popped it all in the blender to puree it and jarred it up in sterile jars.

It made the most lovely pasta sauce and was also fantastic as a pizza topper.  I will definitely be making this again next year ! 

Talking of tomatoes, I miss my little veggie patch and can't wait to get out there in the Spring.  I have been letting the chickens roam free in the winter sunshine.  They love pottering around the garden (I just hope my hellebores aren't to their taste !) and I do love going outside and them walking around with me :-)

A week or so ago we had gales here and my garden looked a little worse for wear!  Luckily the fences just missed our little stand alone chicken run - the other chickens were also safe and sound in their shed.

I have also been busy in my little facebook shop.  I now have over 1000 likers which I am really chuffed about - I can't believe so many people like my little creations :-)  The above creation is a hairclip holder custom made for a customer - it is nice when people push you to create new things, it pushes you out of your comfort zone a bit :-)  Do pop over and say hi here, would love to see you there if you are on facebook.

By the way, talking about the joy of blogging, if you used to follow my sons blog, just to let you know, it is no more :-( Blogger took his blog off him as apparently he is too young!?  It was wondeful for him as it was a way of him creating a little diary and helped his literacy and IT skills but for some reason you are not allowed one until the age of 13 - not sure why.  He was so upset poor dot.  Thanks to everyone who took the time to visit him and comment though. xxx

More Christmas Creations .......

Apologies if all this belated Christmas blogging bores you but I want to document it for the children when they grow up :-)  I had wanted to blog sooner but as all of you lovely bloggers keep adding wonderful new blog posts I get carried away reading and then run out of time to write one myself.

The Christmas trees went up in our house a little sooner than I wanted this Christmas as the girls really wanted to put them up (eldest Sweetpea wasn't really interested this year :-().  I usually put off putting up the trees for some reason but then hate taking them down - I miss all those twinkly fairy lights :-(.  I put the lights on and then let the girls freestyle it :-)

They really enjoyed themselves ...... of course there was a breakage or two but that is all part of it isn't it :-)

They did a really good job and I did my best not to re-arrange anything.

Mr Sweetpea had a real urge to buy a real tree that he can plant out in the garden and then bring in again each year so we also had this tree:

Now I must confess to finding it hard not to re-arrange this one but I kept my hands to myself :-)

We lent our coloured lights to the cubs tree in the Church's festival of light this year so these came back to us after the trees were put up.  Middle Sweetpea asked if we could have them over the fireplace and they looked lovely, in fact so lovely I have only just taken them down.

One thing I haven't taken down is the pom pom garland I made, ooohh I love it :-)

On the run up to Christmas I did quite a few creative things with the children to keep them entertained.  Last year I bought a gingerbread house kit for us all to make.  Before the children devoured the gingerbread I drew around the shapes so we could make a gingerbread house this year from scratch.  I found a wonderful recipe here and it worked really well. 

 

We added a stained glass window by cutting a hole in the gingerbread and putting a boiled sweet in it.  I also had to add a little birdie sitting on the roof :-)

Carrying on our creative week we made my Grandad Pete (the sweetpeas Great Grandad) some gnomes out of Fimo.  Grandad loves gnomes and still has some of my old fimo creations from when I was a child so I thought he may like some of the children's fimo creations :-)

Here they are:

these two are middle Sweetpeas creations - love the one holding the flowers.  Eldest Sweetpea made the toadstool and axe and wood block to go with his gnome below:

Eldest Sweetpeas in on the left and little Sweetpeas on the right (loving the extra long arms, she went a bit white spot crazy too, oh and that pink on the front is his beard :-)).

Of course then I had to make one too :-)

Here they are in their new home.  I popped them into one of my trustee coffee jars and needle felted them some grass to sit on.  Little Sweetpeas had to sit on top as the gnomes long arms would't fit into the jar :-)

For the great Nannies little Sweetpea got to work and planted some hyacinths for them.  We are very very lucky that the Sweetpeas have 4 great grandparents living locally.  It is always hard to know what to buy them but I know the Nans all love flowers - here is my lovely Nan gardening with the Sweetpeas earlier in the year (I hope you don't mind me popping this on here Nan but I did love this photo of you gardening with the Sweetpeas xxx - Nan is high tech you know and reads by blog and e-mails me :-)).

Here is little Sweetpea hard at work, she loved planting these up :-) 

Whilst creating and looking for gifts I got a little side-tracked and bought myself something.  I just had to share these with you as they are so gorgeous!   I had been wanting some of these little birdies for ages and talked myself out of them until I could resist no longer. They came beautifully packaged in a little box.

Just look what was hiding in the green tissue paper......

Such cute birdies which I can hang around the house ....

With gorgeous ribbon tails .....

They came from the lovely Linen Cat, do pop over and see her shop - she makes the most amazing things, not only birds but other wonderful things like a Fox in a Dandy Green Suit - just stunning.  See that extra little pink bird, that little birdie was a lovely surprise which now lives with my Mum.  I showed my Mum these lovely birds when they arrived and she ooohhed and aahhhed over them as much as I did so I gave her one to have in her home as she loved it so much.

Sorry for such a long post, I have got a bit carried away as I had to stop and start it a few times today and then added more.  I will show you what happened to those pieces of linen hidden in my bedside drawer a few posts back in my next blog post :-)