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