Pretty in Pink

Our local school has some lovely raised beds which have been left untouched for quite some time.  To be honest, every time I walked past them to collect little Sweetpea I had to fight the urge to go and weed them.  So , rather than be annoyed by this I decided to take action, after chatting to the teachers I was given the go ahead to do a little make over.  Little Sweetpea, Middle Sweetpea and I dived into two of the raised beds, weeded them and planted them up with things like Cosmos, Sunflowers, Beetroot, Onions, Marigolds, Tomatoes etc.  

Here is a before shot for you, although the poppies looked lovely, it was nice to revert the beds to what they were made for.

This is after an hour or so of work, all planted up. I am hoping that the school keep watering everything after all our hard work.  I have had to remind them a couple of times already but we will have to wait and see.

Anyway, I digress from the original title and photo of this blog post, sorry about that.  I have never been one to keep exactly on track in conversation, I tend to spark off along different paths , but hey, that makes chatting all the more fun.

Whilst eyeing up the veggie patches and wanting to weed them, I noticed a nice large patch of chives in full flower.  Well this reminded me of a lovely photo I saw on Pinterest of some chive flowers that had been popped in distilled white vinegar.  I just HAD to give it ago ..... surely they couldn't turn the vinegar that pink???

So I got picking (with the school's permission of course :-) ).  I filled the jar with chive flowers after checking them all over for bugs etc, then poured in some distilled white vinegar.  Liteally in one day I could see it turning pink, a lovely shade of bright megenta pink!    It looks stunning, so so pretty.  You then need to remove the flowers after roughly 7 days and you are left with a lovely pink, onion tasting vinegar which can be used for salad dressings etc.  I think it needs to be kept is a shady area to keep the colour.  

Wow , isn't nature just wonderful !

The Winner ...

Thanks for all your entries to this fab giveaway, a winner has been chosen and there were over 60 entries in the end (here and over on my facebook page ScentedSweetpeas).  I popped all the names into an excel spreadsheet and then used a random number generator thingy to pick a number.  The number chosen was number 15 ....... that number had the name Andrea Harding next to it.   So Andrea, could you please e-mail me via my contact page on Scented Sweetpeas .  Thank you .

For all those who didn't win, do not be sad, www.schoolbagstation.com currently has the offer of 10% off your first order plus free delivery too - yipppeee.

All this chat about bags got me in the mood to create a bag for little Sweetpea, her PE bag has been looking a bit worse for wear for a while now so I set about sewing her a new one.

Obviously being super girly as she is she wanted the bag to have some sparkles on it and flowers.

Luckily she loved her new bag , I must say I rather love it too.  Who wouldn't want a sparkly, flowery, blinged up PE bag!  I am going to be popping some custom slots for these on my website soon so if your little one (or you) would like one just give me a shout. 

I will be back soon with beekeeping news ..... x

Bag Giveaway

Middle Sweetpea recently decided she NEEDED a new school bag, you know what it is like when they are in their teens, all of a sudden they need to feel part of the pack and follow the style that others have.  Well the bag I bought her hadn't fallen apart yet so I said that if she wanted a new one she would have to spend her own money.  Does that make me sound like a horrid, stingy Mum?  

She agreed and off we went to search online for a bag.  After an hour or so of online searching for a bag from a company that had good reviews we came across www.schoolbagstation.com . We placed the order and the bag arrived within a few days, they even popped a little packet of sweets in the parcel too, such a lovely touch.  Middle Sweetpea was over the moon.

With this fab customer service in mind I contacted the company and asked if they would be happy to give away a bag to one of my blog /facebook/instagram readers?  They said yes !  

So that means, one of you lucky people may get to have a bag delivered to your house for free!  All you have to do is pop a comment below telling me which bag which is priced under £30 you would like to win.  Pop to www.schoolbagstation.com and have a nose, then pop back here and let me know.  

I will pick one winner on 13 June 1015 at 6pm GMT (sorry this is only open to uk residents :-().

And so here it is .....

In my past life, before children, does  anyone else have problems remembering that far back, oh my goodness, where did the time go ???  Sorry, I digress, well I used to be a PA to a few Directors , I used to love my job, all the organising, office banter, learning new things.

Then after having my second child I had to give that up due to childcare issues and I decided to create a big website which had hundreds of rental properties on it for Spain.  I loved creating it even if the guilt of working around two toddlers did get to me.  I did a fab online course to learn how to create my own little website and it spiralled from there.  People used to ring my 'office' wondering why they could hear childrens voices in the background, little did they know my 'office' was in fact my front room, littered with toys lol.   It was such a wonderful learning curve, I learnt about promotion, SEO (search engine optimisation), google adwords  etc etc.  Years later I wound that site down due to having a third child and the rental market in that particular part of Spain changing.  I then fell into creating .

After sewing and creating lots of things I thought it was about time I created a website for my makes.  I used a fab site called Wix, they have some wonderful templates which you can play with and it has been so easy to use.    I would highly recommend it if you want to build a little site.  I have also been able to link the blog to it which is fab.  I just searched for Scented Sweetpeas Sewn Creations and it came up on page one of google which is pretty good for a site which is only a few weeks old.

Why not pop over and have a look, please do let me know what you think or if you have any more ideas for the site, I would love to hear from you .

http://scentedsweetpeas.wix.com/scentedsweetpeas

I will be back soon with news on bee-keeping, baby Quails and my creative antics.