Highs and lows ......

Hi everyone, I do hope you have been enjoying the last week and have had some sunshine where you are.  After another week of grey the sun is finally shining and the flowers are showing their lovely faces :-)  Little Sweetpea above has been wearing a little daisy chain I made her as she wanted to be a princess in the flowers - oh the joys of being 3!

I have really enjoyed taking photos of flowers again this week, I have missed it during the winter months.  I took this photo in our local grave yard, I am not sure what flower it is (does anyone know?), but it is stunning with it's tissue paper like petals.  It is such a simple looking flower but it captures my heart every morning when I walk past it, there is a whole group of them clumped together.  When I took this photo I did scare another local mum on her walk to school as I popped up out of the flowers in the grave yard - luckily she knows I am slightly bonkers lol.

I have also ventured out in a skirt this week :-)  I found a lovely 'White Stuff' skirt in a Charity shop and have been wearing it this week, I only knew who 'White Stuff' were when a mate told me, it looks like I got a real bargain!   I am not sure however if I am very good at being a skirt wearing girl, around 30 minutes after putting my new skirt on I decided to go to the allotment to cut some dafs and as you can see from the photo below I ended up with mud everywhere lol.  A friend of mine also joked that I would have to invest in an iron if I were to wear skirts, I can however confirm that with a slow spin and my shake and hang method it did pretty well on the wrinkle front - bonus !

I wore it out with a long spring coat I have, I was feeling pretty good until my middle Sweetpea said 'Mum, you look like Mary Poppins in that coat' , I smiled, feeling happy that I looked like her, I like her style, but then she said 'or .... a witch!' to which I replied 'hhhmm, I think I will go for the Mary Poppins option'.

Also this week I have been busy cutting felt and creating things, oh how I love felt, buttons and thread, you can create such pretty things with simple items.

I also did a swap with the lovely Kazzy recently, she sent me one of her gorgeous drawings, a lovely little robin for little Sweetpea, a gorgeous rose scented pillow and also a little notepad, it was such a lovely parcel!  I feel very honoured to have one of Kazzy's amazing works or art.

In return I sent her some little flower hair clips for her little Sweetpea, a button heart, a vintage pill box and a Little Bear Lost book (I love the illustrations in those books).

Pets, Highs and Lows :-(

We are all rather excited in the Sweetpea household as our lovely cockerel went off on holiday to my Father-in-Laws recently to meet the Light Sussex ladies there :-)  Well we have popped the eggs they have laid in an incubator, the eggs are turned 3 times a day, the temperature has to be kept between 37.5 - 37.7 deg C and the humidity at 45 - 50 with a little water trough (wow those hens do more work than we think when sitting on eggs!).  We checked the eggs by looking through them with a strong light and they are all dark so look fertile :-)  It takes roughly 21 days for them to incubate, the kids can't wait for next week :-)

On a sad note one of our African Greys escaped this week.  My husband has had him for around 24 years so he is really upset and we are also worried for his mate who he left behind.  He had eaten his way through a wooden door frame and some wire, walked through to the chicken run where we saw him when we returned from the school run.  We tried to catch him in a net but he then escaped and flew to a nearby tree.  What was really sad is that then a couple of crows started to mob him and call their friends in, then over 50 crow mobbed him until he flew away, you could see him trying to fly back towards us but they scared him away :-(  He still hasn't returned ......

Random goodness ....

 

 

Wow it seems like ages since I have been able to post a blog :-(  Time seems to be rushing by and I can't seem to slow it down!  

So what have I been up to ???  I am still in my tidying/de-cluttering mood so the ribbons were the next to get it :-)  I bought some pegs for the washing but then thought they would be great for storing my ribbons on, I rather like them wrapped around their little wooden pegs ...

I have been to a WI jumble sale with my mate Bear's Footprints ... wow what an experience !  She did warn me it would be packed but I didn't believe her until I drove up there and found a rather large queue.  When I got in there I had to literally be pulled into the crowd by Bear's Footprints  to see the clothes etc.  I came out with several bits including some lace curtain, a woolly jumper and some cord trousers all for about 40p each - bargain :-)

I also popped to a charity shop in Bury St Edmunds called Open Door, that place is like Aladdin's cave full of treasures - I spent hours in there (much to Mr Sweetpeas dismay lol).

I am going to felt these jumpers and will let you know the result.  I also got some more lovely ladybird books for my collection - ooh these take me back in time ...

 

I fell in love with these vintage curtains, love the colour and pattern.

We have been watching a little field vole (or mouse) feed under our bird feeder, a whole family sometimes arrives, they are so cute!

I have been buying hellebores for my collection and planting them up, a local nursery sells them for around £2 - yey!  How I love these flowers, they are like jewellery with their gorgeous flower heads.

I have been planting up primroses for my windowsill and popping dafs in vases - if I can't have sunshine naturally I will make it in my house instead :-)

I accidentally made the most humongous cake the other day .... it was meant to be a little sponge cake as I had an urge for a cream cake but then the cake tin was tool large so I had to make two large layers and this is the result!  Mind you we still managed to eat it all :-)

I have also painted this door in our room and the window etc with cream paint.  I painted them yellow and long time ago and have grown out of that colour now, mind you I do miss it a bit.

Oh and I have been creating more hairclips , I had a lovely large order for daisy clips so have been busy making them up and other new ones.

  

Phew, I think that is it for now!  I hope you have all had a fab few weeks.  I better be off as this bloomin blog post has taken me ages and now little sweetpea is getting rather annoyed with me and she wants to plant up some cosmos and marigolds .... now I feel guilty!  Motherhood hey!

Christmas Pressies ....

Thank you for all your lovely comments on  my last blog post and apologies for scaring some of you with Sid's photo :-)  I will warn you in future if Sid is going to star in a blog post.

I thought I would share with you some of the things I made by hand or thrifted for Christmas pressies this year.  I have already blogged about my chocolate covered ginger and vanilla sugar, these went down very well.

I also made some rum truffles with cranberries this year too.  I got dragged into a Secret Santa which, to be honest, I didn't really want to take part in as I already have a big family to buy for - bah humbug me :-)  Now, I didn't want to go and buy something that would just be chucked away so thought I would make something instead.  Luckily I picked out of the hat a close work mates name and I knew she would love something made of chocolate or handmade (she wanted one my little ladybird clips for her birthday :-)).

I made her these rum truffles with some cranberries in them.  They were yummy - of course I had to do some controlled taste testing for safety reasons ;-)

Here is the recipe if you want to give them a go, they are really easy to make:

Ingredients
200g plain chocolate
75g butter
1 tsp vanilla essence (or rum if you want rum truffles - I put 2 tsp rum in mine :-))
225 icing sugar - sifted
2 tbsp double cream
Handful of dried cranberries or whatever other fruit or nuts you think would suit the recipe.

Break the chocolate up into a bowl, add the tsp of vanilla essence (or the substitute).

Melt down in a microwave or in a pyrex bowl over hot water.

Gradually sift in icing sugar and add cream in intervals.

Stir in any fruit or nuts you would like to add.

When completely mixed together pop the mixture into the fridge to firm up a bit.

Take it out of the fridge and scoop out some with a spoon.  If it has become too firm then pop it in the microwave for around 20 seconds to soften again.  Roll into a ball, when all the truffles are made roll into icing sugar (or nuts or chocolate sprinkles) to cover them .

It was really nice making these for my friend as middle Sweetpea helped.  As I was working Boxing Day we spent Christmas afternoon making them together to take to work on Boxing Day.

I found this fab book for my Granddad Pete who has a garden full of gnomes.  In fact it was rather hard to part with this book and some of the photos were so funny :-)

I really need to find my Granddad one of those big toadstools!  I think I want a gnome for my garden now as they always make me smile :-)

This last present went down really well with the my parents and my in-laws.  We got them an A4 calendar made up with photos of the children and us through the year.  Here are some of the photos I picked for it.

At our fav location, the Marina in the village.

My hubby and little sweetpea at the seaside in Mallorca at our fav bar.

At Angelsey Abbey, when you gotta go you gotta go :-)

The older Sweetpeas at Waterside Antiques trying on the gas masks, this photo really makes me giggle :-)

Little Sweetpea looking cool at a wedding we went to in June.

In a war bunker in Mallorca, I was trying to take a landscape shot when middle Sweetpea popped up.

Me and Sweetpea at a wedding in June (excuse my crappy hairstyle but somehow the kiddies and Mr Sweetpea looked fab but I forgot myself - typical :-)).

The calendar was fantastic quality and we will be doing this again next year I think.  I got them from Boots who use Photobox to produce them.   It took a while going through my hundreds of photos but was well worth it as the parents were so chuffed with them.

Hope you are all having a great week.
x