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 :-)

Swept away by time ....

Well goodness me, I do apologise, I didn't realise I had been away for so long :-(  Time really does seem to be going incredibly fast and I can't keep up.  I thought I would do a little catch up with what we have been up to in the Sweetpea household.

Well as you will see above I have turned my cute little crochet hearts into bunting for my bookcase, I popped some beads on the end of the bunting too for a finishing touch.  In fact I loved this bunting so much I made some for my friend's little girls first birthday a couple of weeks back :-)

We have also been strawberry picking a few times , here are some that are from a local farm and also eldest Sweetpeas patch.

Of course that meant we had to have some scones and cream with them as well as jam.  I made the scones without raisins in them as eldest sweetpea hates them for some reason.  This all lead to a picnic in the garden :-)

My friends have been rather busy too over the last few weeks so little Sweetpea has had the pleasure of some playmates coming round whilst their mummies are busy bees.  Here is little Sweetpea with her mad hair and one of her best friends James.  I just loved how they held hands on the way home.

And then we had little Sweetpeas other best mate round that week too,  this is the gorgeous Bear, is he going to melt hearts or what!

They had a lot of giggles.....

Then Bear had to sit and watch one of little Sweetpeas dance routines lol..... If you pop over to my friend's blog here you will see piccies of Bear and Sweetpea Strawberry picking, excuse the photo of me in my scruffy clothes :-)

In the garden Scented Sweetpeas have been flowering, oohhh one of my fav flowers, I love cutting them and bringing them into the house.  They don't seem as prolific as previous years but we still had enough to receive 2nd prize in our local Gala competition.

Talking of the Gala, I spent many an hour last week down the local Strawberry farm helping to create our Cubs gala float.  Middle Sweetpea is the only one left in cubs of my brood at the moment and the only girl in the group - she always was a tomboy :-)  We had to create a float with the theme of Dennis the Menace as it was his 60th Birthday this year.  I had great fun creating bunting for the whole float - Helen (Bear's Mum mentioned above) also came to help.

One of my friends dressed up as Minnie the Minx, we all thought she looked rather fetching in her red wig :-)  She seemed to enjoy that role far too much lol.  Middle Sweetpea was also a Minnie the Minx.

I also went into pre-school and helped the kiddies create items for their float too.  It is a shame more parents don't help as although I found it very tiring with all the extra things to do last week it certainly was a lot of fun :-)  Unfortunately poor little Sweetpea couldn't go on the pre-school float after all as after going to do some more work on the Float the other friday she became sick and was sick from lunchtime that day until early evening on Saturday - it wasn't much fun taking her around the Gala (she didn't want to stay home with her nanny as she didn't want to miss the fun) with a bowl poor thing.

Whilst there Middle and Eldest Sweetpea joined the fun run (why on earth is it called a fun run - can't see anything fun about it myself lol).  I was really proud of them as Middle Sweetpea came 2nd and Eldest Sweetpea came 9th in their groups - goodness knows who they take after as I run like Phoebe out of Friends!

Before I go I just wanted to say a thank you to the lovely Harmony and Rosie.  A long time ago I took part in something called PIF, in fact I think I took part in it twice.  Well I posted off a few parcels as a random surprise for people and then when I returned from holiday recently I was greeted with a surprise package.  'Oooohh what could it be' I thought to myself, on opening it I found a gorgeously soft crocheted cuff and a very cute notepad with birdies all over it, they were all wrapped up in some lovely blue tissue paper.  Thanks very much Harmony and Rosie.

Also thank you for all your comments, although I can't comment quite as often as I used to I am really enjoying catching up reading all your blogs and also reading your comments here.  Take care. xxx

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 ......

Bug central and pretty sugared flowers .

Thank you for all your well wishes on my last blog post, they are really appreciated.  Unfortunately eldest Sweetpea went down with the bug a couple of nights ago so we had two children being sick and one coughing all night - fun times!  The up-side is that we all snuggled in bed yesterday just chilling out all day and all did some sewing (apart from little Sweetpea who sorted buttons).   They all seem a lot better now (fingers crossed) although I do feel a bit off colour but I am hoping that is just lack of sleep.  Thank goodness for on-line shopping as I would have been stuffed otherwise with a week out of my Christmas shopping schedule due to sickness as the kiddies are off from tomorrow onwards :-)  Oh how I hate Christmas shopping.

Well enough of my moaning, now for some lovely brightness on this grey, dark and cold day (well here in the UK anyway, I bet it is lovely in other countries).

I  bought some Violas a few weeks ago to bring some brightness into the dull winter garden and then pondered on making them into sugared flowers.  I remembered reading somewhere that you could eat Violas and Pansies so looked up how to sugar them.

First I picked the flowers and then washed them to make sure we didn't get any sugared caterpillars :-)

I then asked the chickens nicely for some of their eggs and used the egg whites to paint over the petals.

   

I then scattered caster sugar over the petals and then left the flowers to dry overnight.  I think I could have done with a sugar shaker however to give a finer look, also I think you can buy super fine granulated sugar which would probably look better.

I then popped these in an airtight container until I had time to bake some cakes.  This happened to be a week or so later (that is what happens when you are a Mum of 3 lol).  I then had to find the time to ice the cakes, which was another few days later (hence the rushed crappy looking iced finish above :-)).  I did however love love love the glittery finish to these lovely flowers.  They also store fantastically as the egg white seems to seal the colour and moisture into the flower so maybe next time I will make a bigger batch and store them away for a while. 

Take care all of you and keep those bugs at bay :-)
x

What is in a name?

I sometimes wonder how people come up with their blog names, don't you?  There are some many wonderful blogs with great names out there how do people think them up?  I thought I would share with you how I came up with mine. 

We have been growing sweet peas for some time but last year we decided to enter them into the village gala day competition.  Little sweetpea, middle sweetpea and big sweetpea all entered some and they won 1st, 2nd and 3rd!  This year we entered them again and came 2nd and 3rd - luckily it was a friends who won first so we weren't sad that we didn't.

I love our Sweetpeas, they grow well every year and I love their lush green foliage against the vibrant colours of the flowers.  The scent in the summer sun is devine as you walk past them. 

We have some gorgeous coloured ones, here are a couple of my favourites.

I also love the way they attract bees to the garden, the flowers are literally buzzing sometimes.

And what is the secret to growing such virulent sweetpeas ...... chicken poo! :-)

How did you come up with your blog name, I would love to know?