Annie is my swap partner in Apryl‘s Owl Swap and I received her parcel yesterday. I am so spoiled!

I had told Annie during our first discussions about my love for The Owl and The Pussycat and she clearly picked up on that as she’s made and sent me these beautiful toys which are going to have pride of place on my bed under my new print. Annie also sent me some gorgeous yarn which I suspect is cotton, a flake (which was eaten immediately!) and a butterball bath bomb from Lush. I am so grateful – your gift was so thoughtful Annie and I hope you are as pleased with what I send you.

I had planned to bake today but I accidentally put 1.2kg of wool into a soaking bin earlier and filled it with water so I suspect I’ll be dyeing it later! What are your plans (crafty or otherwise) today?

Posted under dyeing wool, general crafty updates, swaps

Oh. My. Goodness.

Scotland was not supposed to get this snow dump! Scotland was supposed to have light snowfall today with sleet intervals. We weren’t supposed to get this!

I have spent most of the day panicking about Bob getting home and the babies all getting back from school & nursery but at 3.15pm the last of my clan finally walked in the door and I could breathe a sigh of relief. This was of course after I’d already had a near coronary when my car drifted across the street and nearly hit a van this morning. Ah well. The kids all went out to play in it (except the baby, who has been asleep for the last three hours and now won’t sleep tonight) and I got this brilliant photo of my biggest kid building a snowman…

ANYWAY! Onto other things – the eggciting giveaway from my last post! As a refresher, here is the photograph again and I asked you to guess which row was shop-bought:



The correct answer was – the back row! All the other eggs were laid by my girls, and to answer a few of you yes the last on on the right of the middle row is a real egg. It’s laid by Meatball who is my eldest son’s hen, she’s a Cream Legbar and her egg is a nice blue colour. As soon as she’s laid me a few more I’ll post better photographs for comparison.

I collated the correct answers, allocated each person a number and ran the numbers through the random.org integer generator coming out with #3 as the winning number which was allocated to Gill from Hollingdale Designs. Congrats Gill, I’ll be in touch for your address details soon.

The owl swap I’d mentioned before will be completing this week as my swap partner Annie is finished her side too. It’s all very exciting as I’ll now be able to share what I’ve been slogging away on for the last few weeks. Wahey!

Hope you’re all safe and warm. I’ll be back later this week!

Posted under family, general crafty updates, self-sufficiency

Sod’s law, innit? I’m actually getting some crafting done and I can’t post about it until after the 14th February when it’ll be sent to the very lovely Annie from overmilkwood. Annie actually mentioned that she’d left a comment on the entry featuring my Give a Hoot mittens but it hasn’t shown up and since Hannah had already mentioned this I’m now slightly worried. If you’ve posted a comment and it hasn’t shown up please would you mind sending me a quick email so I can do some investigating? I do love getting comments and I worry that I’m missing some.

My lovely husband and I went to Stockholm for a few days last week on a very belated (well, it’s our first anniversary in three weeks!) honeymoon. It was absolutely marvellous and I’m trying very hard not to do that really dull tourist thing of coming back from holiday and showing everyone 50 bajillion boring photographs but I feel I have to share this one.

Those are the two Great Grey Owls resident in Stockholm’s Skansen open air museum. The female (Ropia) is on the left of the picture and the male (Bert) on the right, and Bert got so close to me I could have touched him. Seriously! It was absolutely amazing until they both ate some mice which wasn’t so pleasant.
Stockholm was lovely if very cold and definitely somewhere I’d like to experience again.

I will be back as soon as I have blocked out the most recent items I’ve been working on. My friend Eileen had a baby a few weeks ago and I’ve made a really lovely little lace hat for her daughter plus I must show you blocked photos of the Give a Hoot mittens.

Posted under general crafty updates, knitting, swaps

My sister’s ex-flatmate has a cat, a very lovely cat who had seven kittens. C was really not having much success with getting them rehomed and I finally managed to talk my lovely husband into letting me have a kitten to keep our last cat company. After chatting to a few friends I managed to find homes for six in total and I collected them yesterday. Unfortunately, someone changed their mind last night so I may have to keep an extra kitten. Bummer, eh? Two of them left me late last night to go and live on a farm and here are the rest:

As I’m sure you’ll understand, my life as I knew it has now ceased and I’m spending much of my time staring at them and making cooing noises. My eldest sat for the better part of three hours last night with three of them asleep on his lap. He’s going to be gutted when the other two leave on Saturday for their new lives!

Craft-wise, I haven’t done anything since wrapping up the Give a Hoot mittens. I’ve just signed up today to Apryl’s Owl Swap which I have around six weeks to work on. I’ve also been eyeing up the Make 50 things in 2009 craft challenge. A few of my friends have signed up to it and I love the idea in theory, but I know in practice how sporadic my crafting is. Actually, how sporadic I am in terms of meeting deadlines too – November’s NaBloPoMo attempt proves that! Anyway, the lovely folks on the Crafteroo forum have set up a 50 things Flickr group which I’ve joined in the meantime…

Posted under general crafty updates, swaps

Well, I started back at work last week. What was an eight hour contract has swiftly become me working two days a week in the office with additional working from home. I’m loving it to be honest but I’m finding that I have absolutely no free time between working and planning my wedding in three weeks, so although I’m reading my blog list I’m not managing to post much myself.

This is a ‘meme’ post. I’ve been tagged you see.

So anyway here are the rules:
Link to the person that tagged you.
Post the rules on your blog.
Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
Tag six random people and the end of your post-link to their blogs.
Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
Let the fun begin!

1. Painkillers don’t work for me, but I’m very sensitive to caffeine and artificial additives. For example I had a latte yesterday at 8.30am and forgot to ask for decaf. 8.30 last night and I couldn’t stop jabbering away.
2. The feeling of sandpaper makes me recoil. I loathe it and #2 has got wise to this. He has a book called, That’s not my bunny and on page two the bunny has pads made of sandpaper. He growls while opening the page, mimicking me because I hate it.
3. I had eight teeth removed to facilitate my orthodontic treatment as my jaw is so small.
4. I have very few photos of me taken from my left side. This is because I have a huge bump in my nose after breaking it, and you can’t see it in photos from the right.
5. I was on the Women’s committee for a major UK union for two years.
6. I would be a vegetarian if the rest of the family would go along with it too.

In return, I’m going to tag :
Jen at PurpleJen Knits
Eileen at FatMuncher
Jenn at Matersum
Kirsty at WWDG
Kawaii Crafter at Zakka Life Crafts
Semprini at Title Goes Here

You may have seen a few blogs mentioning the ‘Pay It Forward’ exchange. Thanks to this, and to the generosity of Kawaii Crafter I am being gifted with a beautiful mizuhiki knot. I am also involved with a more local exchange as PurpleJen is also gifting me. The exchange has been brilliantly explained by PurpleJen therefore I’m copying this verbatim:

The Pay It Forward Exchange. It’s based on the concept of the movie “Pay it Forward” where acts or deeds of kindness are done without expecting something in return, just passing it on, with hope that the recipients of the acts of kindness are passed on. So here’s how it works. I will make and send a handmade gift to the first 3 people who leave a comment to this post on my blog requesting to join this PIF exchange. What YOU have to do in return, then, is pay it forward by making the same promise on your blog.

So, I will make something for the first five* people to comment on this entry. I’m happy to recreate anything that has been posted on here and is postable (so yes to crayon holders and chunky crayons, no to lemon drizzle cake). Participants must be aware that my exchange will not be sent out until at least the end of February as I have the wedding to deal with before that.

Normal service will hopefully resume soon!

*I’m offering it to five people as I’m doing two swaps and I hope to spread the love

Posted under Uncategorized

Jen and I met up on Tuesday for an evening of drinking tea, knitting, putting the world to rights and unplanned almost adoption of a blind and deaf abandoned labrador called Sapphire. Seriously. This is the kind of thing that happens when we go to Tchai Ovna but it’s still a relaxing way to spend an evening. Alas, Sapphire’s owner returned around 11pm to reclaim her so Bob was rather relieved that I wasn’t bringing home yet another pet.

Anyway since I keep raving about the place I decided to treat a very hungover Bob and the babies to some tchai love so off we headed to their little shop in Shawlands, only to discover a woman with what looked to me like a tiny violin case and a man with a videocamera. Hmmm. Got our tea and some porridge and the woman began playing a ukulele! Seriously it was amazing, I didn’t think I could ever take a ukulele seriously and even now I’m not sure. #2 totally loved her and was shaking his booty to Eilidh’s tunes. I nabbed a business card (promptly chewed by the baby) but a quick google search turned up a wealth of media interviews, Flickr photoset and a MySpace. Brilliant! I really wish I’d had my camera with me for #2′s first trip to the tea house. He was a natural! We had some orange oolong, some chocolate mint tea and some strudel but I think the chocolate mint was his favourite. He was so good with his little teacup! I must look into making him a set of his own.

Craftwise I have a lot going on. My New Year’s resolution was to wrap up all my semi-finished projects before the end of January so I’m working on a few different things, including a scarecrow, wedding invitations and a christening gown. I’m also now doing a “You don’t get that in my country” swap with Mequet on Craftster although I’m struggling to find things to send her. She’s extremely good at what she does, so I need to make my swap outstanding. Any suggestions as to what I can send would be gratefully appreciated – She’s Stateside and I’m in the UK

Hope you’re all well and I’ll be back tomorrow with some FO’s and maybe a recipe. Maybe.

Posted under general crafty updates