I promised you that I had lots to share and I am now able to share most of it. In my usual style, I’m going to tell you a bit of a story first.

I am a renowned rubbish practical joker. I try and play jokes on people all the time and they usually fall flat, this year’s April Fool’s Day was no exception when I told the kids that I was pregnant again and that as a result we would have to move into a one bedroom flat since we couldn’t afford to stay in our house anymore. They fell for it so well that I decided to expand it and phoned my sister, whereupon the following conversation ensued:
Me: Steph? Steph! Oh my GOD I’m pregnant. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I’m pregnant and I have no idea how it happened and how can I possibly have another baby I’ll have five kids under 10!
Steph – Deadpan: Oh my actual God. Are you kidding?
Me – almost crying: NO I’M NOT KIDDING I can’t believe this how on earth did this happen?!
Steph: Are you kidding?
Me: NO!
Steph: No way. I am too.
Me – shrieking: OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! I WAS ONLY KIDDING BECAUSE IT’S APRIL FOOL’S DAY! Are you ACTUALLY pregnant?!
Steph: I hate you.

What this little vignette doesn’t tell the reader is that I am also renowned for being the worst secret keeper in all the land. Seriously. And Stephanie is the only person I know who actually managed to keep her first pregnancy secret until she’d got past 12 weeks. GNNNNNNNNNGGGGGG! So the last eight weeks has been torturous for me knowing but not able to tell anyone until today. Steph & Gary had their scan yesterday and there’s a little baby in there! It’s the clearest scan picture I’ve ever seen – you can see it here which is a photo of the scan and therefore not great, but clear enough to see a bambino in there. Hooray! Baby is due to land before Christmas which is just perfect. I am seriously excited

So that’s my first piece of news. My SECOND piece of news is that Bob & I’s business The Life Craft (which we’ve been sporadically blogging about here) has been entered into a really amazing competition run by Barclay’s Bank. Competitors are divided up by location and then by sector; in 12 days the judges will shortlist their favourite three entries per location and whoever gets the most votes wins up to £50,000 to develop their business. We really need people to back us just now – a task that will take literally seconds to do in the hope that we can be shortlisted. If you could take a moment to do this I really would be most grateful.

So that’s the news for just now! Onto the reviews.

I posted yesterday about our big walk around Calderglen Park with Penny the other night. When we got home, I was so knackered that I decided to have a bath. Lush had sent me a Big Blue bath ballistic and a bar of Sandstone soap last week as a freebie to encourage me to take 90 minutes as a World Cup Widow and I wasn’t going to look that gift horse in the mouth (although I didn’t have the heart to ‘fess up about Scotland’s lack of qualifying!) I’ve used the Big Blue loads of times before and love it but the Sandstone soap was a new one to my crappy sensitive skin and I’m really impressed with it! I got off all of the dry flaky bits without irritating my skin any further and it smells really nice too. Lush are also promoting their BB Seaweed facemask to World Cup Widows but I haven’t tried that one yet.

Although I have to say I’m very jealous of our friends in the South after discovering that Lush have Spas, but they’re only in London, Leeds, Poole and Kingston! Have any of you tried them out before?

The other review I wanted to share with you is for a website that I discovered after Christmas called Dot Com Giftshop. I got these supercute Russian Doll tins for the girls to keep their hairbobbles, colouring pencils and various tiny toys in so that I’d stop standing on them and I was really impressed with the speed and service offered by the site. A few weeks ago, they contacted me to say they’d listed Adventures of a Lady in Training in their top 50 craft blogs (at #42! The cheek of it, I reckon I should have been top 20 at least!) and would I be interested in reviewing some of their products. So they sent me out some of their Heart gifts range and I have to say that yet again, I was impressed with the speed, service and quality offered by them.

This gorgeous & classy tealight holder has been claimed by Erica for above her bed:

and they also sent this selection:

which just made me smile as soon as I opened the box which contained Feltcraft butterfly hearts, Iron-on patches, thick wrapping tape with hearts, thinner gift tape, alphabet heart stickers and decorative heart stickers which I have to admit made me want to sit down and write a letter to someone – anyone – which I could decorate with hearts. Yes I know, I’m unashamedly girly. Anyway, it’s a big thumbs up from me for the Dot Com Giftshop not just for having such a wide variety of cute and inexpensive gift items but also for the brilliant customer service experience.

And finally the bit you’ve all been waiting for – the giveaway! This giveaway has now closed

OK – up for grabs we have everything in this photograph:

and to enter the giveaway I would like you to:

1) Comment here (that gets you one entry)
2) Be a fan on facebook (that gets you another entry
3) Tweet about the giveaway (that gets you yet another entry)

Please remember to tell me in your comment if you’ve done steps 2 & 3 otherwise you won’t be credited for that entry! Also ensure you leave an email address for me to contact you on. You have until 8pm on Wednesday 2nd June 2010 to enter and I will post anywhere in the world.

Please note: I am not paid for reviews other than getting to keep the product I’m reviewing. You can therefore be assured that the review I write is unbiased.

Posted under giveaway

Very quick little update from me today, I’m going to bullet-point for speed and efficiency.

• This is my 90th post. 90 posts! NINETY! For my 100th post I’m going to have a very special giveaway featuring some handmade goodies so tune in. I anticipate the 100th post to arrive within the next four weeks.
• I have finally bitten the bullet and opened my very own Folksy shop. There’s only some owl stitch markers listed right now but I’ll expand that with time. I am very nervous about this and hope it pans out because I need to start recouping some of the money I spend on crafty things!
• For the fifth week in a row, Erica is too sick to go to nursery. I can’t even explain in words of more than two syllables just how frustrating this is for me. Is it selfish to crave some time on your own? I have one day a week where everyone is at work/school/nursery and I haven’t had that day for over a month and I resent losing that time. I don’t resent Erica because sure it’s not her fault, but I really needed today. Ah well.
• I decided against using the cookie dough. It probably would have been fine, but there were eggs in the mix and with Erica being ill with seemingly no reason I just didn’t want to risk it. I am quite annoyed at the waste, truth be told.
• You can now become a fan on Facebook! Click the link to go to our fan page on facebook – I promise you won’t be bombarded by updates etc.
• We also have a web presence on Twitter and Flickr
• You may have noticed at the bottom of each post now there are a row of little icons. Can I encourage you to explore what they do and how they work for both you and I? Any questions and I’ll do my best to answer them
• Finally, I was wondering why whenever I leave a comment on your blogs I have no avatar that shows up beside my details**. Turns out that there’s a very simple way to do this – just go to www.gravatar.com, register your email address and the picture you’d like associated with your comments et voila! If you already have a wordpress.com account then your gravatar should be linked as long as you’ve registered the email address you use to comment. I know there’s a fair few of you who comment here but don’t have a gravatar set so go go go!

Today is going to be a day in the car. I have to get Nairn to nursery, Erica to see her Doctor, take our growhouse back to a large nationwide DIY store after it blew away Wizard of Oz-style last week destroying all our seedlings (nearly a month’s worth of planting and the DIY store in question are refusing to replace our seeds, making out like they’re doing us a favour by replacing the growhouse. I am unimpressed to say the least!) then we have to get some food in and finally take the cats to the vet before I can sit down. Happy days!

**Edit to add – the ever-lovely Ryan tells me that the gravatar thing doesn’t work for every blog as the blog owner needs to enable that option. For the most part it should work though!

Posted under general crafty updates, site stuff

Hello everyone! The deadline for the Time for Tea swap is looming, with all participants due to mail out their parcels by this Friday. I’m so excited to see what everyone has been creating for their swap partners! If you’re participating in the swap, how are you getting on? Have you finished your swap item yet?

In other news I am still here and still being crafty – I promise I will be back this week with some real content. I’m just finding this last stage of pregnancy to be utterly exhausting and I’m not doing quite as much as I usually do. In the meantime if you don’t already, you can catch up with my brief updates on twitter.

Today I’m hoping to finish off some little bootees I’ve been making and attempt Nigella’s Malteser cake so I will hopefully post about those tomorrow. ALSO! I am devastated by the end of Dancing on Ice, particularly since my favourite, Jessica, didn’t get to skate Bolero. Woe is me. How am I going to fill in my Sunday evenings now?!

Posted under swaps

I feel absolutely terrible today. Along with a general feeling of illness I’m not succeeding with the projects that I wanted to work on today. Last year I posted my crayon roll that I’d made. I wasn’t 100% happy with how it turned out because I could see some of the lining fabric outside once the crayon flap was folded so I decided to try a different method. This time, I cut the crayon holding section separately and sewed it as three pieces of fabric instead which was going fine until I turned it inside out. It’s so bulky and it was a nightmare to sew around so my stitches were uneven and I’m just not happy with it at all.

On the plus side, I posted off my friend Emma’s birthday present today. I used the fetching pattern again with some gorgeous RYC cashsoft aran in a dusky pink. I hope she likes them.

I also finally got some photos of the bag I made to send to someone on Craftster. We had agreed a swap way back in January and my package to her appears to have gone awol so I’ve made this bag to send to her. I’m hoping she doesn’t read this blog and therefore won’t see this before I post it. I want to put some stereotypically British things into the bag – any suggestions?

The bag has a zippered centre pocket and a button closure, made with a prym self-cover button.

The design of the blog is likely to change this week, my wonderful husband Bob has been playing with everything for me and we just have a couple of bugs to sort before it can go live which is very exciting. As a reminder, you can follow my twitter for updates and crafty links that I like.

Posted under for the kids, general crafty updates, knitting, sewing

I’ve set up a new Twitter account correlated to my blog. The idea was that I would update it with progress on my blogworthy activities but what I’ve ended up doing is twittering with things I’ve found and liked from other blogs. My twitter is here and I will have a twitter widget on the blog sometime this week.

One of the most brilliant things I found yesterday was this Cylon pumpkin from the evilmadscientist site. Bob was watching Battlestar Gallactica earlier in the year and got me hooked, I’ve now watched every episode and am fairly happy to admit to my geek status. I love it!

Posted under general crafty updates