Obligatory snow post

If you live in the UK, have a blog and it snows, it is the law that you have to write a blog post about it. It's the law I tell you! So here is mine :)

The view from the front of our house, taken from the bedroom window. That is our local park I hasten to add and not our garden!

The snow looks good on our next door neighbours monkey puzzle tree :)

And poor Bumble :( He won't be going out in this weather as he's heavy enough to drive as it is so if I hit a bit of slippy snow or ice there is no way in hell I will be able to stop him going anywhere - into cars, people etc. I will have to nip out in a bit to start him though just so that the battery doesn't go kaput as it did last winter!

As I can't get Bumble out I am going to have to miss a fair I'd planned on going to tomorrow night - it's a real shame as the whole village is turned into a Christmas wonderland and it's meant to be really good. As I now don't have a fair until Sunday (weather permitting) I am going to tidy the craft room!! If you haven't heard from me for a few hours, do call for help!

Busy Sunday

At 9 o'clock this morning Matt was busy fixing our door through from the kitchen to the utility room.

Visitors to our house will most likely never have seen this door shut! The catch was broken and it wouldn't close so it inevitably became the place to hang the peg bag, coats etc etc. However it was very cold in our kitchen and the door being fixed and the cutting of the baseboard under the sink so it fit again has made the kitchen nice and warm! The addition of (a fixed) Sammy the Snake draught excluder has made it extra snuggly warm.

And while Matt was busy doing some DIY I managed to glue down lots of tags - some you will have seen before like the Robins and the balls of wool but the others are from a book called Emil and The Detectives. Once they have been photographed they will be listed :)

Eeeeeeek!

Looky what I got hold of this afternoon :)

And look at the things we love page.

What's that featured at number 7?

Oh that's right - a Swirlyarts Tweed chicken pincushion!

Eeeeeeek!!

He couldn't resist a sneaky peek! The other chickens have already been asking him for his autograph!

Thrilled :D

P.S. I have known about this since early October and have been bursting to say something but I didn't!

Poorly laptop :(

Seems there is a lot of this going around in Burnley at the minute! I was due to post some photographs of the things I have been making but seeing as I'm on the desktop and don't know how to connect the camera (I'll get Matt to tell me later) I have no new photographs for you.

I can tell you though that I have been making lots and lots of these guys for something exciting that is happening tomorrow.

Hopefully I will have figured out how to add photographs by then or if not then I am just eyeing up the scanner next to me!



I'm hoping that Matt will be able to make sense of the garbled stuff coming up on my laptop and tell me what to type to make it better again - fingers crossed eh?

Giveaway winner!!

Ok we have a winner but blogspot is being very silly and not allowing me to upload the random number generator screenshot I have to prove that it was a random choice! Luckily I grabbed the time as well on my computer so later when I put the screenshot up you will be able to see that I did indeed do it at 6.40am this morning!

So without further ado the winner is...............number 4 which is Twiggy!!

Congrats Mrs Twigs - I will be in touch later to let you know what to do as I have your email address *insert evil laugh if you feel the need*

I'll edit this later to put the picture up if blogger is playing nice :)

Random bits and bobs

From my mind (and camera) which is here, there and everywhere at the moment!

An olive with a little hoola hoop hat on - lunches can be exciting you know! And yes I do realise that I am a sad little individual to even put a hoola hoop hat on the olive, let alone take a photograph of it!

Pink mashed potato for tea. We regularly have orange mash (with carrot) or green mash (with broccoli) but we'd never tried pink mash (beetroot juice) before. The girls liked it so that's good :) The brown bits in the mash are the skins - I never peel potatoes so the skins get mashed in with the insides.

My new toy! I got myself a proper guillotine as my last paper trimmer (a slide style one) broke in spectacular style after only cutting 100 pages. This thing has a lethal blade on it and the girls have been told in no uncertain terms that they are not to touch it. I was worried about cutting myself with it (not as easy to do as you would think) but instead I trimmed my finger with the scissors! Go figure :)

And this was my side of the front room after an enjoyable Sunday playing with my new toy and making recycled notebooks. Actually on Tuesday afternoon it is still looking a bit like this but rest assured as soon as I have typed this and hit publish I will be going to tidy it up and will not be distracted by shiny blogs!

Don't forget to enter my giveaway to win £25 to spend in my Folksy shop - you only have 10 hours left to enter :)

Spotty Dotty Girls!

We got a letter from school last night asking that we send the children in today in spotty clothes for Children In Need. Luckily, we have plenty of spotty clothes so it wasn't a problem for us.

You probably can't see but Anya's Hello Kitty top has spots on and Tara is wearing red and white spotty leggings. They both have spotty ribbons in their hair too!

Our creative space

Earlier in the week the girls and I decided to make a reading area in our hallway where the trampoline used to be. The trampoline was one of those small ones and got broken at Anya's party and the space was in danger of becoming a dumping ground!

We used the cheat quilt to define the space and make somewhere comfy to sit. The girls decided they needed pillows and raided the front room!

The book box came out of the kitchen (I now have a dedicated space for the Dyson to live yeah!) and the girls used their crocheted blankets to make the space extra snuggly. I'm going to hunt round to see if I have a spare lamp somewhere so that I don't have to leave the hall light on all the time and I need to make a dead dog (draught excluder to you!) for the hall door as a draught comes through. I might upgrade the book box too at some stage but we will see :)

For more creative spaces check out Kootoyoo.

Fair preparation

I'm at a craft fair on Saturday at Crossley Heath School, Savile Park, Halifax, West Yorkshire HX3 OHG if you are in the area and fancy popping along. Ruth will be there too with her fabulous cards. They have food on offer and I can vouch that the cakes they serve up are yummy! To get prepared for the fair I am spending today going through my various boxes of stock to ensure that I have enough of everything.

I know roughly what I have and I know that I need to make more recycled notebooks (think I'm down to my last 5 and they sell well!) and that I have plenty of chickens! As to the rest I will find out when I have gone through the boxes.

Apologies for the really dreadful photographs - these were taken with the light on but the weather here is atrocious today with lots of wind and rain :( A good day for hunkering down and sorting through stock!

1000th post giveaway!

As I mentioned a few days ago I have hit my 1000th blog post! To celebrate I am giving away a £25 voucher* for my Folksy shop!

I ship anywhere in the world and Folksy allows people from all corners of the globe to sign up and it's free! All I'm going to ask you to do is go to my Folksy shop and tell me which thing you like best in there - a little market research! Feel free to look through my sold items and tell me if there is something in there that you like and would like to see again. That's all there is to it. Feel free to invite your friends and family to leave a comment and any tweets/posts on Facebook about the giveaway will be gratefully received :)

*As Folksy don't offer a 'voucher' scheme yet then I will just ask you to choose goods worth £25 from my Folksy shop and I will send them to you. You can choose to include shipping in that £25 or just pay for shipping on top so you can get your £25 worth!

Oh and I meant to add that I will close the competition next Tuesday (23rd) at midnight which means that there will be enough time for me to post worldwide for Christmas :)

Posting dates for Christmas

Just a quick heads up of the posting dates for Christmas!

Image from Royal Mail

 

International Airmail

 

Mon 6th December -  South & Central America, Caribbean, Africa, Middle East, Asia, Far East (including Japan), Australia  and New Zealand

 

Friday 10th December - Eastern Europe, USA and Canada

 

Monday 13th December - Western Europe

 

UK

Saturday 18th December - Second Class

Tuesday 21st December - First Class

Thursday 23rd December - Parcelforce Next day and Special Delivery

As an aside I may be shutting up my shops the week before Christmas but I will let you all know beforehand!

When chickens attack!

Ronald looks like such a lovely chap when he is posing for his official photograph but beware - he has a dark side.

He like to encourage other chickens to attack small children!

Etsy finds email

Guess who was featured???? Guess!!! Yep, me!!!!!!!

There's my little funky tree gift tags in the bottom right :) It lead to a nice flurry of sales and lots of hearts for the tags! If you want to see the email in full then look here - there are lots of lovely upcycled goodies on offer.

Happy Birthday Anya

Goodness! My big girl is 7 today - how on earth did that happen?? Anya - you are a beautiful, kind and thoughtful girl who fiercley loves her little sister and you go to great lengths to make sure she is happy. You love reading, writing, drawing, crafting and you have just discovered a passion for cooking and helping me out around the house (when you want to naturally!) You are getting so brave at trying new things and you make me and Daddy very proud. Happy Birthday gorgeous xx

My Creative Space

I know it's a day early but tomorrow I will be getting ready for Anya's 7th birthday party (kids after school in the house!) and I didn't think you would want to see photos of me moving the piles of craft crap upstairs or cleaning my toilet?

Today I am sitting on the sofa making 80 lots of stickers (5 stickers in each set)

Luckily, whenever I make gift tags and badges and there are little bits left over I tend to punch those bits out and leave them ready to turn into stickers. I have London Underground, flower shapes, Thomas the Tank Engine, security envelope butterflies and houses and a few more for good measure! My task today is to take the little bits of paper and run them through my sticker machine so that they can become stickers.

I'm packing them up in money envelopes. The ones I had previously were blank on the front but these ones I got had writing on them - as you can see I didn't let that stop me!

And why am I making these? For goodies bags for We Make London - I will be sending down 80 of my business cards too for good measure :) 2 doses of Swirlyarts in one bag!

New Nana chickens

These are the latest Nana chickens - they are having a chat whilst waiting for their individual photographs to be taken.

We have triplet chickens (Delphine has already sold and Myrtle is up in my Etsy shop) The third one is yet to be named and listed.

We also have a set of twins who are yet to be named and listed. As you can see they are not identical but are cut from the same cloth (pun intended!)

And we have Eunice - a lovely refined chicken :)

I have two more chickens that need filling and sewing and hopefully I will introduce them soon although you can guess what they look like as they are the younger siblings of the twins and triplets :)

Travelling Teddy Bear

I received a very exciting package from Japan a few weeks back and it contained a teddy bear who originally came from the USA. He is a special teddy bear who is travelling the world so we took him on holiday with us to Disneyland in Paris.

Here we are arriving at Disneyland - teddy was very excited! The queues were huge early in the morning and that was only to get into the car park!

His favourite place was Frontierland which had been turned into Halloweenland for erm, Halloween! He wanted to be photographed with every pumpkin model in there - or so it seemed!

He loved Big Thunder Mountain - as did the girls - but he didn't want to be photographed on it in case he blew away. If you look carefully you can see the train on the 'mountain' behind. Teddy also came on some scarier rides with Matt and I but didn't like them and he stayed in the backpack for those ones :)
Teddy will be jetting off to Australia soon so keep an eye out as he may be popping up on a blog near you!

Curlypops is very clever!

Way back in January 2009, I sent Cam from Curlypops some teatowels as I had a huge pile and would never get round to using them.

In amongst the UK touristy ones was a lovely Australian one. See exhibit 2 below!

And Cam very cleverly turned it into a bag for Jess. Isn't it fabulous?

I'm now wondering if Cam still has the Lancashire tea towel I sent in the same batch - I'm thinking it would make a great bag for me! I'd just have to be careful though not to take it back home to Yorkshire - it might start another war!!

Go and tell Cam how clever she is - she'd like that :)

Half term happenings!

We rode in a shiny light green car

And a shiny blue one too!

We saw a strange dog

And some odd pumpkin people who covered everything in orange paint

Don't worry though as we found some cuter pumpkins.

I was eaten by a dinosaur

But luckily he spat me out so we could have a girly picture

The girls found a very large Buzz Lightyear (and he was talking this time!)

and we helped slinky dog chase his tail.

And I have no idea why the girls are laughing in this photograph because no-one was stood behind Daddy pulling funny faces and making bunny ears - honestly! *walks off whistling*