It has been a bit of a daft day really but one that I have really really enjoyed. I think I was in need of this kind of lovely fun craziness.
I was woken this morning by the smell of bacon crisping and came downstairs to pretty much my favourite ever breakfast. Pancakes, maple syrup, and bacon. It was awesome! The pancakes even had raisins in. Yum!
Henlow joined us for breakfast and added fantastic comedy value by trying to a few minutes to walk under this radiator pipe. He has some fantastically smart ideas at times!
We then had to pop out for some shopping. I had seen something online the other day about making some toffee vodka so we treated ourselves to a bottle of vodka and a packet of Werther's Originals. Here is the website that I found the recipe on.
Basically all you have to do is open a full packet of Werther's sweets. Pour them into a sterilised mason jar and add vodka.
This is a full packet of Werther's
Topped up with an entire bottle of vodka
And as soon as we started to shake it, the toffee's started to dissolve into the vodka.
It doesn't look the prettiest after the first shake up but we can only hope that it turns a lovely toffee colour in time. The recipe says to leave the sweets to dissolve for 2 whole days in order for them to completely disappear so we are hoping that the colour will change in this time too.
While we were out I had been saying that I wanted to do something a bit active today - I wasn't sure what but just something a little bit daft playing about in the garden or something. Adam had the idea of playing some ball sports in the garden. I know that he really wanted to try to teach me to play cricket a little bit so we needed a softer ball to play with than a real cricket ball. We got a slightly softer plastic-y version when we went to a toy shop.
While we were there I also found something that I thought could be fun. A skateboard! I had been wanting to do something a bit daft and active so when we saw these in the shop I thought that this would be the perfect thing for me to try. I wasn't sure where I was going to be able to practice but Adam pointed out that we live in a quiet little cut de sac so the road should be fine.
I had a really good time practicing - we even spoke to a bunch of teenagers who came past - they were lovely. They laughed at me a little bit when Adam said that I am nearly 30 and wanted to try to skateboard for the first time but then they had a go and tried to show me what to do. It was nice.
Here is a little video of one of my first attempts. I will need a lot more practice but I don't think it's too bad for a first attempt!
This afternoon I went out again for a bit more practice and was getting a bit better at pushing myself along and keeping the board moving. So much so that I think I got a little bit cocky. I ended up hitting a little pot hole in the road and went absolutely flying. I landed on both hands, my right elbow and right hip. The pads broke my fall a little and protected my hands from some good grazes, the elbow pads helped a little but I still have a little graze on my right elbow. I haven't had a graze since I was little. I have to admit, I'm a little bit proud of my first skateboarding injury!
The vodka has been shaken a fair few times today in between playing some cricket and french cricket (which was actually a lot more fun that proper cricket!) and skateboarding. I know it says in the recipe to wait for 2 days for it to be ready but it also says that it's done when all of the sweets have melted. I don't know if it's because we used 1l of vodka instead of the 70cl that it says in the recipe or what but I'm fairly sure that it has to be ready.
It has changed colour a little bit more and become a nicer honey kind of colour
And decanted back into it's original bottle it still looks nice too. It's such a shame that the sweets had made it so that there was ever so slightly too much for the liquid to fit back in here. We might just have to try a little shot before bed.
Cheers and happy weekend!
The following is the final photo for today and I think that this one pretty much sums up most of our day. A good one has been had by all here. The cider and nachos were a mid afternoon snack and accompaniment to tonights dinner of homemade chilli.
I hope that you have had just as lovely a day on your Sunday. Have a good week and I'll speak to you soon.
OK so I have just tried my first post on Instagram for the post that I made on Tuesday. I didn't really think that it would hugely do anything as I have never even used Instagram at all but within about 2 minutes of posting I have gone from 1 view on that post (me when I was testing if it worked!) to 5 (another is probably me again) but still I'm sure that that's 3 new people who have looked within a couple of minutes. Hopefully that means that I will have a few more of you reading this and enjoying what I'm doing here.
The last time I posted it wasn't quite in the essence of what I'd like my blogs to be about and that's trying to spread some happiness and show you some of the fun and creative things that I have been trying to do. I just felt I needed a little explanation as to why I've not been around for a while before re-starting to post about the fun and happy stuff.
It was about a year ago now that I joined a WI group close to where I live. The one in the village meets during a day and from the photo's on their website it looks like more of a "traditional" WI group. I therefore found one in a little town not too far away that I have joined. This one is a "modern" take on what a WI should be. There is wine at every meeting and they try to intersperse some of the more traditional talks and things with some more active meetings. I did actually decide to join when I was starting to struggle with how I was feeling and hoped that me going out to meet new people and do something a little bit different each month would help. It has been good for me and I am starting to grow with confidence each month now that I recognise some people who go and am starting to get to know them. I still find some of the activities a little difficult but this month was a classic of showing how I can pleasantly surprise myself.
This month's meeting was on Wednesday of last week and the session was pottery painting. It's something that I never thought that I would have been any good at and really didn't have any confidence in before I started. If I'm honest I even got pretty panicky at the start. Just making the decision of what I was going to paint got my heart racing and then choosing colours was another thing again.
I decided to paint this "frog lizard". I'm calling it that as when I was choosing what to paint I wasn't entirely sure what it was. I knew that whatever I painted was going to end up brightly coloured so I guess it doesn't really matter.
Unfortunately I never thought to take a "before" photo so I'm afraid that the "after" photos later on will have to do.
I decided to add some star shapes to each of its legs and arms as well as a few to it's back too. There were some stickers provided that you were able to stick on and then paint over to leave the shapes blank underneath. I was a little worried that this wouldn't work as well as I would have liked as the stickers didn't seem to stick very well to start with. Apparently there was no knack to this other than to stick and hope and to not put too much paint on so that it was less likely to bleed under the stickers.
It was slightly tricky to be able to tell which colour was which once you had poured them out of their labelled bottles and even more so once you had painted the first layer onto the clay so I am really hoping that I got the yellow and the orange the right way round for the second coat.
Here he is all painted up and with the stickers removed to show the original white underneath. Some of the stars weren't perfect as some of the paint did bleed under the stickers a little but I hope that this will still be ok once it is baked.
I'm really excited to see what he looks like once he's done but this is as finished as I can show you at the minute.
I bottled out of painting his eyes but when I got home my hubby said that he might be able to put a little gloss black paint on them to make the little guy come to life a little more.
There were pre-warnings at the beginning as to how difficult it was to use the bottles with the fine nibs to squeeze out some black ink. These could be used for outlining anything that you want to highlight or to write on our pottery.
I wasn't brave enough to add anything onto the top of my "frog lizard" but I did have a little go right at the end to add my name underneath. We were asked to label them so that it was easy to tell who's is who's once they have all been fired. I did point out that I really can't imagine how many starry multi-coloured "frog lizard's" she is going to have in the kiln at any one time but at least this pushed me to have a go and try the writing paint. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.
I am trying to keep up with my blogging more often still at the minute and have a few things in the pipeline to tell you about over the next few weeks so I hope that you come back to read more soon.
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Wow! Yet again, it has been a really long time without posting. it's been over 6 months. They have been a little difficult I have to be honest. I have had some ups and downs within the last few months and have recently been diagnosed with depression which I am currently working hard to try to deal with.
Because of this I have found that I have been really distracted and had very little concentration, inspiration or ability to work on any of the things that i used to enjoy. It has meant that all sewing has been put on hold since before Christmas and there hasn't been a lot of other crafty activity going on either.
The only thing that I have been working on this year really has been my weather crochet.
I have used pretty much the same principle as last year when I made the table runner (which I guess actually you might not have seen yet! - I'll post some photo's of it on the kitchen table shortly) but I changed the ranges for the colours ever so slightly. I narrowed down the temperature ranges for this year on the theory that it didn't really get hugely hot enough to get up to the oranges and reds very much last year. Apparently as of this week I am very wrong!!
This year I went for the following ranges:
Red 20.5 +
Orange 16.5 - 20
Yellow 12.5 - 16
Green 8.5 - 12
Light blue 4.5 - 8
Dark blue 0.5 - 4
Purple 0 or below
I wasn't sure what I was going to make this year as I only have 1 kitchen table and therefore don't need another table runner.
I have decided that I will make a cushion cover. I don't have a particular cushion or size in mind to make but so far have got as far as deciding I will be making 2 runners of crochet (6 months per runner). I have worked out that each one should be roughly the same length, I may just need to add a couple of extra white rows to the shorter of the 2 to make them match up perfectly when I come to attach them together.
As we are now more than half way through the year, I have completed 1 of the 2 runners (other than sewing in the ends! - I haven't been any good at keeping on top of these this time around).
It has got considerably warmer through June however I have also changed the temperature I am using to choose the colours as I did last year.
I have gone for low temperature of each day through January and February, mid temperatures March - May, high temperatures June - August, mid temperatures again through September - November and finally low temperatures for December.
I hope you are all still well and out there somewhere. I am going to try to blog more often again now so watch this space and I will try to get bank on track and keep you updated with everything as I go.
