Birthday

My Birthday - it was in April but hey, I'm only 4 months behind in my blogging about it.

It was a very chilled out day really - I didn't really want to do much, just enjoy having a nice peaceful day off with no work to go to and lots of time to do exactly what I wanted. We made some huge sandwiches of all of my favourite fillings and bought a few other treats and went for a walk down to the lake at our local country park.
We just sat there, minding our own business, munching on our goodies and chilling out.

When we got back me and the hubby set to work and made a cake before we had a few people around in the evening. We just made a normal sponge mix in two tins but then we were let loose with the chocolate. We melted down far more than we would ever need to cover the cakes and started decorating (I was eating the rest from a mug after it had solidified again for a few weeks after!)

 A little bit of chocolate butter icing in the middle (my favourite!) and we sandwiched them together.

It was really great fun to make and tasted delicious. I would definitely make it again (and have done since). The only problem with it is when it comes to cutting the slices and serving it. As the chocolate had set so well by this time it was pretty tricky and did make the butter icing in the middle squidge out a little bit.

When it comes to presents I generally have no ideas what to ask for for these kinds of events, although I love them every year and who doesn't love to be spoilt, this year I have to admit that I found it quite tricky to choose something that I would like.

The best suggestion that I could come up with for this was a Kindle - I don't read massive amounts of books every year or anything - nothing compared to what other people with these kind of devices seem to anyway so I really wasn't sure about asking for one at all - I wasn't sure if I would read it at all - it could end up just being one extremely expensive book. As it turns out I have used it a LOT! I love it and sit and read nearly everyday - it is a great way to spend my lunch times at work if I am not able to crochet or knit (it depends who's around as lots of people would look at me really weirdly if I got out my stuff and suddenly started to crochet in our canteen at work.)

So along with this, as I knew I was going to be getting a Kindle for my birthday as this was from Adam - I decided that a sensible thing to also ask for was Amazon vouchers. I thought I would only get a little bit - enough to get a couple of books for my Kindle but quite a few people seemed to cotton onto this idea and I ended up with a substantial amount. I am very lucky.

Having had my tiny little go at sewing with a machine and making my apron I really enjoyed it and thought that this would be something that I could really enjoy doing - especially if I had a machine that was substantially bigger and didn't keep eating my material all of the time!

I had no ideas what sort of machine would be best or what I would get on with the most so - after reading what felt like hundreds of reviews and trying to decide what functions I might actually use on a full-sized machine (I had no idea what I would need really!) I decided to go with this:

It's theJanome 525S and the machine that was used a lot on the Great British Sewing Bee. It seemed to have a lot of good reviews and obviously was chosen to be used on the show so I decided to go for this with my fingers crossed it would be good.

With it I also purchased this Great British Sewing Bee book to give me a few ideas of what I might be able to make and some really basic pointers for how to go about it.

As it turns out, I absolutely love it and have used it loads - almost more than I thought I would. Like I have said - this sewing thing could really get addictive!