We just had a wonderful weekend down in London. We set off on Friday, and unbelievably it took us 7 hours to get there, it was only supposed to be 4.5 but the traffic was just dreadful. Anyhoo we dropped our stuff at the travel lodge and went to my aunties for a meal. It was great to catch up with family, and to give the bride her gift before the wedding. By giving it to her the night before it meant she could have a good look through it rather than give it to her at the wedding when she would be too busy.

Saturday we got a taxi over to the town hall, it was a lovely old building. This is the room for the service.



and here they are married at last, they smiled and giggled the whole way through. They looked so relaxed and happy.

the reception was in a paddock, there was a huge tent and 3 gazebos. There was also a hog roast being prepared just as we arrived.

Platters of nibbles and bottles of champagne came around every 10 minutes to keep us busy till the main meal was served.

This is the tent in which the reception was held.

The inside of the tent,before the main meal.

Me with 3 of my cousins.

The bride with her brother, don't they both look gorgeous!

The bride and her bridesmaids

This is me with the girlfriend's of two of my cousins.

As it got darker we were treated to a display by a fire poi dancer. I was pretty impressed as I have some poi, I am not very good with them and I certainly don't set them on fire lol

On the Sunday we drove over to Bluewater shopping mall where we met up with this group of loony toons. A superb bunch of girls that i know from UKS along with husbands and kids.

Monday we did a bit of shopping and had ourselves some lunch and then set off home, thankfully it only took us 4.5 hrs to get home....think I may sleep for a week now.

ok this is a super quick post. I won't be able to post again till after the wedding. So I thought I would show you the bracelet I made.

It is a free machine embroidery cuff.



Here are the instructions in a pdf that you can download from Scribd. you will need to make a free account.




All you need is ...

some 2 inch scraps of patterned paper
ink for edging
UTEE
beads
strip of pelmet vilene
sheer fabric
metallic thread
ribbon
heat gun
sewing machine

* pleated purse tutorial pdf.. download link in this post*

errmm ok, so it's a bit messy, just a bit mind lol My machine is still set up and draped in a denim bag just needing a lining. The cream box will hopefully be lined with fabric and will hold the wedding gift I made. On the chair you can see ever more denim and a craft mat with 5 little paper flowers on it. they have been dipped in UTEE and will hopefully make it onto a bracelet.



the rest of the room right now is pretty bad too lol.

30 bags done so far, plus that one on the machine which is half done. I have enough denim and time to do another 5, bringing my total to 36. I don't think i will get anymore done than that, as the convoy goes on the 3rd and we are away for a few days before then. So my target of 40 is unlikely to get done, but 36 is pretty close. I will post a pic of them all before I deliver them to the driver.

did you see the bag I made the other day for the wedding? well I made a little purse to go with it.



How cute is that, it was made just from the leftover scraps. I took a lot of photos, too many to put here so I popped them into a pdf for you with a mini tutorial.

Pleated Coin Purse Tutorial.

The pdf is on Scribd, so if you click the link you can download it, you will need a Scribd account but that is free to do.



In a mad rush now, a million gazillion things to do before the weekend,so may not get much visiting done. Have a great week.x

Malteser Genoise.

5 eggs
5oz sugar
5 oz plain flour
1oz butter
4 bags of maltesers
2 bars of white chocolate
225ml double cream

Butter cream...butter and icing sugar and options Belgian drinking chocolate powder and a little double cream or evap milk or just regular milk to make it creamy.

Whisk the eggs and sugar till frothy, this is not a quick whisk, this is an 'at least 10 minutes' job. You have to get as much air in as possible, this is what makes the sponge rise.



Melt the butter.

Fold the flour carefully into the eggs.

Pour a little of the egg.sugar,flour mix into the butter , stir, then pour the melted butter mix back into the main mixture.

Crush 2 of the packets of maltesers and add to the mixture.



Turn into lined oblong tin and bake for 20minutes until springy. Turn out onto a rack to cool.




Cut in half , so you now have 2 almost squares.

Sandwich them together with milk chocolate butter icing.






Sorry about a couple of the photos, they were taken at night and came out very dark, it is just the lighting and not the cake lol




Now make a white chocolate ganache with the double cream and white chocolate.

Melt the white choc in a bowl over hot water, add half the cream. In a bowl whisk the other half of the cream. When the choc/cream has cooled slightly add the whisked cream and fold all together. Pop in the fridge for 30 minutes till it just starts to stiffen up.

Spread all over the cake, top and sides.

Crush the remaining 2 packets of maltesers and throw them on.




Put back in the fridge for at least 2 hours before serving.

If you try to serve too early the ganache will be too soft and sickly. You should leave it to stiffen up, makes it much easier to slice and to eat.

Alternatively make these as cupcakes, forget the milk chocolate butter cream. Just top with the white chocolate ganache and crushed maltesers.

So, my son is home for a while...with a lot of stuff. I do not have a garage or a shed, so my dining room is always full of stuff that has no home, and is now even more full. We looked at the large plastic storage boxes/mini sheds in the DIY shop and decided we had room in the garden for one of those...but how to get it home? the shop is only 5 mins away by car, but they wanted £20 delivery. So yesterday, OH and son and son's friend went off to get it, most of it went in the car, but the back piece wouldn't fit..so this is how it came home...



Son(at back) n friend(at front) walked home, around 15 mins with it on their heads, as you can see it was raining...but not just any old light summer shower, oh no, this was torrential, and they looked like drowned rats when they got here.

Banging and hammering are taking place right now as OH and son put said box thingie together.

Also yesterday i popped up to the quilting shop about half an hour away from us. They have quite a nice selection of fat quarters, and i was able to take in my new dress and shoes (for the wedding I am going to) and find 3 pieces of fabric that coordinate well.

I came home and 4 hours later, had this pretty little bag, all ready to take with me down to London.




The blue fabric has flowers in cream, made up of tiny dots. The cream bow fabric has tiny off white dots on it, and the lining is a dirty pink.....i don't do pretty pink, and it took me ages to find a pink that I could live with lol




I have a tiny scrap of blue and pink left and a bit more of the cream left, so today i shall make a matching coin purse...and then I need to make some sort of bracelet, and then i will be all set...apart from big knickers! i need big knickers to keep all my flabby bits in order. My dress is long and light and floaty and i really don't want my wobbly bits floating around too.

So purse today, maybe bracelet tomorrow, hairdressers on tuesday, packing on weds, a sewing day out with friends on thursday, and friday off to the wedding.....in between all that i still have 14 bags for Moldova to make.

here is tomato watch...i now have 3 bunches on toms on each plant, big ones at the bottom, some small/med toms half way up the plants and just in the past few days i have some tiny ones at the top of each plant. The big ones are rock hard and very heavy, but so far still very green. I am feeding them twice a week, very excited that we might actually get to eat them soon.

Do you have postcards? do you have a lot of postcards?

I do, it would appear to be impossible for me to go to the cinema without picking up the free postcards. I have been doing this for ages, without any real purpose. Though they are handy for writing a quick note on to pop in with parcels.

This is half my stack...I recently gave the other half away.



I decided i wanted to do something with them, so I picked this one out....ready to alter. My thought was that i could alter lots of them and then collage them together....or not...

So i firstly covered it with gesso, which i then wiped off in sections to reveal the flag behind. I inked and sprayed over the gesso. I cut out a dress-up dolly and stuck her on, and gave her some gold leaf wings. At this point i decided to pop this one in a parcel going to USA, so I added USA number plates to the top and bottom.



I added distress stickles, and text. i coloured the dress with prismas.



I doodled and stuck on a flower. It's fairly grungy and messy and was so much fun to mess around with, it is by no means a pretty piece of art lol

I finished off by rubbing gold wax over the edges. then off it went in its parcel.



So now, what to do with the rest of the postcards...

Morning campers, how are you. Here is my craft room, the desk has the sewing machine set up, nothing of interest there so here are the piles of denim that are all over the room.



Here are the first 2 bags made in the 2nd batch, these ones are drawstring style.



they are both lined. Only another 18 to go. I also need to make myself a bag for the wedding, and a bag for my giveaway on here...so much to do, so little time! I also need to somehow fit in a visit to the hairdresser, my hair is far too long and needs at least 4 inches taking off.




Today sees my lovely friend Amalia leave the UK and move back to Spain, it was her birthday the other day and this is her card. I did it in the style of a journal page. Scroll down to a previous post if you want to see how it came together.




This is the bag I made for her. We met up in town for coffee so I could give them to her, and we ended up chatting and laughing for 2 hours. It is a shame she is going back to Spain, but the weather here is just too miserable for her lol

I love these fabrics, they work well together.

Finally I would really like to make this knitted tea cosy, but I cannot find the pattern anywhere. I have 2 other sheep patterns, but this is the one I really want, with the green grass section at the bottom...Can anybody help please?

Have a great week everyone.x

Time for a recipe...

Pear,Hazlenut and chocolate Loaf.

100g hazelnuts
140g SR Flour
175g butter
140g sugar
2 large eggs
5 small pears
50g dark chocolate
2 tbspns apricot jam or shredless orange marmalade, whichever you have in the cupboard.




Grind up half the nuts, roughly chop the other half.
Peel and core the pears. Roughly chop 3, and slice the other 2.
chop the chocolate into small, chip pieces.




Mix all the ingredients, reserving the pear 'slices'.

Turn into a greased and lined loaf tin, top with the sliced pears.

Bake Gas mark 3 for 50minutes till firm but springy.

Turn onto a rack, and when cool drizzle the top with glace icing.

Get me to the church on time...

One of my cousins is getting married, down near London...that's a long way away from us. It will take us about 5 hours to drive down there. As such, and because we want to spend time with family we are going down for 2 nights, it will be a lovely break.

however, as we all know weddings are expensive shindigs,no?

new clothes,new shoes,new bag,petrol,travel lodge,hair cut...etc etc...oh and a present for the couple, obv lol...I promise, I did think about the gift before my clothes..no really I did, stop sniggering!

So the couple have asked for money, towards the honeymoon..yay easy gift! But me being me, I felt I needed to make something as well. so indeed a gift and card have been made. I will share them after the wedding.( end of August)

I chose a new dress and shoes...wasn't able to get hold of either, chose a second,third and fourth dress...bought the second one. Ian is mightily pleased with this choice, not because it looks stunning but because i already have shoes that will go with it. i do however need a bag, which I will make.

In other news..and this does all tie loosely together, my son has moved home. He has been at uni for 4 years doing 2 degrees( definately not a euphemism for romancing 2/3 of a 70's pop group)

anyway, he is home for a while till he finds work and a flat, I have been tidying,sorting,moving stuff around...and here is where it relates to the wedding... in the sorting I came across a beaded necklace kit. I started it a mere 5-6 years ago!! I could not remember what it looked like, and was pleasantly suprised to find it matches the colours of my new dress perfectly.

so I finished it off last night.




it is very pretty, and didn't take long at all to make....well if you don't count the years it has been in a cupboard lol

I got to 100 followers, thankyou all so much.

I will be doing a bag giveaway...as soon as I get it made, watch this space.

Hello Wednesday, how are you?

Cleanish desk over here...the floor is another matter. Here you can see a cup of tea, my new ipod docking station(playing Romanian music as I type) and in the background is my new pencil box.

Warning, the rest of this post is photofull...but do feel free to stick around and look through them if you want to know how I made my pencil box, and more importantly why!



I have quite a few prisma pencils, also some karisma pencils, which are the uk equivalents. I have had the karisma for years and years, and sadly they are very hard to find now, so to complete the set I am having to mix them with prismas...this is bad enough...( I don't like that they aren't all the same style/shape)

but they were all in boxes in drawers, then to make life easier, so I thought, they were all put in one big box.

This resulted in lots of rattling, mainly by me, scrabbling around for the right colour, which is usually always at the bottom...I craft late at night, into the early hours...scrabbling and rattling at 4am is not advised. I generally hear lots of hmmphing and sighing and turning over from Ian in the next room.

So I got a few toilet roll inners, separated the pencils into colour groups and stood them up in the box. this was great , as in I could see all the colours, no more scrabbling...but bad, in that the box was a bit big and every time I so much as looked at it, all the rolls fell over, rather drunkenly!

PLUS...and this is where I give you far too much info about myself, the cardboard rolls were all from different brands of loo paper, and so were all different sizes. See next photo...



You cannot begin to imagine how much this annoyed me...this brings us back to liking things in sets!!!

So, firstly I unwrapped 2 rolls of Ikea wrapping paper, carefully rewrapping the paper onto a third roll, which incidentally is now huuuge! This gave me 2 long, white ,sturdy tubes. I cut them up into same size sections, immediately I felt much better lol I filled them with pencils and facebooked about how I had just spent an hour sorting pencils...I need to get out more!

It gets worse!



The box, if you remember was too big, so i hunted out a smaller box. This meant displacing some
silk dyes and glass paints, which I chucked into another box. I dare say they will lurch around drunkenly now, but they are in a cupboard so I won't see it happening.

I had to arrange the rolls in the box so they made a pleasing pattern...and not be higgeldy piggeldy, cos that would have driven me nuts...I know,I know!

Then I covered the box in this scrummy paper from Art from the Heart. at this point it is looking like a badly wrapped xmas present.



The box is slightly longer than 6 inches, so I was left with a gap at each corner.

I cut these strips, taking a snippet out from each end...



So they would bend over the box ends and fold over themselves.



I did this on all 4 corners and then covered the base of the box.

next I painted the rolls in the colour groups of my pencils. You could cover them in paper, but really hardly any of the rolls will be seen later...and besides it was an excuse to get painty. I suggest if you have small children that you get them to do this, it will keep them quiet for ages...worked for me, I have never been so quiet!



I painted a little of the insides, but only about a quarter of the way down.

next I got a couple of really strong brads, these are especially good as they have the little discs that slip over the legs before you open them out.

I cut a piece of brown webbing, about 50cm long, folded over the ends and bradded them to the box.

I popped some glue onto the bottom rim of each tube and pushed them down into the box, holding them in place for a few minutes till they started to set.

and finally filled it all up with pencils...

The handle swivels on the brads so you can move it out of the way.

No more rattling or scrabbling in the dead of night, all pencils are sorted into colour order...phew! and the whole thing looks quite pretty, almost makes up for them not being a complete set lol