Wishing you all.........

A Very Merry Christmas!

Not long to go now ~ only 2 sleeps until Christmas and I am so excited.........

I'm hoping that this lovely snowy weather continues so that the children can enjoy their very first white Christmas ~ how wonderful would that be?

I'm looking forward to sitting with my feet up on Christmas eve with a nice glass of Champagne and knowing that everything is ready for Christmas day.

I hope that you all have a very lovely time and that your Christmas is everything that you wish for :O) xx

Ready for Christmas

Blimey! Where did last week disappear to? I must have blinked a little bit too hard and missed it! I know that I said that I had almost finished my Christmas shopping but there still seems to be a hundred and one other things to do to get organised for the BIG day.

I have been Busy,Busy,Busy! There has been a lot more running around like a mad woman doing lots more Christmassy preparations. I have been.............


BUSY ~ counting down the sleeps until Christmas by opening advent calendars. Not long to go now! Although I don't think that Joseph should really be dressed as a dentist or that there was a dentist chair in the stable all those years ago, but the children were responsible for the additions which were very kindly lent by the Sylvanian families!


BUSY ~ writing Christmas cards AND managing to get them posted before I miss the last posting date.


BUSY ~ wrapping my little Giveaway presents.


BUSY ~ buying a few more little Christmas presents ~ this time for ME! I'm not quite sure just how these little things managed to find their way into my shopping bags either!


BUSY ~ rippling away and trying to get this scarf finished in time for Christmas and making a few more felty decorations for the Christmas tree.

I hope that you are all having as much fun as me and enjoying this rather hectic time of year in the week before Christmas. I'm really looking forward to the BIG day and think that I am getting more excited than the children are! :O)

Giveaway winners

I would just like to start by saying a very big THANK YOU to you all for the lovely comments that you sent me on my first Bloggy Birthday ~ they were all very much appreciated and made me feel very happy indeed.

I am sorry that it has taken me longer than I anticipated to do the draw for the Bloggy Birthday Giveaway ~ but I have been running around like a very mad woman doing all manner of Christmassy shopping things and I am nearly done! Yes.............. you did hear me right! I am nearly finished my Christmas shopping AND I have most of them wrapped up and hidden in the loft out of sight of small people! How organised is that? I must say that I am feeling incredibly proud of myself too :O)


Right.............. let’s get ourselves back to the Bloggy Birthday Giveaway. I put all the names of the lovely people who were kind enough to leave me a comment into my Cath Kidston Stanley bag and as I had two small people at home both eager to help out I decided that we would each draw one little piece of paper out of the bag ~ which means that 3 lucky people will each get a little Bloggy Birthday present from me.


The first name to be pulled out of the bag by a small boy was ~ Kim

The second name to be pulled out of the bag by a small girl was ~ Lucy

And the third name to be pulled out of the bag by me was ~ Louise


Congratulations to the winners ~ I shall send you each an e mail very soon and will need your posting info and I promise that I will try my very hardest to send your little present to you before Christmas.

I am just really sorry that I can’t send you all a little present but THANK YOU all again so much for your lovely comments.

I hope that you all have a very lovely weekend too :O)

Rainbow Birdie

The sun is shining here in my little part of the world today which makes a lovely change after all the very stormy, windy and rainy weather that we have had over the past couple of weeks. I don't know about you ~ but it always makes me feel much brighter and happier when the sun is shining.


Today I thought that I would show you all my Rainbow Birdie that I made from another pattern from the very lovely Lucy over at Attic 24. I loved these little Birdie decorations the very minute that Lucy showed them on her blog and knew that I would just have to make one. However, I very stupidly thought that it would be plain sailing and very easy to do ~ BUT I had never crocheted a circle before and I ended up frogging it twice before I was happy with the shape for the little Birdie body. I'm not sure what I was doing wrong but no matter how hard I tried my circle would just not lie flat!


Taking my inspiration from my lovely stash of Rainbow coloured Rowan Pure Wool DK I tried to include all the colours of the rainbow ~ Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet.

I know that some of you will have already had a sneaky peak at my little rainbow coloured birdie over on Flickr and Ravelry but I am so pleased at how he eventually turned out that I just had to show him off here too! I think he looks very lovely indeed hanging on the holly tree in the winter sun.

There is also plenty of time left to enter my first Bloggy Birthday Giveaway ~ I will leave it open until the end of November and then I will get my small people to pull names out of a hat to find out which lucky people will receive a Bloggy Birthday present from little old me! All you have to do to enter is leave me a comment on either this post or my Bloggy Birthday post.

Tomorrow I am going shopping in Edinburgh with my very lovely husband ~ just the two of us! How EXCITING is that! It really doesn't happen very often so I am really looking forward to it. It will be lovely just browsing around the shops and stopping for coffee and cake and a lovely lunch without small people being bored or hungry!!

I hope that you all have a very lovely weekend too :O)

Bloggy Birthday

Happy Bloggy Birthday to me....................

Today it is my Bloggy Birthday or Blogiversary ~ my little blog is one year old! I really can’t quite believe that I have been part of Blogland for one whole year ~ the time has gone by so very quickly and I have met some very lovely bloggy people along the way.

One of the many things that blogging has given me is the motivation to make lots of lovely things and also to try out things I wouldn’t normally have thought about making. The inspiration that comes from all you other lovely people is a very wonderful thing!


Now everyone knows that birthdays ~ even Bloggy Birthdays ~ need to have cake. Unfortunately all my baking things have been put into storage because we are trying to sell our house so bought cakes it had to be! ~ but they are still very chocolaty and very yummy indeed. I am going to celebrate my first Bloggy Birthday by putting my feet up and having a lovely cup of tea, a cake ~ or maybe 2 ~ and a little read at my new Country Living magazine too.


Bloggy birthdays also need to have presents so I bought myself a present of some lovely Rowan Pure Wool DK in some very pretty pink shades ~ I do have a little project lined up for this and all will be hopefully be revealed very soon.

As a way of saying a very BIG Thank You to all the lovely people who take the time to read my little blog there will also be presents for you too! I am not quite sure what these presents will be yet or even how many there will be either. I am also not promising that they will be handmade by me but they will definitely be something nice.

One of the most exciting things for me about having a blog is checking to see if anyone has left me any lovely comments. I just LOVE getting comments! The anticipation is sometimes just too much for me to cope with ~ I really must get out a bit more!! Anyway to be in with a chance of winning one of my Bloggy Birthday presents all you have to do is leave me a comment at the end of this post ~ I will leave it open until the end of November so that it gives you all plenty of time to be included in the giveaway.

I hope that you all have a very lovely weekend and I am looking forward to hopefully reading some of your lovely comments too :O)

Garden Loveliness

Earlier on in the week I just happened to take a look out of the window and noticed how bare and wintery my back garden was looking. I decided to take myself outside for a closer look and noticed that although most of the flowers had stopped blooming there was in fact quite a lot of colour still around.

Beautifully vibrant red Wintery berries::

A pretty pink rose ::


Some very fragrant Rosemary ::

And some lovely Geranium leaves ~ with a few little red flowers still out.

One of the things I love most about blogging is that it makes you far more aware of your everyday surroundings and I was actually quite surprised at how beautiful these plants were. I suppose that what I learned was that if you take the time to look a little bit more closely at everything around you then there is beauty and pleasure to be found in even the simplest of things and that there is plenty of colour to be found if you look hard enough for it.

Right ............ moving onto an entirely different kind of garden now.

Summer Garden Granny Squares to be more precise. I have now finished the first block of my Summer Garden Granny blanket ~ and I am very happy with how it has turned out. As you can see it is still looking a bit bunched up and wrinkly and it definitely needs to be blocked but it lets you get the general idea though. That’s one down and only about 29 more blocks to make!! I can definitely see this one being a very long term project! I must say that I am absolutely amazed at the speed that some lovely bloggy people can produce beautiful blankets!!

Enjoy your weekend ....... I hope it’s a good one :O)

Watery Ripple Scarf

Today is a big day for my Watery Ripple Scarf ~ because today is the day that it get’s it’s very own BiG Moment in blog land ~ a kind of show and tell if you like.

My Watery Ripple Scarf started out life as a test run of the very lovely Attic 24 Neat Ripple Pattern and it just evolved very easily into a scarf. I used Rowan Pure Wool Double knit in the following water inspired colours ::

Glacier 005

Pier 006

Marine 008


It was my very first time rippling and I really do have to say that once I got started I LOVED it. I did not, however, like trying to crochet in to the foundation chain for the first ripply row! That was really difficult and I am so very glad that I only had 31 chains to battle with! Maybe if I start now I might get the first row done for a ripple blanket this time next year! I may be missing something but I’m sure there must be an easier way to do it.

Anyway ~ here it is!

The BiG Moment for my Watery Ripple Scarf.............


I really do love my Watery Ripple Scarf and I really do LoVe the water inspired blues and greens too. It is also such a joy to wear and it had it’s very first outing into the big wide world this morning as I wore it for doing the school run and it kept me very warm and very cosy indeed :O)

Crochet Mosiac

Hooray! I did it! I'm so excited about it too! ~ I have finally managed to make a photo mosaic and I have to say that I am very, very happy with it indeed :O)

I have admired these wonderful photographic creations that I have seen in other peoples blogs for such a long time and I have tried unsuccessfully several times to make one for myself. However, yesterday it seems that I finally cracked it!


I used a combination of Flickr and Bug Huge Labs and once you get the hang of it then it is fairly easy to do. It is lovely to have all my colourful October crochet projects in one image and I can definitely see myself making a few more of these lovely creations for future blog posts.

Right.......I really do have to go and do some yukky but very necessary household chores ~ laundry, dishes, cleaning, dusting, hoovering............. you all know how it is ~ the list is endless! Oh and I have to sew some pink elastic onto some ballet shoes for this afternoon too ~ these poor ballet shoes have been waiting for their elastics for a good few weeks now!

I hope that you all have a very lovely weekend :O)

Wet Weekend

I am back ~ and I had a very lovely ~ but very WET weekend ~ in the beautiful Highlands of Scotland. The hotel was just as warm and friendly as I remembered and the picture of the Buachaille Etive Mor was taken just as we arrived from our bedroom window!

The weather was very typically Scottish and it rained for most of the weekend and rather unfortunately I discovered that my so called waterproof coat was not in fact very waterproof at all and I got absolutely soaked from head to toe!


Unfortunately because the weather was so wet there was not much chance to get as many photographs as I would have liked as the rain and cloud were coming down and blocking the view over the mountains.


The Autumnal colours were beautiful and the photographs do not really show the contrast between all the greens and browns and oranges but the scenery was spectacular.


The rainy weather didn’t stop us from enjoying ourselves and although we didn’t get very much walking done we did manage to visit Oban and Fort William and have a lovely lunch and stop a few times for tea and cake!


And I did find the time to crochet some greeny grassy borders around my flowery circles too!

Weekend away

Do you remember a few weeks ago when I showed you a picture of this beautiful mountain?


This gorgeous mountain is called Buachaille Etive Mor and is situated at the head of Glen Etive in the Highlands of Scotland and is where I will be staying tonight!


I am going away for a Girly Weekend with my very best friend and we are going to be staying in The Kings House Hotel which is a remote inn and hotel at the eastern end of Glen Coe and enjoys breathtaking views of the beautiful Buachaille Etive Mor from it’s bedroom windows. Whilst I am very excited about this weekend I am also a bit apprehensive about it too as I have never been away from my children or my lovely husband for as long as 3 nights before and I know that I will really miss them ~ a LOT.

We are maybe going to do a little walking as the scenery is so spectacular ~ but mostly we are planning on relaxing and taking it easy.


I will be taking my walking boots and my watery ripple scarf to keep me cosy ~



Some very essential reading material ~




And of course some crochet too ~ I am hoping to find the time to crochet the green grassy borders around my little flowery circles.

I hope that everyone has a very good weekend and I will be back next week to show you some more of the lovely Scottish scenery :O)

Little end bits

I have been taking it very easy for the past week and have had my feet up on a daily basis and have managed to do quite a lot of crocheting ~ and quite a lot of drinking tea and quite a lot of eating cake and chocolate and all manner of things that are not good for me at all. But it was all for medicinal purposes you understand!

You will all be very glad to know that I am now well on my way to making a full recovery from my Stupidness and had the very nasty little staples taken out today. OUCH! OUCH! OUCH! OUCH!! At least that is over with and I am truly glad about that. Hopefully that will now be the END to my Stupidness!

Talking of ends ~ what do you do with yours? Do you sew as you go? Or leave them all till last? I must say that I usually do sew them in as I go because I absolutely hate being faced with all those troublesome little ends when I come to the end of a project.

However, this past week I have been in a such a hurry to get a couple of little projects started and finished that I just didn’t want to interrupt my crocheting to sew in all the ends.


This might look like a very neat little pile of flowery circles.....


But look at them from a different angle and you can see the tangle of little end bits that need to be dealt with.


Same here with my Watery Ripple Scarf ~ again there’s lots of little end bits ~ although I did actually start with good intentions but was enjoying the soothing action of rippling so much that I didn’t want to stop.


So here I am faced with the horrid job of sewing in ends and how I wish now I’d done it as I went.

Yippeeeeeeeee! The job has now been done and the little flowery circles and the watery ripple scarf are looking much tidier and there is something very satisfying about seeing a growing pile of little colourful ends that have now been sewn in and snipped off.


Don’t you just love seeing all the colourful little end bits sitting in a colourful little pile :O)

Rainbow colours

Firstly I would like to say a very big THANK YOU to everyone who has been kind enough to send me Get Well wishes following my Stupidness last Thursday!

I am feeling a little better and although my head does still hurt quite a lot ~ which with 4 staples holding it together is to be expected ~ I am slowly starting to get back to normal. Although to say that I am beginning to PANIC about the removal of the aforementioned staples is a bit of an understatement! However, as I can’t keep them in my head for ever I will just have to grin and bear it and put up with the pain~ because I am very sure that there will definitely be pain involved somewhere!


Right that is enough panicking for the time being ~ let’s get ourselves back to these Rainbow colours.


A few weeks ago I signed up for a Rainbow Colour Swap and my lovely swap package from Juanita arrived on Friday just in time to cheer me up from my Stupidness! Inside the parcel was a very lovely little green bag which Juanita got on her travels in India and also a beautiful handmade green beaded bracelet which included a bead which she had handpicked from a street vendor in India too. I love the bracelet and am sure that I will wear it often! Thank you so much Juanita.


I also received another parcel at the weekend which was of the very lovely woolly kind. I LOVE it when these packages of wool arrive. I get so much enjoyment from just unpacking it and seeing what lovely colour combinations can be made. As you can see there are quite a few rainbowy colours in there and they will be just right for making more of the pretty flowery centres for my Summer Garden Granny Squares. There are just so many different colour combinations to be made that I find myself waking up at night just thinking about it!


I’m think that I am going to go now and put the kettle on and rest my sore little stapled head and I must say that I plan to put my feet up, drink tea and crochet for most of the afternoon :O)

STUPID :O(

STUPID, STUPID, STUPID!.........that is exactly what I was yesterday morning!!

I did a very STUPID thing yesterday and thought that it would be a good idea to climb up onto the kitchen worktop to try to get something that was high up in the kitchen cupboard. I somehow managed to slip and fell from the top of the worktop and hit my head on the metal kitchen bin. I instinctively knew that I had hurt myself quite badly and that was before I had managed to scrape myself off the kitchen floor and before I saw how much blood was involved.

After a LOT of crying and a LOT of panicking ~ and whilst trying not to bleed all over the new carpets ~ I managed to pull myself together enough to phone my by now very worried husband who zoomed home from work in record time and rushed me to A & E.

To cut a long story short and as it was a head injury I got seen by a Doctor straight away and I have now got 4 metal staples holding my head together and am suffering from the after effects of concussion. Oh! And my head really, really hurts! A LOT!!

Now it has to be said that I never normally need much of an excuse to put my feet up and take it easy ~ but I am enjoying being made a fuss of and have had breakfast in bed and a never ending supply of tea being sent up to me by a very wonderful husband who has taken the day off work to look after his very stupid wife.


I have also got the ideal excuse to sit in bed and maybe crochet a little ~ or a lot! ~ and I have made a start on a very soothing little ripple pattern just to take my mind off my poor little head.

I hope that everyone has a very lovely weekend and I hope to be up and about next week to catch up with all your bloggy news :O) xx

Colourful crochet

Colourful crochet ~ one:


I have at last finished my colourful crochet cushion cover ~ this little project seems to have been on the go for absolutely ages and I am so very glad that it is finally complete and ready for use. It has to be said though that I am not personally getting to sit down and use it very often because it keeps being pounced upon by small children who are finding it very comfy and cosy indeed!


I’d also like to know why small boys like to stick their fingers in all the little crochet holes and have a good old rummage around inside the cushion! What is that all about?

Colourful crochet ~ two:


Look at all this wonderful hooky loveliness! I couldn’t resist treating myself to this fantastic set of very colourful aluminium crochet hooks ~ I LOVE them and although I am not sure if I will ever find a use for every single one of them (sizes 2.00mm to 10.00mm) I’m sure that you will agree that they are all very pretty and are lovely to look at.

Colourful crochet ~ three:


Finally I want to show you this colourful little crochet jam jar cover that I made yesterday. This is yet another wonderful inspiration from the very lovely Lucy over at Attic 24 ~ she has created so many lovely patterns and I am slowly trying to work my way through them all. I am very pleased with the way that it has turned out and it makes a very pretty little container for all those very colourful crochet hooks too.

I hope that you all have a very lovely weekend and look forward to catching up next week :O)

Mountainous!

I’ve got a little bit of a dilemma for you all today!

Faced with this mountain ....


Or this mountain....


Which one would you prefer to be standing looking at?

Well ~ I know which one that I would choose! But unfortunately for me I was standing at the bottom of this very large mountain of ironing yesterday.

Be warned ladies ~ as this is what happens when you spend your days playing hooky with a small metal stick and some wool instead of tackling the very yucky housework!

I had taken the very necessary step of removing the enormous pile of clothes from the airing cupboard as it was in danger of causing a small avalanche and threatening to topple down on top of anyone who happened to move or go anywhere near it!


I spent the whole of yesterday ironing and it took me 4 very long and tedious hours of just standing ironing ~ there were just under 100 items of clothing making up that mountain ~ I know this because I actually took the time to count them!

I am so very, very glad that it is now done and I can get on with doing something else a little bit more constructive ~ such as sitting with my feet up with some lovely crochet and a nice cup of tea :O)