Every picture tells a story.

The brooches standing up on their pins have given me an idea. I might make a 'Theatre' someday with felt figures. Watch this space!

Here are 'Ma boys' sitting by the river at Art and Garden.

 Sunday when this was taken was a nice sunny day but Saturday...well.....shall we draw a veil over Saturday? Late friday night it was cancelled due to waterlogged car parking field. Early saturday morning a phone call.."Jackie, Its on again..get out of bed!" I was pleased it was on but sitting all day in a marquee in the rain was a bit reminiscent of childhood caravan holidays in Abergele.

Anyway Sunday was nice and I took courage and did something I have been meaning to do for all the years I've been there. I walked over the bridge.

 And I walked back again. My knees were like jelly when I got back on dry land but I did it.

                                          On the way I caught sight of the minutest bit of garden.

Here's the Summer house with lovely paintings.

Overall it wasn't a bad weekend, its alway enjoyable socially but financially it was very poor.

It was a great joy to meet one of my favourite blog readers 'JP" who came with the other 'JP" her husband.   I also met Sarah and her daughter from 'The Art of Moodling' whose sunny smile exactly matched her blog profile pic!

It was a delight to meet them all and makes it all worthwhile.

Oh AND I WAS on the radio and it wasn't bad at all. I didn't tell anyone because it would have made me nervous if I imagined my Mum and my friends listening. I told my husband not to listen and I didn't mean it but he's very good and he didn't! 

I made him listen on iplayer and he said it was good. So then I listened and do you know what? It was quite alright. I sounded a bit fat though!

I hadn't realised it would be live. They just sat us down, Chris who owns the garden and me, and started talking to us. When the music was playing the presenter discussed the next question. 

So..as well as the crossing the bridge, I've been on the radio.  Bucket list?

Now, this is the inspiration for the title of this post.

Can you tell what the story is?

The bird box covered with much gaffer tape because a few weeks ago the bottom dropped off. The nest, full of baby blue tits,was dangling on a twig below, the cat was licking his lips, the dog was chasing something around the garden, and the parents were having hysterics on the washing line.

 

 We fixed it all back together and the parents came back and raised the babies. The I found one on the path. I think it had tried to fledge and not made it so I stuck it back in the nest and when we opened the box the other day I'm afraid it was dead. It had a kitchen roll shroud and  cremation in the wood burner.

Anyway look whats in the nest.

A little bit of lime green merino wool which Hetty had been playing with outside.

Now here's another glimpse of our garden. 

 The bit I ignore has blossomed. We have a fine show of what some might call weeds but I love them.

 Such a fantastic pink.

 They are taller than I am when I stand on the path.

 Hetty demonstrates.

 Hetty has had a trip out to meet Donald, The Nova Scotia Duck-tolling retriever. I hadn't heard of them either!

 He's just a baby.

 The meeting went well.

 As usual..there are brooches! 

 Brooches for Woolfest and brooches for an order.

 I love the background colour of this felt. I used a horrible orange lumpy felt to start this off and it gave a lovely glow.

I'll be at Woolfest on Friday and on the IFA stand from 1-3 pm.

And finally......

Different creativity

In the first year of my blog I revealed my appalling failure as a gardener with the above picture..

These are the easiest thing in the world to grow ..nasturtiums ...and I had failed. 

But this year I have determined to have a better go at it.

 I think I gave up on gardening when we had dogs running all over the flower beds, so felt doomed to failure. 

Now, with a new, possibly chemically induced optimism...(Yes the pills are working) may I present the instant-tetris-bookshelf-raised-garden?

 Yes these little units were once my sons bookshelves made in tetris modules shapes.  I have asked for raised beds for the last six months. 'I'll have to look for some wood' came the reply.  

See if we have some wood?!!!!!

You can't look in our garage without getting splinters.  

So I went in the garage and saw these and knew they would work. They are only MDF so won't last long, but have had a coat of 'Ball green' inside and out and are sealed along the bottom edge with duct tape.

I have to admit that B&Q grew the chard and the strawberries..But I grew the broad beans from seeds.

 Impressed? I hope so. I am. I have a chair right next to them so I can sit and watch them grow, and listen to the army of slugs gnashing their teeth at the edge of the gravel. 

 Just pass me my  lace up wellies , an organic hemp smock, and a trug, and there's not much between me and Sarah Raven. Well, except about a foot in height and few acres.

 I know that in the south and east, broad beans are bearing fruit now,  and mine may seem pathetic, but its cold here, and often dull. Believe me this is a triumph in these parts. 850 feet above sea level and on the moors, clay soil, in the shade.

I've been creative in the kitchen too. (Oooh just call me Nigel Slater, what with the Swiss chard and everything)

Chocolate covered crinkle cut ready salted potato crisps .

One of my gifts for my friends 60th birthday after a conversation where they cropped up as a joke. 

Here's the recipe:

Ingredients: 4 bars of Cadburys Dairy Milk Chocolate

I bag of milky bar buttons

2 bags of Seabrookes crinkle cut ready salted crisps.

Method: Eat one of the bars of dairy milk.

Melt the other three.

In another bowl melt some of the milky bar buttons. Eat the rest.

Empty out the two bags of crisps and eat all the broken ones.

Dip the round ones in chocolate and put onto waxed paper. 

If you don't have waxed paper use a yard of bondaweb wrong side up with the adhesive bit peeled off.

Dribble with some milky bar chocolate melted.

Put in the fridge .

Try one.

Then another.

Just to see if they are ok.

And another.

Quality tested by me.

Yum.

I think.

Cheerio little babes

What a spectacle this morning.
A little yellow face at the window of the bird box, a sudden flurry of feathers and then up in the tree a baby blue tit.

I don't think it was the first but it wasn't the last. It sat and cheeped in the tree looking very grumpy

and calling to its parents. ...

who came and fed it and supported it.
Then I ran about the house looking for a better camera and came back just in time to see this...
A little head looking right...

left.....














and then making the struggle ....

and out.
(Click to enlarge the pictures, sorry they are a bit fuzzy ...I was excited)

Its a breezy chilly day. Its the Village festival day. The fairground has arrived on the sports field about 300yards away. In about an hour the children of the combined schools and nurseries of the surrounding area will process noisily through the villages and make merry on the field.
And there are half a dozen new baby blue tits in the hedges and trees in our garden.

Some good news and some bad

The Man with the van arrived unannounced this morning and when I opened the front door he was bowing low in humble obsequience, presenting me with a pink box, inside which was my repaired laptop.


Actually he was just arranging his accoutrements on the doorstep..a big pile of papers to give me, a sort of calculator looking thingy for me to sign and he was wrestling with the cable ties on the sides of the crate. I got him some scissors and am now in re-possession of my laptop.

I am having to re-accustom myself to the appearance of the photos..they look a bit bleached out compared to their vibrant appearance on the monitor on the main PC. It makes such a difference and I wonder how you are viewing them?
Slightly worrying aspect to the repair..when I sent it off my laptop had a password. When it came back it didn’t. I have to hope the workshop was too busy for the repair man to rummage about in my personal files.


GARDEN NEWS
There are some extremely short stemmed big leaved nasturtiums poking their way out of the soil outside .
I’m so pleased.
I am having my usual battle with the bane of my life...slugs.
I heard that if you give them oats they eat them and then swell up and die, so I put several piles of oats outside, and in the morning the oats had gone but there were no bloated dead slugs anywhere.
I did it again the next day and went out at dead of night to see what was going on.
You know those pictures you see of African water holes with elephants, gazelles, wildebeest and zebras all around? Well that’s what it looked like, with every variety size shape and colour of slug feeding their slimy faces on oats.
I don’t know a good way to kill a slug so I went to bed and left them to it.

Last night I tried the beer trap. They are supposed to drink the beer and drown happy. Once more at dead of night I went out to see that everything was going to plan..more hundreds of slugs around the beer, even bigger fatter than the night before(must have been the oats) so I got the shovel and flipped a few more of them into the beer and went to bed feeling a bit guilty about hastening the demise of so many of Gods creatures.

I needn’t have worried. This morning ONE SLUG is floating in the beer. The others are all snoring fast asleep and full of beer and oats waiting for tonights treat.

There are no pictures today as the subject matter is just too repulsive.

More information than you need to know.

There will be more words in this post than I am used to because I’ve been tagged by ethel and edna

This means that I have to answer some questions about myself and then find 6 more people to tag.
Are there any volunteers out there?

Before I start, here’s a picture of a surprise in my garden.
I’d forgotten I’d planted the cowslips last year so I was happy to see them amongst the forget me nots.

I have a problem garden. Its shady, sometimes very windy, with a clay soil and its over-run, or should that be overslithered, with slugs and snails. My expectations were high once but as I saw my lupins languish, sweet peas stubbornly refuse to flower, and delphiniums disappear without a trace my optimism faded.

I have heard of people who watch cookery programmes on tv and then suffer from 'Kitchen performance anxiety'. I watch Monty Don and Rachael de Thame and I suffer from 'Garden performance anxiety'

All I can do is enjoy this time of the year when those plants which are happy, flourish in the adverse conditions.

Can you spot the damage?
Flushed with success at the sale of two of my green and orange brooches on ETSY I've made a lot more.









And now for the questions :

The rules of the game get posted at the beginning. Each player answers the questions about themselves. At the end of the post, the player then tags 6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.
1) What was I doing 10 years ago? 1998....? My sons were 13 and 15 and the older one was not interested in school so I spent a lot of time ‘encouraging’ him to finish his coursework for his GCSE’s.
I was working a lot as a supply teacher, and excited at the prospect of starting to exhibit and sell my embroidery. I was also approaching 47! I remember the week before my birthday I said to a friend ‘I’m 47 next week. Yippee’ in as deadpan a voice as I could muster to illustrate the prospect. Strange how that prospect would seem much more exciting now I am approaching 57!
2) What are 5 things on my to-do list for today (not in any particular order)
Answer these questions and post them on my blog.
Check for comments.
Check for comments
Check for comments. (Can you tell I’m quite keen on comments?)
Go for a walk.
3) Snacks I enjoy: Toast with marmalade, ice-cold chocolate.(But I’m not fussy I’ll force it down if its at room temp.)
4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
I’d have to start by getting rid of a lot of it by giving it to all my friends and relatives and respond to appeals I’ve heard now and then which have caught my attention, and hope I could really make a difference. There are so many.
Employ someone to remove all the slugs and snails from my garden then I could grow my favourite flowers.
Get the roof fixed and the house painted.
Buy a big chunk of the local countryside so it won’t get built on.
Buy a laser eye machine with staff for my local hospital. My Mum had her eyes ‘lasered’ which enabled her to drive again but she had to wait longer than she should have for an appointment at another hospital. It changed her life so much for the better.
Buy a cottage in the Lake District with a view to moving there to live. (I couldn’t just upsticks and leave my house..it would take me a while to ‘separate’) But I am aware that Lakeland residents can’t afford to buy houses for themselves, because of outsiders raising the value, so I’d use my money to find a solution because I’d feel guilty otherwise.
5) Places I have lived:
Not many: Penwortham, Near Preston; Strawberry Hill, Twickenham and Teddington, (when I was at St Mary’s College); Twickenham again for 3 years teaching; Penwortham again; Manchester for 6 weeks (in my husbands flat when we were first married before we bought our own house); Higher Wheelton; and finally for the last 23 years, Brinscall.
6) 6 peeps I wanna know more about: There are a lot more than 6.
I am not brave enough to TAG anyone in case they have already done it, and in this early stage of my blogging career I have to play safe, so if 6 people would like to volunteer........?

And finally...next week Issue 4 of

Have you noticed the colour? Its a coincidence. Honest.