Tag: Christmas & Advent

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dear diary :: February already?

Hello everyone.  How are you all – I have missed you, it has been a long time and life here has been no less frantic than when I abruptly abandoned my blog?  Of course every day I have intended to write a post….but we all know what we intend to do and then what we actually do can be quite different.

For those regular readers you will remember I had to make a hasty departure up to Scotland during the Christmas advent to survey the storm damage to the cottage.  The wind had taken the felt, on the flat roof kitchen extension, clean off and we had to find someone to come and re-roof just before Christmas and you can imagine the long list of people in the area waiting for a roofer to do repairs for them – so many properties affected.  If this aggressive weather is not due to climate change then I don’t know why it is getting progressively wilder.

Roof sorted, we returned home just in time to sort out Christmas. 

And with a long list of to do’s I set about completing the Christmas plans.  It seems an age ago now.

I had cards to finish making, writing and posting, presents to wrap and some for my friends still to make – this year I chose to make Florentines and found some pretty wooden bowls by Habitat to put them in. I had to make them the day before Christmas Eve so they were nice and fresh.

We had very simple decorations this year no more than the mantelpiece and a bowl of dried orange slices and we never did buy a tree; by the time we came back from Scotland there were only a few days before we were setting out to go up to my daughter’s house for Christmas and buying and decorating a tree for two days of pleasure seemed a little ridiculous.

Our wider family all got together for the first time in goodness knows how long for Christmas Day at my sister’s house (she has now got the most room) and we tried hard to keep it a secret from my mum just in case someone caught the virus beforehand and we couldn’t go. It was hard to surprise my mum as each day when I rang her she would say ‘don’t you know what you are doing for Christmas yet?’ and I would always reply ‘ no as we are not sure if we will be locked down’.

The grandchildren all had the most wonderful time and my mum was so happy to see us all.

I iced the Christmas cake so the three grandchildren could have fun decorating it all by themselves with some little figures and sprinkles. And they made a good job too it was quite delightful though I think most of the sprinkles were eaten before they got anywhere near the cake.

We all managed to dodge the Covid virus but DH and I did come down with a cold / flu virus the day after Boxing Day, as did my brother and little Sweetie.  Why just the four of us out of a gathering of thirteen people we will never know. 

So that was our Christmas and thank you all for your lovely greetings and messages.

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Meanwhile January has been spent catching up with myself and planning.  It is always a job I look forward to as the New Year begins and listing everything down tells me we have more plans than time.  Nothing changes!

My focus word for this year is Improvement.

I intend to improve one area of my life each month – everything from health to wealth, two of the areas which need a good overhaul.  Some areas do overlap and once I make an improvement I will obviously have to review and keep it going in the coming months….that is probably the harder part.

January is always a busy time here with birthdays. One of my oldest friends reached the grand age of 80, though she doesn’t look it, so I had cards to make. I was a bit stuck for ideas but settled on this one using up scraps of fabric.

My mum reached the even grander age of 96 and we had a trip up to see her and take her a chocolate sponge cake with fresh cream inside and chocolate on top, her favourite.

Little Freddie celebrated his 3rd birthday and I organised a little tea party for him at home with a jungle theme. It was mainly immediate family – my two daughter’s and their partners and his two cousins, Little L and Sweetie who came and they helped him unwrap the presents, play party games and eat the party food. Sweetie, who is almost the same age as Freddie could hardly wait to play with all his new toys and as soon as they were unwrapped and admired and he had moved on to the next one she would edge nearer and nearer to try them out for herself, hoping no-one would notice!!

We had so much fun making these party hats from Tesco – I can certainly recommend them. They were easy to decorate even for the little ones – each person chooses some eyes, ears and a mouth from a selection to stick on and create your own little character.

I made a jungle cake which again was super easy with some little jungle animals and dessicated coconut dyed green with food colouring. The log effect around the outside of the cake was created with some chocolate coated wafer biscuits sliced in half and stuck on with melted chocolate – it saved me mixing up some buttercream for the sides.

I found some jungle animal and foliage pictures on the internet to print out and stick onto card for decorations and to stick on the front of each party bag with their names (which I have obscured). The party bags contained a few chocolate coins, and other jungly bits and bobs and these cute little hand puppets peeping over the top I discovered in Poundland (£2 each and made from recycled bottles) and they were a big hit.

Currently we are back in Scotland enjoying a break for a few days.  There are improvements to be made here at the cottage, weather permitting and if the weather is bad then it is the perfect place to sit and do some more planning. But I will tell you more about that another day.

Bye for now x

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creating Christmas * day 10…the Christmas card

This should have been a post about our Christmas outing to Derbyshire but that had to be postponed for another day due to unforseen and unfortunate circumstances which I will tell you about later. So today instead of going out I stayed in and put the filling into the cake for my younger daughter’s 40th birthday (which is on Monday but we are celebrating it tomorrow) and mixed the buttercream for the coating. Then while there was a smidgen of light left I started making my Christmas cards.

Well better late than never!

Each year I try and produce a few of my own Christmas cards – they vary from year to year, different sizes, different medium, different designs. Many readers will have seen previous cards I have made and anyone interested can search my blog under the Creating Christmas link in the sidebar or in the menu above.

Sometimes I want to try out a few new ideas that I have and sometimes I have a very definite idea of what I want to do.

This year because of time pressures I have produced a very simple lino cut print of mistletoe from a few sketches I did 2 years ago.

It is still in the development stage – testing the design for unwanted marks and the colour. My initial print was a bit too much lime green so I added first some white (too wishywashy) and then tried again with a little Prussian blue to tone it down.

Much better. Currently I am debating the wording; if I decide to use any wording it will be stamped on afterwards as cutting out the ‘mistletoe‘ wording, as I had on the original design sketch above, has to be cut out backwards on a lino print which is an art in itself and I really don’t have the time.

So this is my progress so far. It is meant to have that home made look that is one of the qualities of a lino cut. Sorry about the awful light it goes dark so quickly these days but you will get the gist.

Hopefuly I will get them all printed tomorrow – I find lino cuts are a good way to do a mass production.

It has been a turbulent week for us so far and one where I am left wondering if anything else can happen.

To summarise briefly my mum is not a happy bunny at the moment and so my daily calls are a bit fraught trying to keep her cheerful, one of our relations in Scotland has sadly died and there will be a funeral next Thursday, decorating the cake I have made for my daughter’s birthday has proved a bit of a challenge time wise (will I ever learn), then the icing on the cake (not my daughter’s as I have still to do that)….is that we received a call from a friend in Scotland in the same village as our cottage to tell us the recent storm was horrendous and the waves along the shore have been so high and so powerful part of the harbour wall and other concrete sea defences have been taken out, the surface of the main road broken into pieces, and some nearby wooden holiday chalets at Ardwell village flooded out….and…wait for it….. the wind has completely ripped off the felt on our flat roof kitchen extension (oh dear, here we go again).

We hadn’t planned to go up to Scotland so close to Christmas but we will have to now and I have had to rearrange hair appointments next week and other planned tasks and DH has been on the phone all day trying to find a roofer who can come and replace the felt; but of course they are all busy repairing all the storm damaged roofs in the area.

To add to our problems all week I have been having dizzy spells (such a lot of tension in my neck) …not surprising. Our Christmas plans will be on hold for a while and what gets done will and otherwise I am not going to worry (too much) but I think we will be lucky if we get our Christmas tree now!!

So for any readers following along with my creating Christmas I may go quiet for a day or two as my advent blogging is interupted, but hopefully not for long.

I am going for my tea now and then have another go at getting the cake decorated if the phone manages to stay quiet for an hour or two and there is no further bad news.

I really fancy going for a lie down in a darkened room.

back soon x

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creating Christmas * day 9…the Christmas Angel

All of us tend to create one or two family Christmas traditions over time, many of ours began when we had our own children, as our two girl’s loved to repeat what we had done the previous year and so it went on.

And now they have flown the nest but the traditions started back then still carry on.

Some of our family traditions happened accidentally, in that they were never started with the intention of becoming a tradition, rather they just evolved as they became a much loved repetitive theme.

One of these was the Christmas angel.

A tradition that began unintentionally the year I made a stocking for each of us in about 1987 when our two daughters were 6 and seven.

The very first year of our new stockings I had found two lovely little angels to balance on the top; poking out over the top they somehow finished the stocking off quite nicely and the girls of course loved them.

The following year I repeated this with another two different angels and after that they always waited eagerly each year to see what kind of angel would greet them on Christmas morning – it was more exciting than the stocking itself and so the tradition was born.

Over the years we have had fabric, wooden, metal, glass, porcelain, wire and even chocolate angels – whatever I find that catches my eye. Some have been quite tiny and others much larger but they always fit into the stocking. I haven’t got this year’s angels yet and it is one of the reasons we go for a trip into Derbyshire each year as there are plenty of those lovely little gift shops and I can search for just the right angel.

Of course by now, as you can imagine, I have a collection of angels carefully wrapped in tissue paper in a box labelled Special Christmas Angels and this is where they all reside – others are kept at my daughter’s homes. Sometimes one or two are allowed out at Christmas to hang amongst the other decorations and a few of them will now be over 30 years old.

Although both daughters left home long ago we still use the stockings I made when we are all together – but now there is one difference…….sometimes they surprise me with a Christmas angel on the top of my stocking if they happen to see one they think I would like.

Yesterday was quite a slow day…. I didn’t do very much other than make up the little posy of flowers for Helen’s mum. I deliberately chose these really cheerful colours as it is so grey and miserable outside.

I had to leave them on the doorstep as she was out but she rang me this morning and we had a lovely catch up and arranged that we will meet in the New Year…. (Covid willing).