A jeans bag

No more snow and in fact we had a few mild days though it has got colder again now.

Didn't do a mosaic at the beginning of the week, though I might do one later as I do have some photos.. some however you aren't going to see including the ones of my in underwear which I HOPE I will be able to compare with ones later in the year and see a visible improvement.. it's well past time I got rid of some of the excess from having two kids or rather from being more physically immobile than normal with both of them at different stages.

I can however show you a bag I made as a late Christmas present. I hope the recipient liked it, I don't know her well enough to be certain but well she's part of our extended family so will have to get sued to me I suppose :)

This was originally a set of slightly strange jean shorts but I really liked the embroidery on them so picked them up in the charity shop planning to do something along these lines at some point.

The strap was the only other thing I bought and is a wide velvet ribbon. The fastenings were salvaged off an old bag.

Mosaic week 2 - more snow and sledging.

This week's Mosaic is rather late for Monday but I just ran out of time, that and my rather dodgy computer decided to crash when i was most of the way through it but before I saved it!!

It is very rare for us to have snow for this long, more than a day or two at a time is very uncommon in fact so that I have two weeks in a row of snow pictures in not something to miss. These were all taken on Wednesday. We were asked to pick up Treestump from nursery early as the staff wanted to get home before things froze so I went to get him walking through one park in falling snow (top three photos) and Tom went to get Noddles from school. After school we all headed to a second park which in fact is just over the road from the first to sledge, by this time it had stopped snowing but the sky was very grey making the light levels quite strange it felt almost as if my glasses were in need of a clean but it was just the way everything looked...

This second park is just a big flat field except for the fact it has a bank round the edge next to the road and this bank is big enough to sled down. Normally this park is empty apart from the occasional dog walker or someone taking a short cut but as you can see it was really quite full of poeple sledging, having snowball fights or just enjoying themselves out with friends. The bottom right photo is Treestump trying to throw a snowball.. problem was he could pick up just enough snow to coat his glove but not enough to have some to throw! It was very funny if frustrating for him.. In the end he worked out there were bigger lumps he could pick up form around where others have dug up snow for snowballs.!

I love the way the snow and the light made the trees monochrome even though in the lower pictures it is mostly Rhododendron which are evergreen. It made the bright waterproofs the boys were wearing stand out all the more.
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Week 1 - mosaic

I am not trying the 365 photos thing again but would like something to encorrage me to take photos often so I'm going to try doing a mosaic a week. Sometimes they may be themed like this week, other may be a hodge podge of whatever I snapped that week.

This week has been dominated by snow. For many people this much snow is minor but we don't often get it so for us this much substained snow is unusual. Much of the rest of the UK have had even more and for longer which is even more un-usual certainly for the more southern areas that have been hit by it.

Looking at this it looks like I live somewhere rural. Believe me that isn't the case. All these were taken either in parks or on our allotment all of which are in the middle of Coventry a city with about 300,000 poeple in it.

I am posting this up on Mosaic Monday over at Little Red House.

Change of look

Thought I'd do a winter theme using some photos taken in the park yesterday !

A late Christmas Present

Late not because the person giving it to me was late bu because we were responsible for ordering it and were rather slow!

I have been wanting one of these for ages but haven't been able to justify it but now I have my very own Bpal scent locket.. from the Bpal Trading post and now I have one!

I love this clockwork one, all the others are a single colour but not this one which is two colours, gold and silver, well three if you could the blackened bits. There are various holes in the cogs and so on so that you can put a small wad on cotton or similar inside with perfume on it and the smell comes through. Very useful for perfumes you love but go weird on your skin or if you just don't want to wear them on skin for some reason such as they have cinnamon and you react to it.

Tom also got one but his is the three daggers one.

The Art of Crochet

This is a new part work magazine and as normal the first issue is at a cut price to encorrage you to try it. I quite often buy the first part if it is something I like but I haven't gone any farther in years. Most part work magazines give you very little each week when you compare them to other magazines but then they do give you items to allow you to make whatever it is they are about but over the time it takes you to get everything it tends to cost far more than buying it outright and they are often bad quality but that's like many things in life you can buy something outright for a good price or overtime for an inflated one.. do I think they are good value? Not normally but they do allow you to get something a bit at a time and there have been times in my life that has suited me, so while I think they are over inflated I don't totally knock them though I have noticed they don't seem to try very hard on quality..

So what about the Art of crochet, well the first issue you get a 4mm hook (so that's the 99p already) a dvd showing a few very, very basics of crochet, a leaflet doing the same again, a leaflet extolling the virtues of the later issues and a slightly longer magazine, with some basic stitches, the first blanket square, and a few other patterns. The yarn you get is two balls. a 16g one of a light brown (for practising) and a 25g of a raspberry (for the first square), both are acrylic and OK quality but nothing special. I assume from what is said the 25g is the normal size of yarn you will get each issue.

I don't think I'd make the blanket, I don't much like many of the squares but the colours are OK and I could see using them for other squares. I can also see it might be worth getting the first few issues to see what it is like. If you subscribe you get issues 2 and 3, 2 more balls of yarn, a yarn case, a travel case and a hook roll plus a binder and dividers for 1.99.. From then on you get 4 issues every 4 weeks at 2.99 per issue.. there are a couple more extras you can get with the first couple of deliveries depending how you pay. I suspect it would get samey very fast and these days with the wealth of on-line free patterns and so forth there is far less need for a cheap gradual information source like this but the small bite size nature can make it easier to get your head round than the over wealming amount of info you get on the net. For someone starting off the first few issues might be quite useful to give you an easy slow in to the craft.. 120 issues is probably over kill though so I suspect there is a fairly fast fall off of subscribers.