Scavenger Hunt

Friday 29 January 2021

Link Up Party: My Own Choice

 Hello there, hope you're doing well.

The last picture for the January Scavenger Hunt is My Own Choice.

This week I have made my marmalade, one of the absolute pleasures of January.  I cut the skins a little thinner this year, although I like chunky marmalade, last year's was a little too chunky.

Six lovely jars full of orangey goodness.



I wonder what everybody else has used for their own choice of pictures.  I'm off to find out here.

As always Kate, thanks so much for organising the hunts.

Bye for now..........Clicky Needles.



Monday 25 January 2021

Snow

 

Hello Folks.

Like most of the UK, we had snow yesterday.  I love living on top The Cotswolds and when the snow comes it hangs around.

From my bedroom window I can see the local sledging field, there were family groups having lots of fun.  In days gone by we would have been there too, but thankfully, with our kids being adults I don't have to stand around getting cold feet anymore.













The roof of our kitchen had a cosy blanket of snow over it.













The branches of the May Tree looked lovely.













The children in The Close have all been out and they made a huge snowball which has come to rest outside our house.  Today, it has melted a bit as has the snow on the road.  













I did have a Tesco delivery booked, which is the first one I have managed to get since April, unfortunately it got cancelled, so I'll be off to the shops when things thaw a bit more.

The temperature has started to drop again and our rain chains are completely iced up.













Stalagmite. 













I've had a go at making sour dough.  The starter was looking good but when I came to bake the actual bread it was an unmitigated disaster.  No pictures of this, it's already in the food bin.  I'll stick to my bread maker I think.













Well, that's me for now I have a couple of projects on the go, which I'll show you next time.

Bye for now............Clicky Needles.



Friday 22 January 2021

Link Up Party: Moon

 Today's Scavenger Hunt subject is moon.  I love taking pictures of the moon, so I have quite a few pictures to choose from.

This picture was taken in France a few years ago.  The moon was rising over a mountain top, with a tree branch in front.

The rest were all taken from my garden.

Harvest moon.













Glowy Moon.














Cloudy Moon.



This is a very small selection of my many moon pictures.

I wonder what everybody else's pictures are like.  Find out here.


Monday 18 January 2021

My Little Coldframe


This weekend I decided to make a cold frame.  I am planning planting lots of flower seeds this year and I'm going to need somewhere to harden them off before they are planted outside.

We had some leftover fence/pallet wood from our extension build 3 years ago.  I saved this wood from the skip (it was a constant game between me and the builder - he would put things in the skip and I would take them out) who wants throw good things away that you've paid for?  It's been sat in front of our garage ever since.


The frame is a super simple design.  I bought a sheet of twin polycarbonate for the lid for the grand sum of £10 and cut it into two because I wanted two smaller frames that would be more portable.  I made the lid first and then the box to fit the lid.  
I used wood glue on the corners as well as screwing the timber together.  The hinges to open the top nearly defeated me, I just couldn't work out which way they needed to go, but I got there in the end.


I added a baton that holds open the top for ventilation but folds away when not needed.

As you can see I have stained the outside black but I will paint the inside with white emulsion to reflect the light for the young plants and seedlings it will contain.  I cannot tell you, how much pleasure making this has given me.


 


So, the polycarbonate was £10, the hinges were £8 and that was it!  I am making another, so each comes to a grand total of £9.  Not bad. 

In the background of some of the pictures you can see my stone trough.  This came from our family farm that was sold 20 years ago.  I asked Dad if I could have a stone trough, we had quite a few hanging around, and we ended up swapping, me a gardening book of mine Dad liked, and him the trough.  He brought it up to our house on the back of his pick-up, I think he used the tractor to get it in, and dropped it onto a bale of hay and then onto bricks, where it has stayed at the front of our house ever since.

The front of the house is south facing and over the years the trough has usually been planted with geraniums or bedding plants in the summer which require loads of watering and more often than not, bare soil in the winter, which was rather depressing. 

At the end of last summer I decided it was time for a change, going for year round interest.


I took a trip to the garden centre and bought some gritty compost and some sempervivums or Houseleeks, easy to grow and requiring very little maintenance.
I used some Cotswold Stone slates that also came from the farm when we left, to try and replicate some rocky outcrops.  Sempervivums hate their leaves becoming wet so when it was all planted up, I top dressed with gravel. 


And that's all you have to do.  They will look after themselves, happy in the sun, happy in the cold and don't need watering. 




















Some sempervivums (like sunflowers) even have Fibonacci sequences, which fascinate me.  Have a look at these beauties, isn't nature amazing?

I hope you are well and bearing up in these rubbish times.  It is still cold here, even though it doesn't look like it is.  January. Meh!  

Stay safe.....Clicky Needles.




Friday 15 January 2021

Link Up Party: New

Hello all.

 I'm joining in with Kate for our second Scavenger Hunt post of January 2021.  

Today we are finding something new.  It occurred to me whilst finding something to picture, that everything is new at some point so really it could be ANYTHING in the world. 

That thought was blowing my mind too much, and I went for some new shoots of snowdrops.  No white tips showing as yet, but such promise for the weeks to come.










I'm off to see what everyone else has come up with. Link here.

Wednesday 13 January 2021

New Fabric from Scraps

Hello All.

I don't know about you but I cannot bear to throw any fabric scraps away.  Now, I'm not talking about fabric of 3cm +, that's just fabric to me, but teeny, tiny scraps, the kind that are generated when squaring up block.

I have been saving these little pieces for a while and before Christmas I set about using them.  

Firstly I laid out a piece of water soluble embroidery stabiliser in roughly A4 size.  Then I got my scraps and laid them on top at different angles and made sure I had covered up all the stabiliser.  (I may have taken far too long over this, and even ironed some of the tiny scraps.)


When I was happy that it was all covered I put another piece of stabiliser on top and pinned around the edges, and then carried it to the sewing machine carefully so the fun could begin.


Then all you have to do is sew with a straight stitch all over.  I discovered that curvy lines look much better on the finished fabric and more fun too.




Wash away the stabiliser and you are left with new scrap fabric.


I used my new fabric to make tree shaped Christmas cards.































A few hours filled with pleasure for me.  Did you use a vintage machine Clicky? I hear you ask.  Well, yes of course I did, my white Singer Featherweight, but I didn't take a picture!

This made a small dent in the scraps and I'm now trying to think of what else I make use this method.  Any ideas?

Bye for now.......Clicky Needles.

Friday 8 January 2021

Link Up Party : Gifts

 

Hello!

I am joining in with Kate's Photo Scavenger Hunt Link Up Party.  One picture each Friday.  Shouldn't be too hard.  Right?  

I failed miserably at the Christmas one, so let's hope I can do this one.

Anyway, here's my picture.

Gifts.

I didn't get loads of presents which is just fine.  











I got a lovely sewing mug and sewing cross stitch needle book from my pal Romain; she always gets me really good crafty gifts, and a Sarah Raven voucher from my lovely Mum and Dad.  I am planning a cutting garden this year so I can use the vouchers to buy beautiful flowers.

The best gift I am getting is Mr Clicky Needles returning home to the UK from the USA in February, he's been working in America and we last saw each other in March 2020.  That's the only gift I need.

Well, that wasn't so hard, hopefully I will be joining in next Friday too.  

Bye for now, I'm off to check out the other pictures

Clicky Needles.


Tuesday 5 January 2021

New Year

 Hello Lovelies.  How are you?  I hope your Christmas was as good as it could be.


Master Clicky, me and the dog spent Christmas Day with my Mum and Dad.  It was a day filled with conversation and laughs.

Back at home I had two Christmas Trees.  An 8 foot multicoloured affair and
a bargain £7 red and white tree bought a few days before the big day.
A few of my favourite decorations


Look! Can you see the Scandinavian Crochet Heart that Teresa gave me when we met up in Oregon in March last year?  It seems like a lifetime ago.

It was lovely and cosy with the wood burner lit and the lights twinkling on the trees but to be honest with Mr Clicky still in America I wasn't feeling my usual Christmas contentment.

I packed the decorations away earlier than usual.


Like others in the UK we've had a little bit of snow which came and went quite quickly.

This poor blackbird was all puffed up against the snow.












I've been continuing with a weekly knitting zoom with my monthly knitting group, there are usually 9 of us and we all agree that it has been great to have contact in these difficult times.  Yesterday we went back into National Lockdown as Covid cases rise.

There is good news for me however.  Mr Clicky and I have decided that he will be returning to the UK for good.  He will be returning in February, the last time we saw each other was back in last March when I went to Chicago to visit him.  This last year obviously has not gone as we planned and we have decided that enough is enough.  He'll be working from home when he returns so I am now concentrating on sorting out a workspace for him.

That's me for now, keep safe...Clicky Needles.