Day 2 of the Advent Season

Homemade Notebooks

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The girls delved into their advent calendar again today and received some little notebooks made by me. We also had another bible story, which produced many a question but I won’t go into that, it really was quite extensive.

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They both have already begun to draw in their notebooks, can you guess which one was produced by which?

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I’ll take this opportunity to complete my October to November updates:

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One of the things that was weighing heavily upon me when I took a rest from blogging was my lack of dedicated work space to create items for my blogshop and so I decided to do something about it.

Before moving to a more work friendly area of the house this is where I was trying to work, in a corner of the living room. This just left me feeling cramped and the area made the whole living room look untidy and it felt ‘heavy’, which is not good for the creative mind.

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I decided to move myself into the loft which was properly insulated early this year and so it does not get cold or hot. There was already a dedicated area for the sewing machine and some of my hubby’s gym equipment so with a little rearranging, I created a little space for myself. I covered a half of sheet of ply board with some lovely old blue linen cloth I had lying around used my storage draws as legs and made myself a work station.

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Of course it doesn’t look like this all the time, the picture to right is more reminiscent of the area once its in use, which is fine by me. What I find stifling is having to tidy up my things at the end of every day/ work session while I’m in the middle of a project. If I can leave everything they way it is, it means I can come and do a fifteen minutes here/ an hour there whenever I have the time, without having to waste time taking everything out again and when the project is finished I do a big tidy up in readiness for the next.
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One of the things I have been dabbling in is making my own focal pieces to use in my jewellery designs and in my paper crafts. These focal pieces are made from a cornstarch clay recipe, which air dries, the picture on the right are the pieces after I have hand painted and sealed them. I haven’t had time to turn them into anything as yet but I have a few ideas floating about in my head.
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One of the things I offer in my blogshop is the opportunity to receive a Free Wish item from me, info can be found on the right hand side of my blogshop. The item above is the first Free Wish I have had to produce, you can read about it here.

I want to share my experience with a vegetable that I grew and ate for the first time, its called Shark Fin Squash. First and foremost the plant is a brute and a bully, it will try to take over your plot by any means necessary. It is though an abundant producer and if I knew then what I knew now I would have gotten a lot more produce from the plant than I did get, not that its not enough. I won’t go into to much detail but if you want more info there is tons out there just google it.

So the squash is a brute outside and a bugger inside, that’s if you can get into the darn thing. I kid you not, a cleaver and a hammer is how I got into the first one and that was hard going I tell you! I loosely followed a recipe for shark fin squash soup (incidentally that’s the only recipe you’ll find for this vegetable) and created a very nice tasting meal but I was so tired after trying to get into it that I couldn’t truly appreciated it. The next thing is the amount of flesh from one squash could easily feed 8 people and although the meal was nice it does not lend itself for eating as leftovers, you just don‘t want any more the next day.
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Now this squash is more melon like, there is a mild smell and taste of watermelon when it is raw, which I find sweetens the soup slightly. So because of this the second dish I made was to create a sweet and sour vegetable sauce, then I added the flesh of a baked shark fin squash (I pierced the squash a few times all around it then I baked it whole, which made getting into it much easier). I only used half of the squash and we were all satisfied, I gave the other half to a friend whose hubby is from Vietnam and he used it in his chicken soup to good effect.

Now I have re read what I wrote I don’t think I have explained this vege properly but feel free to ask me questions in the comments of this post or by email and I’ll do my best to clarify my experiences with this veg, which by the way I don’t plan on growing again (unless I can sell it to a Chinese restaurateur).
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During the month of October we also celebrated my eldest 10th birthday. I don’t do big parties every year for my girls, we celebrate the majority of their birthdays at home with the family, sometimes a few members of our extended family come along to make a fuss of the birthday girl, sing happy birthday and to share in the cake and ice cream. When they do get a big party with all the trimmings its on specific birthdays - 1, 5, 10, 13, 16, 18. So with this in mind my eldest was planning her 10th birthday party for the last year, writing and changing and rewriting lists in her diary. Well with my help her special day went beautifully, all invited friends came so counting my girls there were 14 in all. I filled the 3 hours with party games, arts & crafts, makeovers, food and a piñata. It was a huge success and I was knackered for a good 48hrs afterwards.
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Now I know you all must be wondering what’s the latest with the allotment plot. Well the last time I was there was the first weekend of November and that was for a members meeting. The picture above shows the last lot of work I got done late October, which was the digging over of the main un-worked area. There is a strip of grass path about 4ft wide directly in front the dug area which awaits my elbow grease but time has not been on my side and when I did have the time the weather was foul. The meeting was fruitful though on two fronts and I’ll go into one of them at a later date when things are more concrete but the one I’m happy to share with you now is that I gained a further 5ft of width to my plot, whoopee!! More planting space and with that comes more digging than I thought I had laid ahead of me, ho hum, it’s a case of taking the bitter with the sweet.
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Ta! Ta! for now.