50th Afternoon Tea!!

So this year my sister and I turn 50!! Well our combined ages make this delightfully round number at any rate. So we decided to do what ladies do, and we whisked ourselves off to London for the day for some sunshine, shopping and afternoon tea. It was such a wonderful day! The sun came out, it was about 27 degree so the hottest we've had so far this year, and we had the most chilled out day pretending we knew our way round London (I even gave a tourist directions, and I they were correct too!).

We decided it was vitally important that now we are grown ups, we should pretend to be so and have afternoon tea in a fancy hotel. Naturally we picked the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory themed tea and my goodness was it a good idea! The savoury side of things was so delicious, with smoked salmon on rye bread and mini leek and Stilton quiche standing out as the most yummy of the selection, but the sweets were truly exceptional!

Chocolate, chocolate and chocolate! Oh and candy floss, Eton mess, brioche, scones and milkshakes obviously.... I certainly didn't feel like a lady at the end!

Scones, Brioche and cocoa bean financier!

Pear drop and sherbet lemon candy floss, Eton mess and Caramel chocolate milkshakes!

Scones with summer berry jam and apple compote.

Caramel chocolate milk.

The big finale - Golden egg with vanilla cheesecake and mango.

This tea was a limited offer from here, but they have so many more to choose from.

May Bank Holiday

Now I have a normal job I actually get to enjoy the benefits of Bank Holidays!! This meant the whole family (plus two dogs) piling into the car and heading to the beach huts for the weekend and luckily enough we had the weather to go with it too. I'll brush past the fact it was pretty windy on the Monday and we were all wearing woolly jumpers, but on Sunday it was lovely, book reading/sunbathing/dog walking weather. Finally.

On a short little walk with my camera I couldn't help but be consumed by the colours I found on the beach so here is my little colour study on a British beach. The only editing these pictures have had was on the camera before taking them. I'm still learning how to use my camera so I wanted to capture the colours using only the different settings of my camera.

I have a whole other post to publish just with pictures of the moon, the skies were so clear all weekend that we had the most amazing night on Sunday the full moon was huge and so bright so there are some more pictures to come in the next few days!

I hope you all had a great bank holiday too.

Weekend Round Up 28.04.13

It's been a fairly chilled weekend again, I'm gearing up for a busy May by taking it slow for the end of April. The weather has been rather more miserable again at the end of this week, so I've avoided too much outdoor adventuring. Instead I've had tea with friends, whilst learning to embroider (pictures to follow when I've finished something!), film watching and today's highlight The Duck Race. Great fun! Although a little windy today it was still brilliant! And I had the pleasure of hanging out with some Alpacas too (one day I'll have one of my own!). Also this wonderful event organised by Faringdon & District Rotary Club raised over £4000 for charity! Another good reason to stand outside cheering for ducks all day!

4500 ducks dropped from a digger for a 200 metre race speeding away from the start line.

A few break away ducks take the lead.

At the bend the poor ducks took on a head wind...

And the race was opened up. Genuinely, super exciting!!

And the winning duck was number 362... sadly not one of our ducks ours were numbered up in the 3000s!

But the real ones were ever cuter than our yellow racers!

Alpacas. Are. Amazing.

This guy actually danced for carrots. Smart little pony right there.

Kune Kune pigs. Super cute. Super smelly.

Weekend Round Up 23rd-24th

I've had so much fun this weekend, getting messy and spreading my projects throughout the house like I did when I was in uni! I'm working on a project from Mollie Makes and have been dying some fabric to get the perfect shade of green I wanted, so the bathroom became my official drying space.

I then spent today mixing up the dye for my final pieces of fabric and while they were drying I played around with a new wooden stamp I'm hoping to use to add an extra unique detail to the project.

Hot chocolate in a colour coordinated mug was a must.

All pieces cut out, ironed and ready for printing then sewing!

It wouldn't be the weekend without home made pizzas, candles and girly movies with friends either!

Not to forget, home made (unconventionally shaped) Churros, cinnamon sugar, dipping chocolate and cream.... definitely overindulging!

Weekend Round Up 16th/17th

It's been a busy weekend, baking, cups of tea with friends, theatre trips, unexpected snow, more baking, more tea, more friends, more baking, evening films with family. I couldn't have planned a better weekend if I'd tried. So much happened I'm not even going to describe, I'll just let the pictures do the talking.....

The snow was totally unexpected today and it was all gone by this evening, but it made for a fun day playing and a good excuse to stay inside baking! Yes we are 7 years old and we used every colour food colouring we had. p.s pie for dinner was WAY more tasty than it looks in the dish, I'm by no means a tidy chef!

(Delayed) Sunday Round Up.....

SO after my fabulous weekend in Bristol I was supposed to put up some pictures of my lovely new dress in action.... 

However Bristol turned out to be so very fabulous that A) I managed to leave said pictures in Bristol (they are keeping my camera company which I also left in Bristol) and B) Bristol left me feeling so very un-fabulous on Sunday afternoon that I didn't have the energy to put together a post detailing said fabulousness.

I persuaded my lovely sister to take a few quick snaps of the dress and this is the best one (not a comment on lovely sister's photography skills but more a comment on how photogenic I am...turns out not very as it took 12 pictures to get one good one!) BUT the dress turned out just as I'd hoped, so simple, yet a perfect fit, super comfy and it looks good dressed up with heels or casual with woolly tights, boots and a nice jumper! The pattern was adapted from this book, I used the pattern for the bodice, but altered the neck line. For the skirt I took a rectangular piece of fabric and put a loose running stitch along one long side and pulled the stitching a little. This caused the fabric to bunch up and I then stitched it onto the bodice ensuring the bunching was even all the way around.

The bonus of making your own clothing is you can make it fit your body shape absolutely perfectly so it is much more flattering than an oddly fitting dress creating awkward silhouettes.

It also thoroughly enjoyed being out and about in Bristol being wined and dined!

I hope everyone else had the most delightful weekends too!

That Friday Feeling...

Is there a better feeling than knowing tomorrow when you wake up you can do whatever you want to? I've been cramming some sewing machine time in over the last two days, trying to finish one of this week's projects and tomorrow morning I'll be putting the finishing touches to my vintage dress, very excited. So far the fabric has been lovely to work with so I'm hoping it'll look good once finished. Check back Sunday to see the finished piece!

I'm also planning to test my new road bike tomorrow, I've only been out on it twice since I bought it as we've had enough snow and wind to put off even the hardiest of cyclists so I'm very much looking forward to that!

Saturday means Bristol for the evening for food, wine and excessive jollity in the company of beautiful people. I can't think of a better way to spend a weekend than crafting, cycling and catching up with friends.

Is anyone else up to anything exciting in the run up to that annual February Love fest?

Watch this space....

So it's been a little while since I posted anything (sorry!) but between illness, SNOW and visiting friends, I've fallen behind not only on my blog, but also on generally being creative. Although I have occasional feelings of guilt about ignoring this space.. I've been having so much fun I quickly feel OK about it all! Once the snow fell I spent the weekend walking the dogs, drinking hot chocolate, feeding the birds and catching up on vital TV! All in all, perfection.

This weekend just gone I further managed to avoid all forms of creativity as I spent the weekend in London for a  friend's birthday  It was such a wonderful weekend of beautiful food (Haggis for burns night) wine, lazy breakfasts and burritos! The birthday girl in question is a school friend who I hadn't seen for over a year, and as always it was like no time had passed. It was also really lovely to just hang out with good friends, with no pressure to get anything done, other than prepare ourselves for further wine consumption...

Having spent an indulgently guilt-free weekend simply enjoying myself, I headed back home on the train Sunday afternoon with some interesting thoughts running through my head about work, happiness, money and the future. I'm thoroughly enjoying my job at the moment, it is great work experience and I work with some lovely people, as well as some wonderful young people too, but as is often the case I don't make much money. A fact I was reminded of after spending a weekend with people much the same age as me who earn significantly more, and it really made me think, should I be getting out into the world trying to earn more money, so I have the option to do all the things I want to in the future? Or should I accept my fortunes of the moment and focus on all the beautiful things I do already have in my life? I then read this post on a new favourite blog of mine, which just echoed all of my current thoughts, reassuring me that a) I'm not alone in all these thoughts and that b) if I'm not alone in them, then I really mustn't let them trouble me so much.

I might not make much money at the moment, but the bonus is short working hours, which leaves me with plenty of free time to do all the things that ultimately make me happy. So for now, whilst I work on boosting my CV and slowly (very slowly) saving money, I get to play around with beautiful fabrics, culinary delights and all things crafty. So for the next week I shall be monopolising my free time with plans to make a brand new day dress, and a skirt for work! So keep checking in on this blog to see how my sewing goes and whether I can finish this dress by the end of the week (I've been badly making a practice run over the last two weeks so hopefully I'll be ready to make the real thing now!).

Blue flowery fabric: vintage flea market bargain for the dress.
Cream flowery fabric: local fabric shop find for the skirt.

Pasta perfection

Dinner parties with friends are some of the best possible fun. There's wonderful food, copious amounts of wine and hours and hours of mindless chatter and catching up with each others' lives. The most magical thing about them is that even though they happen so irregularly, when the company is right it is always as if you've hardly been apart. To make a magical dinner party even more perfect, this time we made ALL our food from scratch especially the pasta....

Cooking a fresh meal is satisfying on its own but hand making pasta was something else! I won't lie it was a long process (and due to certain guests insisting the wine be opened before we started, it certainly took even longer than planned!) but it really was so much fun! Combining flour and eggs is all there is to it, then there is lots of kneading to be done and having many hands makes that a quicker process.

Then there's the rolling.... a pasta machine makes this an easy process but again a long one! Rolling pasta however is not only great fun, involving everyone in the kitchen as each chunk of dough gets stretched out to be about 2 metres long, its a lovely thing to play with. It feels like soft leather in your hands, it is so thin in the end, but still it feels strong and almost waxy.

On our first attempt at slicing the pasta we rolled the dough up and just roughly chopped it then tried unrolling it. This wasn't so successful as it all stuck together....it also didn't produce the most beautiful pasta! It certainly looked home made!

Our more successful attempts used the tagliatelle cutter on the pasta machine and this produced such beautifully even strips of pasta that we continued to use it for the final chunks of dough. All the pasta was then hung up on the drying rack to crisp up before cooking.. a hilarious sight to see in the middle of the kitchen!

Most importantly.... the taste. Fresh pasta is amazing, I'd never had it before but it is so light, fresh and juicy I really would recommend making your own! If you don't have a pasta roller, you could easily make ravioli rolled with a rolling pin and chopped up with something tasty inside. Our beautiful pasta was served up with a lovely home made tomato sauce, goats cheese and meatballs. Simple. Delicious.