Heart week

It's love all around on my craft-a-day calendar this coming week with a Heart Week theme. Rather than post after the event, I thought it would be nice to share a few heart ideas.

This heart cake topper garland is from the calendar. Rather than trying to complete all the crafts each week, I'm selecting one or just using the theme to come up with my own ideas. This was my favourite of the options.

But these are the others if you want to try out a different one.

Or why not make a heart mug hug using the pattern I posted here?

And there's always origami. There have been several heart-themed patterns on my origami-a-day calendar. This one folds up so that you can write a secret message.

Not heart-shaped but this is the Valentine's gift Chickpea is giving her boyfriend: chocolate bark decorated with marshmallows, jazzies, chocolate beans, glace ginger and toasted almonds. We've also spent today making animal-shaped biscuits half-coated in chocolate for him. One of them is a bear because he's her Bear :)

This week many people will also be wearing green hearts to show their support for the Climate Coalition who are raising awareness of climate change. I wanted to share some links on their site but it doesn't seem to be working so here's one to a supporters pack and a few ideas from the Women's Institute instead.

Why not hug a tree? (Photo from 30 Days Wild in 2016)

Or show your love for the environment by spending some time in one of your favourite places. You can see some of the things other people are doing on the CC twitter feed #showthelove

Happy Heart Week! xx

Craft-a-day: Groundhog Day

Today is Groundhog Day in America when all eyes will be on the town of Punxsutawney to find out what weather the rest of the winter will bring. According to legend, if the groundhog emerges from his burrow to a cloudy day, winter will be short; if it's a sunny day, it's another 6 weeks of bad weather! Luckily, here, it's set for a miserable day so we're in for an early spring!

So why am I talking about groundhogs? Well, they're the theme this week of my new craft-a-day calendar. If you remember, during 2016, I worked my way through a kirigami-a-day calendar. A couple of weeks ago, we visited the same garden centre where I'd bought that and saw this one, half-price. Into my basket it went.

Each week has a theme such as snowflakes, gnomes, triangles, foxes, and each day has a craft on that theme. As the project is meant to be completed the same day, they're all pretty quick and simple.

To be honest, that aspect has been a little disappointing as most of the projects are on very similar lines - lots of cards, gift tags and cake toppers. I can't see me making everything but the templates will come in handy in future. I'm also thinking I might use the weekly theme as the jumping off point to inspire other activities like baking or days out. Watch this space to see if any of these ideas come to owt or nowt!

Did you think this was all I bought at the garden centre? Hmm, maybe not...more on that next time!

Happy Groundhog Day! xx

Day 2: Make a twig teepee

This morning I was browsing through the blogs of other people taking part in 30 Days Wild and came across Craft Invaders written by Sarah. That led me to her Pinterest board and out into the wide world of nature crafting. So many gorgeous ideas that I'm going to try. The one which caught my eye today though was making a mini-teepee out of twigs and found objects.

First though, a refreshment stop: a twister for Chickpea and a bunny ears for me. It's hot work playing with twigs in the sunshine.

Assemble your twigs and tie at the top. Make a circle of card with 6 notches cut at regular intervals. This will help keep your frame spaced out as you weave strands of coloured wool around your twigs.

Decorate with flowers and found objects.

Ta-dah! I can't believe I actually got Chickpea to spend an afternoon in the garden but she loved doing this :) Roll on Day 3!

Festive making & baking

Christmas already seems so long ago that it feels strange to still be looking back. However, I wanted to show you what I'd been up to before continuing to move forward with the new year.

One of the things I most enjoyed over the Christmas break was having time to spend making and baking. The luxury of actually being able to plan to do some crafting and to do it at a leisurely pace, rather than squeezing it into increasingly fewer spare moments. If I was to make another resolution for 2014, it would be to find more of that kind of time rather than trying to cram in as much as possible. I really felt much better for slowing down, resting and feeding my creative side. Luckily, I don't make resolutions though because it would already have been broken.

But anyway, what making and baking did I get up to?

Starry lebkuchen biscuits with some dough I found lurking at the back of the freezer (and it was no worse from having been there since the previous year!).

I also ventured into baking with yeast for the first time with an apricot, chocolate and cardamom panettone. How exciting is it watching bread rise?! Why have I never tried this before? Bread making is definitely something I'll be coming back to when I can plan an 'at home' day.

The panettone should probably have been smaller and taller but I only realised at the last minute that I had the wrong size tin. Not that it made any difference to the taste. We ate it toasted for breakfast on Christmas morning with shop-bought Christmas tree crumpets and starry waffles.

This was a tree of a different kind made from a polystyrene cone. As you can see from the photos, I cut circles of Christmas fabrics with pinking shears and pinned them in layers to cover the cone. The idea came from the free Cloth, Paper, Scissors e-newsletter.

I also worked on my Father Christmas cross stitch which, I'm embarrassed to admit, has been on the go at least 5 years. All that remains to do is the outline stitching and more of the swirly snow. I've been in two minds whether to crack on and finish it or whether to keep it as a project to pull out each Christmas. I have another cross stitch project in mind though and I'm not sure if I have another frame so it looks like it will have to be finished.

No photos for this one but I've been working on my quilt too, transferring rectangles from piles of unsewn to sewn - a slow but therapeutic process.

And I wasn't the only one crafting for Christmas. Chickpea made this beautiful decopatch treasure chest as a gift for a friend. I was so proud of her: she worked so hard and really took time over all the details. Watching her enjoy crafting was one of my highlights of last year and something I love to encourage. This year, therefore, I'm going to continue being a craftlete, trying different crafts and hopefully finding others which she'll enjoy.

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Thanks for the comments about the cookery book challenge. I was ridiculously excited making my first draw this week, quivering with anticipation of which of my lovely books I'd be using. Was I still excited afterwards? Well, you'll have to wait until my first update to find out :)

Tealights & teacups

Like many of you out there, I love to burn scented candles in the evening, particularly with the nights drawing in. We don't have a real fire so it's lovely to have the gentle glow of a flickering flame to give the impression of the warmth of a fire.

What I don't like though is all the bits at the bottom of the tealights which don't burn away and get wasted, particularly if they're the more expensive ones or my favourite scent. Maybe it's the crafting spirit in me that saves everything but I've been hoarding them until they could be repurposed.

Over the summer, I decided I had enough collected to create new tealights. I scraped out all the bits with a screwdriver and melted them down in an old milk pan. The molten wax was poured into new tealights using a kit bought from Hobbycraft.

Really quick and simple. Thankfully the scent is pretty good too given that it's a combination of different wax.

The other candle wax of which I always have plenty is from the small samplers. Some burn down all the way but most seem to leave behind a large molten lump. These too I've been collecting and sorting into colours ready to transform.

Fired up with the success of the tealights, I decided to be more ambitious and make a teacup candle. I found this beauty in a charity shop for £1.

Again the wax was melted in my old milk pan and poured into the cup. There seemed to be a lot of wax in the pan but, as you can see, it wasn't nearly enough. My method of holding the wick in place was a bit precarious too!

I was very happy with the way it turned out though and was glad I'd made one for myself before attempting to make one as a gift. I already have another teacup to make one for my Mum - now all I need are some more leftovers!

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After a week when I travelled to 5 different towns/cities in 5 days with work, I decided that this weekend would be a quiet one. Apart from treating ourselves to coffee and crumpets at a local cafe for breakfast this morning, it's been a couple of days of cosying down at home and cracking on with my miniature quilt.

One of the benefits of so much travelling was that I managed to read this book, Malkin Child by Livi Michael. If you enjoyed my post about the Pendle witches, you might like this. It's the story of Jennet Device during the period in which she testified against her family and others during the Lancashire Witch Trials of 1612. As it's actually aimed at young adults it's a light and easy read and helped me pass a pleasant couple of hours on the train.

The wind has really picked up over the last couple of hours as the storm approaches. Hope you're enjoying what's left of the weekend and that you stay safe. x

Aston Pottery

On day two of our holidays we headed to Aston Pottery which is a few miles from Witney. We visited last year and I treated myself to one of their lovely mugs.

This time we were booked onto one of their ceramic painting workshops. It was a very simple technique using plastic stencils.

No surprises for guessing which stencil Chickpea chose to decorate her plate with!

I went for a wildlife theme and subtler colours. We all really enjoyed it and it was a great way to spend an hour.

After the painting, we went on a tour of the workshop to see how the pottery is made. Someone asked how you get the empty space inside a teapot. Basically you pour liquid clay into the mould and leave it for an hour. The material the mould is made of is porous so the clay starts drying out around the outside. After an hour (or however thick you want the outside to be - longer = thicker) you just turn the mould upside down and pour out the excess clay - magic!

Next it was time for lunch in their cafe. Naturally they use their own pottery.

I loved that the light fittings coordinated with the pottery.

The last thing to explore were the gardens. I couldn't get enough of the rows and rows of dahlias.

Just beautiful and so colourful.

This is the Pleached Hornbeam Jubilee Walk, filled with gorgeous cottage garden flowers.

A pink echinacea was covered in bees and butterflies. This one is a small tortoiseshell.

Look closely and you can see a brimstone. I so wish it had opened up to show you the incredibly bright acid yellow of its wings.

This was the best I could get of a peacock too. Having seen the flowers crowded with so much life, we actually called at a garden centre on our way home to buy one. It had been planted less than half an hour before the first butterfly landed on it!

And did we buy anything from their shop?

Of course we did! Again, no prizes for guessing which one Chickpea chose.

We had to leave the plates at the Pottery to be glazed but, a couple of weeks later, Gill brought them up for us. It's amazing how much more vibrant the colours are now and we were both thrilled with them.

Our visit to Aston Pottery wasn't the end of our day though as we headed on to another destination - more about that next time. x