High School Musical

One of the problems of having children is that some times they want something so much you just have to cave in! This is what happened when our little girl turned 5 recently. She desperately wanted a High School Musical Movie party. I couldn't say 'No'.


I love a good theme and decided to go down the Stars and Stripes route. I like to have an activity underway when the children arrive to get them involved and help them to forget about their parents leaving them. So I'd cut up strips of crepe paper which the children put into bundles and made into pom poms, which they danced with during the film.


We put up a large screen with surround sound and created bill boards and a ticket office using some cardboard, painted red, and studded with fairy lights and as each child arrived they were given a ticket.


An intermission gave the opportunity to serve the birthday tea, which was literally hot dogs and by apples from the garden, much to the children's disappointment. Then we produced these American Style cup cakes (which Boy and I had spent the night before creating). They also each got an ice cream during the second half of the film (no wonder some of them couldn't sit still!).


They were all sent home with the obligatory party bag. I always go overboard with the cellophane, I figure the contents are largely irrelevant. But, since my guys are really into badges at the moment, I made each child their own shaker style name badge for that personal touch.

And bags of pop corn, of course!

visually beautiful

when i saw this on tea for joy, i saved it. It keeps giving me studio envy! how is it so tidy!! one day i will show you a picture of my studio (it is sadly not visually beautiful!) what is your workspace like? send us a picture and we will have a little show and tell!

conkering the world

There's nothing as satisfying as a good old family walk. However any one with young children will know that often family walks come with much moaning, need for wee's, falling in cowpats etc and I've mentioned before how we like to give the walk a focus in order to keep the children's minds away from all the thing they could think of to whinge about.

At this time of year there are so many wonderful leaves around that leaf collecting is an obvious task, but today Hubby and Boy started the family off on a quest for conkers. It's a great school boy game and we spent hours hunting for conkers to help Boy in the playground.

We each kept our own secret stash and once we had returned home (and cleared ourselves of mud) we had our 'family conker competition'. There were 3 rounds catering for the different needs of our three children.

1) The largest
2) The prettiest
3) The oddest shaped

Believe it or not each child won a round!

holly anna

I've been hearing a lot about Frome recently. The name keeps popping up as an interesting, arty place and has made it on to my wish list of towns to visit. And today we went. The place is full of crafty/sewing shops (must mention millie moon , a haberdashers to die for!), places selling lovely vintage clothes and more modern and contemporary art as well. It was also the monthly Artisan Market, where delicious local food and crafts were on sale in the cobbled streets of the old town.


It is therefore not at all surprising that this is also the town that my brother-in-law and his fiance have decided to open their shop Holly Anna. And, after (an enviable) few months of scouring auction rooms and car boot sales, today was their opening day.


Having seen the back of their car after some of their early Sunday morning shopping sprees I knew that their shop would be full of things that I would fall in love with and I was not at all disappointed.


They've got a great eye and a distinct style. The shop has been put together in such a way that you want to walk out of the shop with the whole look rather than one individual piece.


Sigh....

I love the way they have used these old milk bottle tags - turn it over and find the price.

And I've been coveting a tailor's dummy for ages. Unfortunately our house really has no space for something this big that, for me, would be purely decorative. For now I'll just have to make do with this photo and dream on!

Suffice to say our Little Girl (who already thought that said fiance is the best thing since the colour pink) was so impressed by it all that she's come home and started to make her own shop!


The next Artisan Market will be a special Christmas one on 5th December and I'm sure it will be an event not to miss. Meanwhile if you are in Frome don't forget to visit Holly Anna.

B is for...

Beatrix, Birthday & Bunting.

Baby got a last minute invite to celebrate her friend's 3rd birthday (I know that means I can't get away with calling her a baby much longer). With various school runs and wot-not I had little opportunity to get to the shops to buy a present, so decided that something home made would be just the ticket.


After a quick rummage in my cupboards I came up with: a piece of calico, some transfer paper (one of my favorite inventions), pink thread and bias binding and, hey presto, I whizzed up some personalised bunting. Every little girl likes a bag so one was made to match, and in went the bunting. It was finished off with a little badge made out of a couple of suffolk puffs and an old button.

lavender harvest

We've had a couple of days of beautiful warm early autumn sunshine recently and it's given me the opportunity to head out into the garden and harvest our lavender bushes. As we live in a dry, vertical, sheltered sun trap lavender is about the only thing that actually flourishes in our garden, which is just as well given that I've taken to making lavender parcels for pin money.

With Christmas fairs on the agenda it makes sense to dry my home grown lavender and use some of it as stuffing and it is actually a therapeutic way to spend a late summer afternoon. But I'm also planning on making some things with a more seasonal scent for Christmas. Any suggestions on how to create a yuletide alternative ?

baking bread

i love it when i discover an exciting local happening, and i was nearly beside myself when i saw a poster for 'fired up' -community baking days at Upper Grange in Stroud.

the poster said, 'from midday onwards bring your own dough to bake in the searing heat of the wood fired oven, all welcome, bakers,spectators and tasters.' now i am a big fan of woodfired cooking so off I trotted with a focaccia (delicious) and a potato bread (a not so super experiment).

The whole experience was  a delight, the garden which the oven is in is beautiful with abundant fruit trees and vegetables (obviously i had to keep my veg plot envy under control!)

Upper grange is part of an educational trust (it is on lovedays mead off folly lane) and they are holding tHe bread baking days on sept 25th and october 30th,

 In addition there will be an apple day on 2nd october which is a lovely family event where everyone young an old can pick and press apples.

anyway back to the bread..........what can i say it was fabulous, katherine had made a sourdough rye loaf which was delicious with a deep nutty flavour, i asked her only half jokingly if she might give a lesson in the mysteries of creating a sourdough starter, so watch this space and hope she agrees!!

so this coming saturday it will be on again, and what am I going to try this time? a fabulous woodfired pizza I think, dribbling with buffalo mozerella and scented with basil.

 If you would like any further information or some contact details send us an email.

weekend reading

i have spent a thoroughly enjoyable (and for once peaceful) afternoon perusing the pages of a new discovery babyccino kids - a fab website/blog with instant appeal.

co authored by a group of trendy mums, it features travel articles, crafts, recipes fashion and much more. it has a lovely international feel, and the layout is really clean and calm, i will be dropping by often for an aspirational fix (i say aspirational as i long to rid myself of clutter and be cool and neat and tidy - never going to happen!!!!) happy weekend.

perfect peaches

I happened to come across a bag of what must have totalled 2kg of these delightful 'donut' peaches in our local greengrocers. They weren't perfect and so were reduced to £1 for the whole bag. Anyway not one to miss a bargain I had to buy them (and then think of what to do with them!!)

so ......peach and raspberry jam (equal quantities of chopped fruit and sugar, the juice of half a lemon boiled hard for about 4minutes then tipped into a sterilized jar).

and peach and strawberry pavlova using a big version of the ottolenghi merengues, we also had peach,parma ham, rocket and mozerella salad twice but both times it was eaten before i could take the photo!!!!!

pretty in pink

Sarah and I are both suckers for packaging and yesterday Hubby returned from a weekend away with a prize example. I'm not generally a fan of carnations. To me the mere word conjours up images of single, folorn stems on cafe tables and last ditch attempts at flower buying in a petrol station. However, packaged up nicely and it's a completely different story.

These pinks, wrapped simply in brown paper with an acid green bow of raffia are beautiful. In fact I can't bring myself to unwrap them. I even decided that they would make a very charming, rustic bouquet for young bridesmaids to carry. How fickle I am!

And whilst on the subject of pink and packaging look at these amazing fairy cakes a friend made me for my birthday. My eyes practically popped out of their sockets when I was presented with a box of 16 of these. Handmade, these truly were a work of art and tasted delicious too.

visually beautiful

as part of our new website product launch this year, we are trialling some photo printed products, including roller blinds, blackout blinds and bespoke photo wallpaper.
i was heartbroken last year to find my hard drive had died taking with it 10,000 photos not backed up (stupid I know!) they were all pictures of holidays and trips taken during the first 5 years of Miss B's life. Anyway sometimes joy fills your day unexpectedly and this morning i found an unlabeled cd full of photos of a trip to visit great friends in California about 5 years ago. So i have decided to do a little user trial of the blinds and have one myself, which do you think i chose............................??
happy weekend everyone

nasturtiums and dahlias

Sunday saw us spending our last day of the Summer holidays driving around the M25 to celebrate my Godmother and her husband's 40th wedding anniversary. Despite the journey it was a fabulous day, the food was delicious, guests ate lunch on trestle tables in the garden and everyone's children played together idyllically (the majority of the time). Amazingly we arrived at our destination 1/2 hour before we were due so we decided to find the nearest play ground and let the children use up some of their pent up energy before unleashing them at a grown up lunch party. And thus it was that we found ourselves in a car park by a village hall that happened to be setting up for the Annual Kent Dahlia Society show. And there in a 70's flower power array of madness were all the 'rejects' and they were being sold off at the fantastically tantalising price of £1 for 5. I couldn't resist. Though in all honesty I think they looked better in a huge display of vibrant colours and statement shapes but we didn't have space in the car to bring them all home. Even some of what we had got bashed by and tired, flailing arms and legs and Tin Tin books as we drove slowly back around the M25 that evening. But not even those went to waste!


But back to the Ruby Wedding Anniversary celebrations. Whilst on the World Wide Web I discovered that a less well known gift for 40 years of marriage is the Nasturtium. This thrilled me. I have a metal trug full of neon flowers sprawling in front of my kitchen window, making me smile when the rain comes and clouds hide the view over the valley. I've been wanting to do something inspired by said trug for a while.

I've also been wanting to work on my (very) freestyle machine embroidery as well as use this new stuff I found called 'dissolvable'.* So after a little bit of rushed experimenting - of course I had left this to the last minute - the result was this card, which I presented with a packet of ruby red nasturtium seeds.


*Not sure that that's it's real name but they knew what I meant in the shop. It's like a sheet of plastic that you can put in your embroidery hoop and machine on as if it were fabric. Once finished you dissolve the plastic in water and you are left with just the stitches. Fantastic - you can see better examples of the result in this post.