December 7th

By now the second Ashes test will just be finishing.

The Ashes for the uninitiated are a regular series of cricket matches held between Australia and England. They're held in England in our Summer one year and then 18 months later are held down in Australia during their summer.
This means that every 2 yeas we get the joy of listening to the glorious British institution, Test Match Special through the night, and waking up in the morning to hear that the English batting has collapsed the bowlers have bowled brilliantlysomeone has scored a massive total errrmmm something (or possibly nothing) has happened while you were curled up in your bed.

December 6th

I love having pretty jewellery about the place, my clothes tend to be pretty plain, I am very unadventurous, but with some nice accessories I feel like I've made an effort!
If I'm only going to my works Christmas do there's a fine line between looking like I do at school every day, and spending the whole evening feeling overdressed. Something plain but with a nice necklace and earrings seem to fit the bill nicely.

Silver Feather Bracelet available from Cravejewelrydesign

December 5th

The advert's for this Christmas pudding by mad gastr-scientists Heston Blumethalhave been on the TV for the past few weeks, Waitrose have reportedly sold out, and at £13.99 for a 1kg pudding it's not exactly cheap!

However fear not, you can make your own! The lady at the Telegraph doesn't seem that keen on it, but I've made something similar using a chocolate cake mixture round the orange and it was delicious!

December 4th

Here's hoping we see some of this this Christmas



Photo by Michael Schlegel

December 3rd

Just about now the adverts are starting to appear for the festive delights that we can look forward to on TV, every year the BBC airs something cracking. Just to celebrate here's a video that says why I don't mind paying £13 a month to support this fantastic channel.

Giftmas

Last year I wanted to make a Christmas stocking, I couldn't find any I liked. I wanted it to be in red, white and green and be traditional looking, or and because I was skint I didn't really want to pay for it.
Over the Christmas holidays I sat down with a notebook containing square paper and I drew things. I am not a good drawer, I can sketch given enough time, but I am not one of those people who can produce a realistic looking drawing in 5 minutes. However designing colourwork motifs involved colouring in little squares until you're happy! I can do that sort of drawing.
I worked out how many stitches I wanted to do the stocking on and adapted the sketches to fill that many squares and minimise the floats on the reverse side.
It was just the sort of therapeutic work that averts all the stress of Christmas. I then looked back at features I'd liked on other socks and stockings I'd knitted and reminded myself how to do them.
By the end of the holidays I had a stocking. It then was put away with all the other Christmas decorations. Roll forward 9 months and I decided that I'd quite like to knit another stocking as a present for a friend. If I was going to reverse engineer what I'd done I thought I might as well write down the pattern.


And here it is-

Meet Tis The Season Stocking
It's available from p/hop which stands for pennies per hour of pleasure. If like me you're skint then download it and donate what you can afford, if you can afford more later come back and donate again, if you really can't afford anything download it anyway, come back when you've a bit more spare cash and donate then, no one will ever know as it's an honesty box system.
All money raised goes to help MSF who are a fantastic charity helping people all over the world every day of the year.

December 2nd

I would love to own this skirt (in case anyone want's to buy me something... it's getting a little late for the postage to the UK from the US though)

Available from the sewmoe Etsy shop

December 1st

To start us of in December, a sunrise.
At this time of year I see a lot of sunrises as it's only just getting light as I arrive at school.
None of them are quite as pretty as this though.



Buttermere at Dawn taken by mark_lj

Sledging

Cars haven't made it up or down our street all morning. We're now at a foot of snow with more falling. However the tea and milk situation was reaching rock bottom so we had to venture out.
While we were out there it would have been rude not to sledge down the hill wouldn't it?



It's a proper winter wonderland out there, we just un-burried the steps that lead to my front door before I killed myself by falling down the snow slope that existed instead of steps, however with more snow forecast I'm not sure how long they'll stay safe for.