Spring II

Today my little one and I spent a nice day playing in the garden, baking and eating. Although I am itching to get back into embroidery. Hopefully sewing up some small pieces in time to pop onto our shop ahead of Christmas - some small geo abstracts and new sweater letters.

Our daily routine now includes going into the garden to admire the aquilegia that's finally in bloom (trying to stop Ava from plucking all the flowers) and most important of all, checking on our strawberry plants. Trying to harvest the tiny alpine strawberries before the bugs get to them. We also watered the sprawling raspberry tangle that's beginning to fruit. I left it to go wild meaning to prune back a few canes but when I eventually got around to doing it I discovered quite a few canes were in bud. I'm not entirely sure how to take care of this plant and i'm not even sure what type of raspberry it since I purchased it at a local nursery. But I think it might be the floricane type since some of the old canes are fruiting again but then again some new canes are fruiting so it's all very confusing!

I hope I can keep it thriving. We all love raspberries at home and it would be amazing to eat our own instead of the often lack lustre tasting ones from the store. We also made some time for blowing bubbles and baking some muffins. This will be the last time we use frozen blueberries though, they are completely tasteless. With a drizzle of maple syrup and butter they're not too bad though!

New year freak out

Hello! New year and new blog post. I remember when I was younger the time between the end of the year and the start of the next felt a lot longer with enough time for me to get used to the idea that a new year was about to begin and be comfortable with the new starts that it would bring. Now it feels like I only have a few days to celebrate the end of the year and all things that have happened before the freak out of realising that holy moly what will I do, the new year is here and it's time to start all over again. I'm pretty sure i'm not the only person who sometimes feels overwhelmed at the possibilities of a blank page, the feeling I get at this time of year is like that just about a thousand times stronger.

At the end of last year I started to worry about how we could develop our work. My boyfriend will be the first to tell you that one of my favourite past times is to worry so I didn't turn away from these thoughts. Instead I thought about why I was feeling that way. I think it's healthy to reflect and analyse what you're doing, explore change and develop so that's what we'll be doing, starting now.

This year has the potential to be a lot of things, whether we're ready for it or not. So maybe, just like the first beach swim of the season, we just need to jump in!

1. Christmas is a lot more exciting when children are involved. I was never really into the whole Christmas build up - decorations, trees and lights until this year. I went a little decorating mad making pop pom and streamer garlands, painting ornaments, a wreath and also pimping dollar store bon bon crackers with new gifts, confetti and jokes. This is the finished wreath. I used left over acrylic paint so unfortunately it wasn't water proof and had to be taken down whenever the rains came. Next time i'll make some with waterproof paint!

2. I was in a budget saving mode this year so also hand painted some wrapping paper. 

3. We had a mixture of old ornaments for our first tree borrowed from M's parents and my own. We did splurge a little though on three owls that we hid amongst the pine needles.

4. For family Christmas lunch we continued M's family's tradition of paper hats and added some fun variations from TMod, masks too!

5. Bon bon aftermath. I replaced the novelty gifts with some amazing Japanese wooden spinning tops from Poketo, mini 3D wooden puzzles and some woven bangles from Leif that I was almost tempted to keep for myself.

7 - 10 We've been spending a lot of time at our favourite beach. Ava's slowly getting used to the open water, she loves digging her hands through the sand. Hopefully she'll take after M's side of the family and be a natural swimmer.