Its been a while.....

Well New Year has been and gone, Carl is back in Hong Kong and life is back to 'normal' in fact it seems like ages until we have another holiday, which is depressing. I suppose the dark days of winter have that effect on people.  We are still doing our fair share of hospital visits for just about all of us, but I hope that they sort Laura out first, it has been uncomfortable for her for a few months now, she just wants things sorted out and back to normal. Fingers crossed that she gets sorted soon.

We took a trip into London one Friday evening to see the London Lumiere. We drove to Potters Bar station and that  was the start of the problem!! They had changed to automatic number plate recognition, so we drove in and attempted to pay, sadly it couldn't find my car, we were given a huge list of cars, not one of them was ours!! So we had to call the 'number' on the machine and register my car, credit card and full details all to pay £2 !! Worse than that I registered my car but couldn't get it to accept my card, so now whenever I park at Potters Bar, Rick will get the bill!!! Jolly decent of him I say!!

We got off at Kings Cross and walked around the first area, despite the wintry evening it was absolutely rammed with people!! We stopped to watch as much as we could but some of the places were ten people deep and we couldn't get anywhere near them. This projection on a building was very clever.

It was good to watch, lasted around ten minutes and was also rammed!!!

We moved on and found some other installations!!

We look as if we are doing a bit of a Halloween type of shot here! It was just the 'flower installation'!!!! casting an green glow. 

We enjoyed the bits that we did manage to see, but we really wanted to have a bite to eat and for some reason we couldn't find anywhere with any space, it was starting to be a bit of a nuisance , in the end we had to settle for a posh fish and chip place that was fairly expensive, but we were out of options by then!!! We had a really good night, its was chilly and really felt like a winters night better than that it didn't rain!!!

For the past couple of weeks my friends Jane and Karen and I have been preparing for a bit of  craft sale  in aid of cancer research, it was a low key event on a school night, but we were really pleased with all the support we got from friends and family. We didn't publicise it too far and wide, kept it to a select from people close at hand, we seem to have raised a fair bit of money (we are yet to add it up) So thank you to everyone who came and made it such a good evening!!

I have still been doing some pottery, this term I decided to have a plan of action. Half the lesson I spend thinking about what to do which results in a huge waste of time, so this time I started with a plan. I have decided to make a bird feeder totem pole. I have a picture in my mind that includes lots of different elements. I have bought a metal pole which I will use to support my 'Creation' I have spent a few weeks now making, boxes, houses, a giant acorn, spacer tubes, plates, curly flowers etc. I plan to stack them all over the post and set it up with bird feeder 'stuff' hanging from the various bits I have built into it.

As I say in my head its a work of art which will rival Banksy for its message, I suspect in reality it will Blue Peter a bit of a run for its money!! 

So watch this space for an update !!

I am going to try and keep my blog updated but I  have been so tucked up with my Angels that I haven't had much spare time!!!

This week I am off to Brighton for a conference, can't think that Brighton in February is going to be very welcoming, the weather forecast is dodgy, so I better pack my thermals!

So see you soon, sorry Eunice I have been so remiss in my updating!!

Time Flies..

Time flies, particularly at the weekend, you spend all week looking forward to the weekend and then in a flash its gone. I hate not having anything in particular planned, because it makes me feel as if I am wasting time deciding what to do. So this weekend I decided to do a couple of crocheted mats. I wanted to do an oval one for my bathroom and a rectangular one for Carl's bathroom. The first step of the process is to rip up the material, that causes clouds of lint dust, so I sat with the back door open and I wore a mask. The whole of my work room is covered in a layer of dust, but I have the ripping down to a fine art now. I can tear up a whole sheet without a join!! 

I decided on pastel colours for my mat and Carl wanted blue and white to go with his bathroom.

It is really amazing how quickly it all grows. I made a mat that measures around 4 feet by three feet in around 2 hours!!, I tried a different technique for Carl's, I even managed to get 'corners' which I hadn't been able to do before. 

The great thing about these mats is that they are made out of recycled material, they are absorbent, having been washed loads of times before and they are washable, so even white ones can be kept looking pretty!!

Since last year when Mum passed away we have been trying to sort things out, the situation at the hospital is being dealt with by our solicitors, I still feel very sad about the things that happened in those last few weeks. I have been surprised at how companies have reacted after a bereavement. Some like 02 have been fantastic, they simply dealt with everything and wrote off mums bill, cancelled the account, others however have been less than great, one of those is Virgin Media. I have a lot of services through Virgin including TV, Internet and mobile phone. I set up Mums broadband through Virgin, so as dad doesn't use broad band, back in December I called up to cancel the account. They said that they could as long as we paid up the rest of the contract, which didn't expire until May 2014! I explained that only Mum used the Internet but they wouldn't have it, so I have this weekend cancelled the contract and I asked them to see how much Internet had been used in the past months? Despite no usage they refused to refund anything!! Virgin a fantastic example of lack of compassion and ability to think outside the box. They are simply money grabbers. They even had the cheek to ask for the router back, they can have it, I don't think its likely to be working by the time it arrives back with them!!!

Have a great week, roll on Bank Holiday weekend!!!

Trying something new.

The advantage of being off of work is the extra time you have to sit and think about things, I like to think and ponder , but even better than that I like to 'do' things, try my hand at things. The advantage to trying things is that it occupies me body and mind!! We have recently redecorated two bedrooms, I say we, I have the ideas and I have been project manager!! Tom has decorated to my command!! I have helped clear out cupboards and under the bed in our room, you know offering express instructions and holding the black bags!! Its taken some time as I have not been physically able to help too much, but we are finally there. We unearthed lots of 'stuff' mainly 'stuff' that is too good to throw away, but no longer required. All that happens with that is that you store it for ten years and then throw it out anyway!! I suppose if you were able to keep it for another thirty years it would become 'vintage' and be worth a fortune. Sadly I end up getting rid of stuff long before it becomes valuable again.

Anyway I found some old curtains that had been in the conservatory many moons ago, I packed it all up with the intention of giving it to the local school, the more I thought about it the more I wished I could put it to some sort of good use. I was looking on the great time waster - Pinterest when one of my friends pinned a picture of a braided rug made out of strips of fabric. I did a bit of research and although I liked the look, it was clear that you would need to braid the fabric and then sew it together in a spiral, it was the hand sewing that put me off, but it had tickled my interest so I eventually found instructions to make a crocheted rag rug, it had everything I needed, used rag strips, grew quickly and did not require sewing up afterwards. So I ordered my giant crochet hook (20mm size) and started to tear up the material into two inch wide strips. 

This part was very satisfying, the quickest way to do it is tearing great for venting your frustrations. I found that if I ripped along the length and stopped around an inch from the end, I could move over two inches and rip back the other way, before I knew it I had a huge ball of yarn !

So the next step was to start crocheting, it was quite easy, I tried several different ways before I settled on a simple strip. I planned to put it by the side of my bed, so it needed to be around two feet wide by 4 or 5 ft long. I unpicked it a couple of times until I was happy with the result. In the end I made a 15 chain and then did a single crochet into each stitch, at the end of each row I added an extra stitch to allow me to turn the corner and crochet back along the other way. I carried on until I ran out of fabric.

I love the effect, its knobbly and somehow rustic!! Its multi coloured effect is much nicer than the dated curtains that I made it out of. 

The finished article!! I have found it quite addictive, it grows so quickly I managed to do the whole rug in two evenings. So once that one was done I started to think about doing a round one for the spare bedroom. 

I had run out of fabric, so again looking on line other people suggested that duvet covers are great for rugs, so I put a wanted on my local Freecycle site and was given two king size  blue sheets and a dozen blue and white pillow cases, all had seen better days, but that didn't matter as I was going to rip them up and it saved sending them to the dump!!

So I started on a circular rug .

You don't have to worry about the fraying on the sides, or making sure that its only the right side showing, the variation of the right and wrong side gives it an interesting texture, the blue looks quite like washed denim.

To make the rug circular its best to work it on a table to keep it in shape, you have to judge the shape and occasionally add in stitches to keep it flat. There is no exact science to it, you just have to make sure it stays flat. If you do it too tight it starts to turn into a shallow bowl shape, which is not what I was looking for!!

Here is the finished article, just right for my 'dressing room' The pale part is made out of the pillow cases and I finished it off with the last of the dark blue. To give you an idea the rug used one blue king sized valance sheet and twelve pillow cases !! 

This afternoon I tore up the rest of the sheets while watching Sunderland come second in the cup final. I actually felt it was a good game, just a shame that Sunderland lost. I just have to decide what to make with these mammoth balls of yarn!! I have a couple of ideas but I think I'll think about it for a while and see what I decide to do with them!!

Hope you all have a good week, as I sit here its pouring with rain yet again, I would love for it to be a bit warmer and a whole lot dryer some time soon!!!