The perils of cooking when tired...

Art Trail!

Been, gone, busy, successful!

Still can't find the surface of my desk....

Found a missing tape measure and lots of reels of thread and snippets of fabric to treasure, but no wood as yet...

Hard to tidy when you have one of these

Tiredness + rushing + courgette + mandoline = emergency visit to minor injuries on Monday evening.

Have to keep it on for a week, which is just as well because I'm afraid to look...

So there won't be much stitching going on here!  My break from blogging may as well start a little early - I'll hopefully catch up with all the blog posts I've missed reading in the next few days, then I'll be back in a few weeks - with restored finger, hopefully!

Happy as a pig in mud

At least that's what I was telling myself all last week. 

Inspired by Emma's workshop here I spent a happy few days making lots of these:

And I am truly chuffed!  Thanks Emma!

I also turned the beaky birds into leggy chicks:

(I am less chuffed with these, but win some lose some...)

But little did I know that come Saturday afternoon, the mud would be very very real....

The morning had started very well, and while the sun wasn't shining it was still dry...ish.   Dry enough for Someone to win Second Most Handsome Dog in Uckfield and the Girl to WIN Junior Handler!  Two rosettes, two bags of doggy biscuits! 

Here is the lad checking out the competition with Mum and the Girl:

Looking VERY handsome with his blue rosette:

and then being put in his place by the Girl

returning triumphant!

But then the rain started.  Just in time for me to arrive at a little village fete to promote my embroidery class, and to forget my wellies.  

 And it was only when the MUD started coldly and wetly entering my right boot through a little hole in the stitched seam that I realised there was a river running through the marquee...

Happy as a pig in mud?  Well, it was definitely mud, I was most definitely in it, and I was probably a bit piggy because I tried to console myself by spending my takings on a huge whoopie pie to stuff my face, but no, I wasn't particularly happy...not until I could get home and remove my boots and sling them in the washing machine and my feet into a hot bath.

My left foot was completely dry and clean, proving that even though they're very old and tired, my waterproof boots really are (apart from the little hole where the stitching has split the leather of the right boot when they were re-soled).  Unfortunately, much as I would recommend them, you can't get Aqualamb boots anymore as they have stopped making them.  Typical.

The perils of multitasking

Why not just have a sit-down in a comfy chair, enjoy a glass of wine and watch a bit of Wallander on the telly?

Why not indeed?

I'll tell you why not: because so much MORE fun could be had by attempting to set up a beading-the-legs-on-chicken-brooches session on a lap-tray in front of the telly and then DROPPING the box of beads at just the WRONG moment (is there ever a right moment for dropping a selection box of beads?)

and then spending 3/4 of the programme on your knees with a dustpan and brush saying "it's OK, you carry on watching, I'll only be a minute....just got to get the ones under the armchair..."

and then spending an hour the next morning washing the dog hair and dust bunnies off the beads using a variety of sieving utensils.

Pah.

Legless chicks

(apologies for the gratuitously misleading title to this post, couldn't help it)

Inspired by the Chickens of Normandy, and confined to the house due to a prep day for a "virtual" colonoscopy*, I felt the need to stitch something relatively easy and slightly pointless.

It starts with a little baby chick getting all stitched up and trimmed to size:

And then here are some beakless birds, waiting for inspiration to strike:

which it did, in the form of little pieces of folded metal from a tomato puree tube. 

So here are some beaky chicks:

Just need some legs now!

(Nothing "virtual" about it in terms of the prep day, I can tell you - luckily the actual thing itself just involved lying in superman position under a large doughnut-shaped X-ray machine for 5 minutes)

The Holiday of the Chickens

As mentioned previously, last week we effected an escape from the country.

Basically, we packed the Girl off to school with her suitcase on Monday morning, then legged it.  We even had the theme tune from The Great Escape in the car on the way to Folkestone...and while the Girl and her teacher and classmates were chugging their way across the Channel in their ferry, we were under it on a train on our way to France.

And after many hours of tunnelling and driving, we arrived at the Gite of Chickens, somewhere in Normandy:

Yes, we spent our holiday photographing chickens.  And watching chickens.  And teasing chickens, by making them run for breadcrumbs.  (Have you ever seen chickens run?  Hilarious)...And that cockerel, he was well and truly hen-pecked - the chickens even stole food from his beak.  Didn't stop him waking up at 5 every morning, though...

Chickens, the last Wallander book, a cold beer....bliss.

We did venture out occasionally, to enjoy a meal a deux

The John Steele being this chap, suspended on the church at Sainte Mere Eglise by his parachute on D-Day.  You'd have thought someone would have helped him down by now...

Inside there's quite a bit of stained glass dedicated to the American parachute regiments (most notably 101 Airborne, of Band of Brothers fame)

But mostly, we just sat around and looked at this

Heavenly.