10th Wedding Anniversary

Eleanor attended a workshop today with Edwina Bridgeman at 'The Black Swan Gallery' in Frome and loved it. We have been lucky enough to see her work before and I just fell in love with its serene simplicity. She has agreed to create a comissioned piece for us for our 10th anniversary this year. It will be a piece showing our family together, me, 'long suffering husband', Eleanor and Martha....I'm so excited! I'll post a pic when its done.

Vintage Embroidery

I have brought back home with me a super embroidery which my great aunt made back in 1950's. It is so detailed and uses different layers of fabric and embroidery to create a Swiss style landscape. It is so beautiful but really needs to be reframed properly...a job for next week!

lovely vintage hats

On our way back from Cheshire we stopped at Bridgnorth to break the journey and more importantly to visit 'The Looking Glass' where they have a fantastic array of vintage hats, mostly from the 40's. It really is a pleasure spending time in there looking at them and the lovely owner allowed me to photograph some of them. There were some cloches in superb condition all safely behind glass and the colours were as fresh as when they were originally worn.

Baking cakes is a messy business

Well we've done snow stuff for the past few days and it was time to make some lemon cupcakes. Delicious but the frosting spoon did seem to spend a great deal of time being wafted about by Eleanor leading to splattered (but very tasty!) floors/walls and ceilings. i love the smell of the cakes baking but it was difficult for us both to be patient until the cakes had cooled enough to frost them....needless to say they're all gone now. We're off to Liverpool later this week to see the Tate and Liverpool Museum....no doubt we'll get some antique snooping done too.

Felt Flowers at Bea and Evie

Yesterday was the felt flower course at Tina's shop 'Bea and Evie' in Frome. Despite the weather I managed to get there and make three different flowers plus a very cute felt ring. Frome really is a lovely place and there are several great shops up the hill where you can find some real gems.

More snow

Martha's first real snow experience and Eleanors latest snow creation called Medusa!

Making and Buying

Finally I'm managing to replace the hats which I sold (the ones I hoped to keep for myself!) and some more ribbon flowers. The felts which I purchased from Holland are superb colours and work really well with some of the vintage flowers I've purchased recently. I also managed to pick up a wonderful hatbox at the B+W antiques fair so my new hats can be stored in style. It's snowing here so I'm looking forward to going out in my wellies with the girls later and having some hot chocolate afterwards to warm us up of course!

Let it Snow

"If you don't find snow exciting you know you've grown old!" according to my friend and I couldn't agree more! The place looks magical and finally Eleanor could go out and enjoy making a snowman (or is that Grover the muppet?).