Happy Henlow Adventures

Last weekend was Burns night - always held in our local pub in Yorkshire on the closest Sunday. We went up to stay with our friends and went out on the Sunday evening with all of our mates to eat amazing homemade haggis made by the landlady of the pub, Glenys. It was a great night with Sandy fiddling in the haggis which started a great evening of music played by our friends Caroline and Tammy with him later on too. Here’s some photos of the evening. This is Sandy carving the haggis whist reciting Burns’ poem. It was great when all 3 were playing together. Sandy is incredible - he needs no music or anything he could just join in as and when it fit and it would always sounds wonderful. He was also really encouraging when the others were slightly nervous about playing or getting the odd note wrong. It was a lovely evening - much needed after the tricky weekend of learning I’d just had too. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.

This is one that I got for Christmas and completed a couple of weeks ago with some help from my friend. It was actually really tricky. A bit like a wasgij the picture on the box didn’t match the picture you were trying to create. The idea is that once you’ve made up the jigsaw there will also be 8 challenges hidden within the jigsaw that you have to solve - in this case to find the cure to your illness and escape the witches room. Here’s the box  As normal obviously I started by trying to put the edge pieces together but even that in itself wasn’t very successful. I tried and tried and I think I still ended up with about 3 pieces I just couldn’t get to fit anywhere and I couldn’t see what if anything I’d done wrong so I started working on the middle instead. Once complete the puzzle ended up a bit like this. Next to solve the puzzles within the jigsaw. If you don’t want to see how the challenges are calculated and what the solution is to the escape then please stop reading now

Last night I finished off this jigsaw that I had borrowed from my friend at work. This post will be short and sweet with just a load of pictures of the making process. Here goes: This is the picture on the box and this one requires you to puzzle what the judge in the pink tutu can see  The edge wasn’t too bad on this one - the top bit was good to make as it had the pink and blue stripes on it I started to piece together the most obvious bits first - with this one I fished out all of the pieces that had blue in them as my starting point  A bit more coming together here  And tah-dah here we go - I finished off the picture last night. Very enjoyable as always this one. I love that there is always so much to look at in these jigsaws.

The last few weekends we’ve had some time at home - it’s very strange having so many weekends where we have no particular plans but I really love it. By the time I’ve got to a weekend at the minute I’ve been so tired that all I’ve needed is some good sleep and time to chill on the sofa or do things at home that we’ve been wanting to do. A few weeks ago we decided to go out and buy a new Lego set. It’s the diner. We’ve been saying all last year that we weren’t going to get it as we didn’t think it looked as good as the other sets we had done before and thought it was smaller than some of the others and more money too so it wasn’t worth it. We then watched some videos on YouTube and we kind of changed our minds. As much as we’d poo-pooed it before it still looked like it had a lot of cool features and little bits that we hadn’t realised were in there before. We started building it a couple of weeks ago and have tried to spread out the build by doing just 1 or 2 bags per weekend but t

This morning before breakfast we decided to go for a little walk - not very far, just along the canal near to our house. The weather was gorgeous - cold and frosty - and we were both awake early enough so before breakfast we set off. I took quite a few photos along the way - here goes: We had to shuffle past an angry swan who was still protecting a signet (or swanling as we like to call them) At the far end of the walk we found a load of ducks. We watched them for a while ducking under the water - surely they must be really cold this morning. Some bits of the canal were even frozen and definitely all of the puddles along the path were too. It was great fun walking along smashing through the puddles - I did say that we couldn’t do them all - I think it’s only fair to leave some for kids who may have been following behind us. This was one of the pieces that we smashed out of a puddle. We stopped to have a look at the sheep in the next field on the way back. There

Just before Christmas I made some little bags for my colleagues at work to hang on their trees. I thought they looked like little elf treat bags so that’s what they became. I followed a pattern from the Half Yard Christmas book I had got last year or maybe even the year before. It went something like this: I started off by cutting out two circles of fabric, one in a grey pattern and one red  I used my toffee hammers to weigh down the template while cutting the circles out. When I had both circles cut out ready to go the next thing to do was to cut these both in half  And then into quarters I matched up a piece of red with a piece or grey for each quarter. I wanted to make a couple with each colour on the outside. I pinned on the ribbon to the outside of one piece of fabric And sewer the inner to the outside with right sides together. Next comes the tricky part - turning them around to sew the edges together. It ends up looking a bit like this when you come t