Happy Henlow Adventures

This has to be a pretty huge accomplishment as it’s been in the pipeline for a VERY long while. This is a tapestry I got and started when I was a kid - maybe my mum can remember when exactly - but the date on the fabric says 1998. I’m sure it can only have been a few years after that maximum that I started it. This has been sat around in my craft room doing nothing since we moved into our house about 8 years ago and just getting in the way. I finally picked it up as this lockdown is all about finishing things that have been started. This is all I could see of it for years. I started off working on the sky a little bit as I knew the bottom bit would be a bit fiddly with loads of different colours in little patches. Look at the difference in colour where I have just finished bits of the sky. It’s most obvious on the half white/half cream cloud at the bottom! I got this far but then wanted to save the rest of the nice easy blue bit for the end when I’ll probably be bored of doing al...

We did get around to making the crumble topping for the gorgeous stewed apple and blueberry mix that we made at the weekend and we had the first half of it last night after our dinner. You can read about us making the filling in my blog post  here . The recipe came from Mum L as most of these things do (although we did mess up a little with the measurements and added a lot more sugar than we probably should have)! Here’s how it looked before it went on the oven And I didn’t get a picture of the whole thing when it came out but here’s the slice I had. It was delicious- well worth the wait and the effort it took to make it. The even better news is that there’s still the other half left for after dinner tonight! Have a good evening all.

Yey! This post means I’m ready for the big tah-dah moment. Last night I sneaked upstairs for a few minutes while Adam was hanging laundry out and getting dinner in the oven to put the final touches onto my painting. On Friday I had the day off so I managed to paint the green section then - with my new paint that had arrived so I had a pre-mixed geeen. It did feel a little bit like cheating using the pre-mixed green as it’s not a primary colour and the others I had mixed myself from primary colours but I just wanted to get the painting finished and I had ordered a green so it seemed a shame not to.  I got it all taped up ready to go and then started adding the green. The joys of having it pre-mixed is that it didn’t matter if I ran out of paint half way through as I could just add more quite easily. That was my big worry with the other colours that I mixed and having it happen once already with the green was plenty for me so I took the safe option.  And with the f...

This morning (well afternoon but not long after if got up) we decided to have a good fruit preservative and food prep session. We had ended up with a couple of bunches of bananas that we hadn’t eaten and were starting to get to be almost too ripe so we started off by chopping them in half (skins on) and putting them into bags in the freezer. Apparently they freeze ok and we thought in halves we could then grab one or two out at a time and have a bit of a frozen banana lollipop type thing. Hopefully they’ll work. Apparently the skins go black but the actual banana should be ok. We’ll see. Next we moved onto the apples. We had got a couple of bags of “desert apples” which came on an order we had a managed to get from Morrison’s earlier in the week but when they arrived they were a little bit battered and bruised (I guess they’d been under another bag in the van before they arrived). We didn’t want them to go to waste so we thought we would stew them. We started off a peeling and chop...

I have been working on this for a few weeks now. I was inspired by the heart that I painted on the paper mache canvas in  this blog post.  I really enjoyed doing my little bit of art on this so I decided to do a full canvas in the same style. Nothing too complicated as I know I can’t paint actual things but I thought some sort of abstract piece of different colours would work ok. I had a quick google for some inspiration deciding that I wanted to do something with 6 colours similar to the colours that my little drawers are painted in my craft room. This was the image I used to get my inspiration for the design So I drew out my design on the canvas I had It’s a start - a bit like the design on the phone case but I didn’t really want the corner section to be quite as big as the pinkish bit on the phone so there was a little improvisation needed to try to get all of the sections to be similar sizes. It turned out something like this. Ignoring the line that I scribbl...