Little Things

 

Little things making me smile recently include:

♡ Teatime picnics on our fire escape balcony in the sunshine.

♡ Adding cup stitches to a current WIP. I love how they work so well with the stem stitch circles around the blobs in the fabric pattern, creating textured circles within circles. Plus they are fun to make!

♡ Completing thread cards ready to go into kits for upcoming sales events and to stock up my shops. Fire Flower II has been flying off the shelves recently so there is lots to do! The thread cards themselves take forever to make but I can't see any other way of getting so many colours into the kits so I'll have to keep on making them. 

♡ Guide meetings held outside in a local Division campsite. This particular site is in Chiddingly and, this time of year, is absolutely full of wild garlic releasing the most incredible scent! I love love love being surrounded by trees and woodland, with just the call of the birds and the cows in the field. And the happy shouts and cries from the Guides too, obviously. 

♡ Amazing sunsets out of our kitchen and living room windows. The view we have from the balcony is absolutely the best part about our home and especially at this time of year where we get to appreciate it with the long evenings. 

♡ It being warm enough, and light enough, to sit outside in the evenings to work on computer stuff. This photo in particular was from a newsletter writing night so; Friday night, PJs on, sat in the golden sunshine with Easter egg chocolate and a coffee. 

♡ Cheeky little snails. Toddler F is fascinated by snails at the moment and spends a lot of time searching in flower beds for them. This one was waving us off from my parents house one evening last week. 

♡ Working on April's ATC cards. The theme is Farmyard Friends and I've not given myself much time to complete these so am totally cheating with my sheep fabric. Even with the cheat they are still taking a while so I have them as my bus project and they are popping out all over the place! 

Monday Club Butterflies

Toddler F and I have had a little change to our weekly routine recently which has lead to some quite exciting things. Dad is working his way up to retirement and has taken every Monday off until he retires to use up his annual leave, which means he's wanting to do something fun on his days off. 

Our previous Monday routine involved myself and Toddler F staying at home for the morning, then catching a lunchtime bus to the parents for a bit until I had to go to Rainbows and they looked after Toddler F. They also look after my nephew on Monday (who is 6 months younger than my one so they are a bit of a double trouble act) so it was an afternoon of playing for the two boys.

Since Dad has had these extra days, we started a Monday club and Toddler F and I have been catching an earlier bus, getting picked up at the bus station, squeezing into their car and going somewhere fun for the morning. This particular week we went to the Sussex Butterfly Gardens at Middleton Common Farm, which was stuffed with the most amazing butterflies!

The boys weren't that sure about butterflies landing on them, but they were very good and stood still until the butterfly flew away, and also (mostly) looked where they were going so as not to tread on a butterfly sitting on the floor. (No butterflies were harmed during their visit.) It is very very hot in that polytunnel though so we did have to leave when the boys got too sweaty. Once you've bought your ticket you can go in and out though so that wasn't a problem. 

Reece, Toddle F and I did come here fairly recently with a different nephew as part of a challenge badge he was working on. It was a weekend and they had an extra bug holding activity as well as some crafts - I held a leaf insect and the biggest type of stick insect in the world! Very prickly, like holding a long conker. The boys all chickened out of course. 

Sneaky moth!

The boys were fascinated by the little drinking stations with the sugar water. A butterfly lady came round and refilled the bottle caps whilst the boys trailed after her, nattering away about butterflies and discussing the fish in the pond. I did ask if the fish ever ate the butterflies and apparently they do nibble the odd one if they can. Someone does regularly go round and rescue any butterflies that have accidentally gone for a dip.  

My favourites are the ones which have brown wings underneath but when they fly they are electric blue on the top side of their wings. I didn't manage to get a photograph of those though unfortunately. 

I'll see if I can share any other Monday club adventures with you over the coming weeks. Quite a few of the previous trips out have been to garden centres, we're slowly working our way around garden centre cafes and testing their cakes. The cakes at the butterfly farm are equally lovely by the way. 

 

Autumn Loves

Things I'm appreciating this autumn:

❤ Love hearts in my coffee

❤ Watching hundreds and hundreds of geese flying over me at the bus stop on the way home after working at the shop. The noise they make is tremendous!

❤ Slow mornings working on my Moss & Lichen Stitchscape Swap cards. These are going very very slowly!

❤ The most amazing sunsets on the bus on the way home. This was probably the last bus sunset this year as the clocks have now changed and it's completely dark by the time I leave. You can just see the hills literally glowing golden on the left hand side there. It was incredible with a black cloudy sky above them contrasting so beautifully. 

❤ We've had some fairly stunning sunsets at home as well too. 

❤ My last little Sunflower doing it's best to flower in October! The weather has been quite mild, wet but not cold apart from one surprisingly frosty morning. I'm not sure the petals on this flower are going to open all of the way out though as it's been closed up like this for a few days. 

❤ Evening stitching in front of the TV with my sleepy sofa buddy. 

❤ Pumpkin picking in the sunshine! Another beautiful day, warm and sunny and so many types of pumpkin on offer!

❤ I've been able to finish off quite a few projects lately which has felt good. I always feel better when I think I'm achieving things, plus the house isn't quite so messy as I can put things away!

My Birthday

There was nothing particularly special about my birthday this year, no big number or huge party, but we visited some rather lovely places that I thought you might appreciate, and that I would like to remember when I look back through my blog diary in a few years' time. 

I had swapped my day at work so that I could have it off and was joined by The Mother, brother and Baby F for the morning with a lovely breakfast at Bills in Lewes, followed by a walk to Southover Grange Gardens. It's really something special this time of year, and I often come throughout the year - especially after a trip to the dentist - to see how it changes. If you come earlier in the year, the Pampas grass is huge and fluffy, crowding over the dried up canal like a permanent explosion of featheriness; if you come later in the year, you may even see some water trickling through the canal itself. There's a rose garden, a clean cut looking box garden, a kind of wild and untamed garden, mowed lawns, borders, and then this beautiful strip of planted wildflowers!!

It was too pretty not to try and have some nice photos in front of. The burst of colours was really something with the red poppies, blue cornflowers, yellow and white daisies and whatever else was in there. Sadly there weren't that many bugs, bees and butterflies visible on it - there just don't seem to be that many around this year. 

There is a grange still here at Southover, but it is privately owned or operated, usually for weddings and things like that. My godmother got married here - as did the Rag 'n Bone man!

It's also where The Sussex Guild have a permanent shop so you can wander round and pick up beautiful art and craft pieces from local artists/makers. 

Baby F just likes rushing around it because of all the little pathways popping through hedges and borders. There are a lot of stone walls here as well, some of it from the nearby ruined Lewes Priory (you can also walk around what's left of it) which seems to have had its stone pilfered to build many different parts of Lewes, bits pop up all over the place. 

Once we'd wandered around the gardens enough we headed back to my parents so that Baby F could have a nap and then played there for the rest of the afternoon before going out for a birthday dinner at Pizza Express. I even got a free birthday pudding!

My birthday weekend continued with a trip to Michelham Priory House & Garden, owned by the Sussex Archaeological Society (who also manage Lewes Castle among other places). Incidentally there was a Jaguar and Classic Car show on at the same time which kept my uncle and cousins entertained, personally I'm not at all interested in cars - even the people who owned the cars didn't seem that bothered, they were all sat in deck chairs behind their vehicles just having a chat. Perhaps that's what it's all about. There were a few people polishing off imaginary specks of dust but mostly it just looked like a classic car carpark on the lawn. 

You can walk around areas of the priory, it's got a long 800 year history so there's lots to read about, and there's dress up for the little people. The best bit for me was the smells in the kitchen - a proper herby smell as if the Augustinian canons who founded the site had just finished preparing a meal for themselves - although I doubt they would recognise the place now as much was destroyed by the dissolution of the monasteries. The garden photographed above represents what the cloister would have looked like, through the use of a wooden pergola, but there isn't a cloister there now. 

It was also home to evacuees and Canadian troops during World War II so there's quite a bit about that part of the site's history too. 

We had hoped for ducks, as The Mother remembered there being a lot of ducks there and our small people love feeding them, but we think that the Jags scared them off as there wasn't a single duck there! However, we did spy this lovely Barn Owl having a nap in the glass lantern above the entry to the inside of the priory! I'm not sure how many other people noticed him and we aren't sure how he decided upon that as the best place to have a snooze - he didn't have much to hold on to and looked pretty wedged in there but hopefully he managed to get out ok. 

We had a picnic lunch, wandered around the gardens, drank coffee, wandered through the little craft market that was also there and then mooched round to my sister's house so that the boys could all play in the garden together - a proper family birthday weekend!