Bargain.

I only got the prompt this evening as I couldn’t get on anywhere at work or on my lunchtime walk to see what it was.

So I shall share my photos that I took and see if I can find a link

On my walk were some lovely ducks swimming along the river.

I saw some pyracanthus growing wild.

I wondered how old I would be before my pyracanthus is this big.

Here is mine at home, just coming into flower. It looks all fuzzy from a distance.

Oh and it was a bargain at £18 six years ago. I have so enjoyed watching it grow and love the shape of the branches in winter, buds in spring, flowers in summer and berries in autumn.

There I knew I would get there!

Groceries.

These are mine in my shop. I am in charge as my boss is on hols and I have been busy for the last week putting up bunting, dressing the shop for the jubilee, ordering stock, slightly wild-eyed, not enough and I'll wind the customers up, too much and i'm looking at the ethical and expensive thought of wasting stock next week. He's back tomorrow so hopefully all will be well and he can take over!

Messy.

I'm not entirely sure how a desk can get so messy after making one layout and having a tidy of the rest of the room but it appears that my new place to put stuff 'I don't know what to do with but is vaguely important' is on the corner between my crafting space and the sky box!

Dulls the creative edge though. My excuse for not getting on with creating tonight.

Tools.

Safety knife from work. I use this when I am helping out on the shop floor to open packaging and poking non-productive members of my team. Only one of those things are true.
My scissors which have been so good at cutting paper and my hair. Only one of those things are true.
They are both actually quite blunt. The safety knife will be replaced today and the scissors were replaced last week.

Unfinished.

We were just talking about the list of unfinished jobs and how we are going to get them done this summer.

A boiler service and make good the wall around it is on the list.

Cleanliness.

Is an aspiration.
If the aspiration does not come to fruition on any one day then retreat to the garden.

Pay no attention to the gravel lining peeking through nor the plastic green picnic bench we are sitting at, it helps to ignore those bits and pretend my little garden is perfect :) 

Boring.

Nothing boring here today The sun is shining so even the commute was lovely driving through the trees and valley. Work was hard, hectic and adrenaline fuelled but not boring. Our mortgage application was approved and my sizzix eclips has arrived and cuts beautifully! I am using some of the mortgage and my savings to do some much needed improvement work on the house, which I am really happy to do, but I have treated myself to this much longed for toy as part of that. I wanted a cricut since I first started crafting, I didn’t need and couldn’t justify it then. Over the last year or so though since I have been planning to start a crop and I thought it would be useful to cut down on the cost of alphas, since seeing the magic of the ecal/scal where you can design your own images, use your own fonts to make alphas then it has become an absolute want. After lots of research this last year, I decided on the sizzix eclips.

Right, off to play with the software that goes with it Then I better get on with planning this crop so it earns it’s keep!

Soft.

My dressing gown, soft and cuddly, just right for winter evenings, throwing on top of the bed, throwing round the boys for extra snuggliness after their showers, wrapping round when watching TV. 

And, sometimes, just sometimes it has the tie still in it. Not often, Ali usually pinches it :)

Artificial.

My artificial eye...mwhahahaha.

I was so pleased to be done with my lenses this evening. I have dailies so I can throw them out immediately.

I was so upset when my sight suddenly and significantly failed when I was 16, I already had a brace on my teeth (I was too vain when I was 13 to have a brace then and then too vain to not have the brace later so I had one at 16 and made them take it off 2 days before I left for university), when I realised I was to have glasses as well......horrors :)

It wasn't cool at all then and so I immediately had lenses for my 17th birthday present which were painful and a faff. How many times I put them in after bleaching them without rinsing I do not know, suffice to say that the glasses would have looked better than my pink eyes!

When I was able to get dailies at an affordable price I never looked back. I don't wear them as often as I did as I like glasses now and they are easier. I do like to take them out slowly in front of the children to freak them out!

Restful.

The dress I ordered to wear at the wedding did not fit when it turned up this afternoon grr.

I dashed into Barnstaple to see what I could do. Fortunately they had it in a larger size, although it is the shorter version double grr.

I was feeling quite hot and bothered after that so on the way home I stopped at one of my favourite spots in North Devon. This is the view from Fullabrook looking down towards the Taw & Torridge Estuary. There was a beautiful sea mist and scudding clouds. I sat there for a few minutes and it was restful.

Oh and Minty says goodnight, she has been in bed for about 2 hours!

Ornament.

“You’re neither use nor ornament!” is what my Granny used to say when I was under her feet. I never really knew what it meant when I was little apart from scarper and find something to do. I tell you that for no reason other than it occurred to me as I typed the title

The country’s most prized ornament at the moment, arguably, is the Olympic flame which is the ornament to all the many torches that the bearers are passing in such an ambitious relay.

It came to my town today. I was not there. I was at work. I had to walk from work and watch it with my colleagues for 1 minute as it passed. I enjoyed that. My family were at the Ilfracombe Olympics having fun and waiting for it to arrive and stay for 1 hour. I am not bothered. I am Fine about that. Really. 

My dear Mum took enough photos and footage that I could probably complete the rest of this years challenge without pressing snap again!

I have also recently started to link up a Shakespeare quote on my other blog on monday’s and today, when looking for a flame quote it just happened to mention ornament as well. Happy co-incidence.

It was dreadful to have all those strapping Met Police officers (well the nice ladies are not strapping of course!) that are the Flame Security Team milling around.. I wanna be that flame, I want strapping met officers to make sure i’m secure . Enough, g’night.

Minimalist.

My layout today for UKS used a minimalist amount of scraps of pretty paper


Inspired to get a bit messy by Suzie’s ace video. Yep that’s about as messy as I can cope with getting!

Interior.

This is an experiment with another app I bought a couple of weeks ago. It is called 360 and you take a series of shots and it knits/sews/plasters them together.

So this is a 360 of my room, bedroom/craft room! It has included; a small boy trying for a bunk-up (he won- he's asleep now) and the detritus of a day spent catching up with project life and putting kits together. 

Anne if you look carefully you will see a flag paper that is part of the kit. I guess one of those sneak peeks you see! I'm glad the light made the desk a bit blurry as it is the worst part of the tip. I had to sweep a load of stash (I mean put away tidily) to get to the laptop to post this!

Well I hope it won't be too small to see, if it is i'll edit it with a larger one!
EDIT: If you click on it it enlarges! If you really think it's a good idea :)

Flower.

Firstly, a huge thank you to Anne for the lovely parcel that came today. How kind, I shall enjoy my goodies!

This is the foxglove, we started tracking it’s growth a week ago sunday, by the thursday this was how tall and now…

Another week older, another foot taller and we are so happy that it is a lemon colour and not the pink as we had pink last year

Group.

A group of kilometres I ran today.

Candid.

The school run, a candid shot of a few Mums heading in.

Portrait of a Stranger.

I failed today ladies
I was running, jogging,shambling along this morning on the tarka trail and there were the odd people coming along the track towards me on bikes, walking, running (one marine with his bivouac and kitchen sink on his back), jogging etc but my spacky breathing and co-ordination combined with holding Minty’s lead and my water bottle meant that getting the phone out of it’s position (tucked in my bra as I have been too disorganised to buy a proper thingy for it) would have meant certain crashing to the ground or freaking out the poor folk that were out trying to exercise, relax etc.
I totally forgot on the school run, most of the mums are a bit of a stranger to me as most of them are as mad as a box of snakes and avoid them at all costs but as I forgot I didn’t use that opportunity.
So i’ll share the strangest thing that happened last night, both boys asleep in the same bed before 9:45pm!
I have doctored the photo using a great new app that Sian linked up in her blog post yesterday, Halftone.

The kids adore this app, I think we will use it a lot

Faceless Portrait.

I know I have blogged before about Ali’s pokey stick obsession so if it was here I apologise for repetition!

He has loved them since he was little and any would do.

At the moment this is the collection outside! There are two inside as well. One of them is Gandalf’s staff at the moment and has a foil jewel at the end. Gandalf would have no such truck with that, but there is no telling Ali.

That picture makes me go, that’s Ali.

Portrait of a Woman.

 

My Mum, dealing with a lot at the moment.

I snapped this at the top of Widemouth Bay, near Bude today as we have been out for the day to north Cornwall and a lovely day it was too.

Self-Portrait.

YOU WANT ME TO DO WHAT?

Unforgettable.

The prompt has thrown me a bit with stuff going on so i'm going to take Suzie's advice and pretty much ignore it.
Ali on the zip wire instead.

Sandy.

The point of sale of our sand bag sales.
I think that has to qualify for the most mundane post of the year, surely!

Woolly.

Cheating a bit tonight? I have posted on t’ other blog my project life pages for last week and one of the photos was Fudge (my dog that isn’t Minty ) in a woolly hat.

Love that kid, love that dog

Prickly.

My pincushion protecting the prickly from me. It has green bakers twine hair as that is where I put it after choosing it to go on a layout i'm making :)

Woven.

I have a new years resolution to learn how to crotchet. Well I may have shown you the chain I made when I was on retreat, it pretty much stopped there. I mentioned it to Mum the other day and she has started it for me to get the hang of it and then help me!
As she said my Granny would have said of me my yarn and thread skills make me look like "a cow handling a musket". So true!!

Bumpy.

The texture of the cardstock I have been scrapping with today.

Rough.

I could have used my rough-y old hand from yesterday!

Fudge, one of my dogs has a rough old coat.

Here he is lying at my feet in my scrap/bedroom

Rough, but lovely.

Smooth.

See the contrast between my lovely smooth ring and my lovely wrinkled hand :)

I love my new ring, it really isn't appropriate for my gnarly old hands, but, I, Just, Dont, Care. lol.

Anne, I'm so sorry, I could not find a photo of Minty tonight. A) she is laid down and I cannot get a good one of her. B) I cannot track one down of her because they are all prior to this years organisation of the photos that we have discussed this week.

Tomorrow I will succeed. My own personal prompt :)

Beautiful.

I was waiting on the school run and noticed how beautiful this tree is.

Futuristic.

Sorry, Epic Fail as Thing One would say. I have no mojo for even a vague tenuous link

Instead i’ll offer a competition. Who can come up with a tenuous link from Mrs Ladybird to Futuristic?

Grunge.

One of the opposites of grunge must be pretty.

I drove Mum out to Bickleigh in mid Devon for a distraction after the funeral, it was so pretty and the river was running so high due to the rainfall. The restaurant you can see in the first photo is The Fisherman’s Cot. I heartily recommend it if you are nearby or travelling to the south west as it isn’t too far from the M5. I had a lovely pie, Mushroom & Spinach with Hazlenuts and White Truffle Oil. Made a change from Burger King