Christmas Highlights!

Me and my sister over the last 2 years having been putting together a hamper for both my brothers, parents and a family friend as a gift. This year the theme was a Morocan meal as there was preserved lemons, couscous and homemade harista paste.  All the ususal jams and pickles and more alcohol this year was added.

Christmas morning, just before little dear decemated the presents. Christmas day dinner at my parents, both turkey and pork were cooked as my sister refused to eat tasteless turkey, but who do you think thought it was lovely!

This years plans, not a lot as we are due to complete on a wreck of a house later on this month, so all time, effort and money will be put into that. I will take lots of photos during the refurb. Due to this we are really having to tighten our purse strings so a £50 weekly shopping budget has been set. Also hubbo is 40 this year and the only thing he wants to do it go down to the River Cottage canteen so in June we are off down to Dorset.

Here's to 2013 (bring it on)

Halloween Hell!

Well at least the kids enjoyed it! 93 kids, same amount of adults, apple dunkin, gooey hands, craft corner followed by hotdogs and chips!

£240 raised towards a new heater for our local village hall.

SUCCESS I THINK!

WI workshop.

In our wisdom back in January me, my sister and a friend offered to run an in house workshop to save on the pennies at out WI.  The title of our workshop was 'Homemade Christmas'.  We spent time decorating the souless grey room that we meet in and gathering together all of our resources. We broke down the workshop into 3 different sections, home decorations, gift wrapping & gift ideas. We tried to get it through to the ladies the idea of gathering things throughout the year, old wrapping paper, broken jewellery, sale items!

My section was gifts, ideas were given such as homemade fire lighters, teenage breakfast set, movie set, lavender sugar, sloe gin, baking jars and homemade body scrub.  After a brief talk we then moved room into the kitchen area after a brief stop at the refreshment station of Mulled wine & mince pies. I then showed the ladies how to make a body scrub it went down very well.

Lavender & Rosemary Body Scrub

Granulated Sugar
Olive Oil
6 drops of lavender oil
4 drops of rosemary oil
tablespoon of lavender

Get a jam jar and fill with sugar until almost full. Tip into a bowl, add the olive oil until all the sugar becomes stuck together but not saturated. Add the essential oils and dried lavender, mix well. Put back into the jar decorate the jar and voila a perfect homemade gift.

Its been a while, I missed you!

 Me & little dear at Hardwick hall in May (need to loose weight)

Well I have really missed you!

I don't know about you, but I use my blog as a diary of my world.  It all started off to promote Just Original which is fine and there are still snippets of that going to go on, but I miss writing and taking pictures for my blog.  I downloaded pictures going back to March of this year from my camera today which is really sad.

So here goes I am going to try and blog at least once a week, there will be some catching up first and then hopefully I will try and keep it up to date as much as possible. I am away in Keswick at the moment and we have just got WIFI finally into the apartment so this has inspired me to get my bum in gear.

Things to look forward to are a WI workshop that me, my sister and friend are running for our WI, called 'Homemade Christmas', were trying to get our local WI back to grass roots as such. I have organised a childrens Halloween disco as a fundraiser for our local village hall. We are in the middle of buying a new house, which is a wreck so we saving our pennies where we can, so there will be some money saving tips and also some great finds from the house as much of the contents are being left. It was the village Post Office/Shop and has not been touched since 1993 when it closed down.

Hope you keep with me!

Happy Easter

Hope your having a great break!

Winter Wonderland!

We have been very lucky here, we got snow! So on Sunday we went on an adventure to Daneshill

It was so peaceful and untouched.

The Chickens on the otherhand were less impressed!

Budget bags!

Me & my sister were on a mission to collect some pieces of furniture that she had spotted. When we got to the shop typically is was closed, but the shop next door was open and lucky for us that its was. The 1st thing both of us spotted were these, one for me & one for little dear!

Both for the bargain price of £15.