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I just find it so hard to believe we are midway through January. Time to start blogging again on a regular basis!

Once again January is an alcohol free zone for me and Dear Heart. I've been taking the opportunity to set in place routines that I want to follow over the year and have been trying to spend more time working through my sewing to do pile. After a few weeks break over Christmas I'm now walking again on Saturday mornings. However bits of the trail have been rather soggy. Last week part was even flooded, luckily it was just before my turn around point. I'm now wearing wellingtons when I walk on this particular trail.




I'm making good progress on my fabric sewing to do pile and once that's sorted I'm going to start making gift bags to use up my fabric stash. Here are some pictures of present bags I made around Christmas.

Jingle bells and let it snow bags used snowflake sequins that were a table decoration (and destined for the bin) at a party and a bell from a long ago eaten chocolate reindeer.

I was also quite pleased with these gift tags made from magazine cuttings and fabric scraps. I couldn't find (until it was too late) where I'd put the Christmas cards from the previous year to make tags from.

and more Christmas bags...

Just for variety a few birthday bags

Here is the apple pie I made for our Thanksgiving themed dinner in December. I veganised Linda McCartney's recipe that uses cream cheese. I was delicious and there was enough left over for me to enjoy some for lunch the following week. One the subject of food, my lovely sister bought me a stick blender a a Christmas present. She didn't think it was a particularly great thing to give me but shrugged as it was on my list. I love my stick blender. No more batch blending of soup which resulted in soup dripped all over the work surface. Dear Heart will eat almost any soup as long as it is blended. He claimed the simply lovely carrot soup (from the garden of Vegan) that I made last weekend was the best soup I had ever made. Pretty high praise for a few carrots, some stock, dill and soya milk. I did make home made bread to go with it as well. the really easy bread recipe takes so little time and it's so nice to have fresh hot bread with home made soup.

That's all for now but more photos soon of some sewing projects I'm working on.

Bliss is...

I seem to have had a very busy weekend what with one thing and another. I'm not quite sure that I am fully ready for the coming week. Last week seemed to be crammed with activity as well.

However, let me tell you about Wednesday night. I arrived home as the rain started and it was cold and grey outside. Dear Heart had gotten home before man and had made a fire (the first of this autumn). He insisted that I sit by the fire and warm up while he made me a cup of tea. It would have seemed rude to refuse so I did just that until he went to his Round table meeting at 8.30 p.m. I read the marvellous Bread Alone by Judith Ryan Hendricks and felt inspired to start making my own bread again ( I want to play with sourdough).

Anyway after Dear Heart had gone I needed to make myself some dinner and sort out some lunch for the next few days. I had a look in the fridge because I do like to see what I have in the way of leftovers and create from them. I found 2 rather dried out sweetcorn cobs, some melty pizza uncheese and a spoonful of chillies. So I boiled the sweetcorn until it looked a bit fatter, let it cool and then sliced it off the cob. I made a batter from gram flour and water and added in my leftovers. Ideally this batter would make little pancakes but mine always break up so I go for something that looks more like scrambled eggs. With lunch for the next couple of days sorted I popped some gnocchi from the freezer into some boiling water and enjoyed them with a splash of olive oil, salt and pepper.

Feeling blissfully warm in my belly I washed up and headed off to bed where I feel asleep with a contented smile on my face.

Here's to the week ahead.