Suze H

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Monday 11 February 2013

I am soooo over winter now.....

.....I'm fed up with the cold icy rain, the dark gloomy skies, the wind chill factor of -22⁰ (okay, maybe that's a slight exaggeration!)  I love a cold and frosty winter, but only when there are blue skies.  
With all this cold weather, I decided that two things were most definitely needed:

1.  Some flowers to add some much needed colour.  I absolutely love daffodils and I don't think any other flower makes me feel quite so happy:
Open up little flowers - you know you want to!
 2.  Some homemade baking.  So I made some orange/choc chip brownies (which are always a firm fave in our house) and a banana and chocolate loaf
Supply has much depleted now!
This was absolutely delicious and I will certainly make again!

Thank you to At Home with Mrs M for the chocolate and banana loaf recipe.  The only change I made was to use less ripe bananas, as I don't like a very strong banana taste.

As Sunday was such a wash-out (no way I was going out in that weather!) I shut myself away in my craft room with some CDs and cracked on with some jewellery making.


I'm really into making shamballa style bracelets right now and am trying to increase my stock in the hope of some summer sales.  I prefer making the smaller bracelets (middle picture) but think the larger ones will be more popular, as they're more like the styles in the shop.


Personally, I'm not a huge fan of using all shamballa beads on these bracelets as I think it looks a bit OTT, and I like using a variety of colours and textures in my jewellery making.

I'm going to make a few of the smaller ones using different colour cord.  I've already got some in royal blue, but I think I'm going to get some green and red cord too.

I also need to get round to making quite a few leather bead wrap bracelets.  Those, along with memory wire bracelets, are my best sellers.

And in the evening, I managed to get a bit more done on my cardigan while watching 'Marple'.  
I'll watch this new series if it's on, but the fantastic Joan Hickson is the only Miss Marple for me!


 So, all in all, quite an industrious weekend!



Friday 8 February 2013

New knitting group


Well hello.  I'm afraid I've been rather remiss in my blog over the last couple of weeks, mostly because I haven't done anything worth blogging about.

Most exciting is, a couple of us have started a knitting group at the office which takes place every Wednesday lunch-time.  It's a small office of about 40 people and on the first week, there were only 3 of us, including myself and my co-founder, but we are confident that numbers will grow as the word spreads.  Some of the girls are even interested in learning how to knit, which is great!  There can never be too many knitters in the world.

Because there's a lot of gossiping going on at these groups, I thought I would bring something easy to work on.  I cannot count and talk at the same time and when I'm working on a lace pattern, it always goes wrong unless I'm concentrating.  So, I'm working on a little summer cardigan from Sirdar in Click DK.  I absolutely love some of the colours in this yarn and the one I'm using right now, Cranberry, is no exception (although as usual, my camera doesn't do it justice):





A colleague's wife very kindly donated some Rowan magazines that she no longer wants to the group.  She naturally received some of my homemade brownies and shortbread as a big thank you for such generosity!  I love the Rowan magazines, but I doubt that I'm good enough to make half of the stuff in them.


Had a good piece of news last night too.  While checking my emails, I found that my Australian pal, AC, had contacted me.  He came to Cambridge to do some research at my last workplace in 2012 for a few weeks and bless him, he follows my blog - so a big hearty hello to you, AC!  He now has a position at the university and starts next January working for my former boss!  So this time next year, AC and his girlfriend will be living here - yay!  I can see celebratory welcome drinks on the distant horizon in January 2014......