Monday 30 April 2012

On my hoop....



At the moment I am stitching a gorgeous cute design by The Stitching Shed, they are a company based very locally to me in Morecambe. I love their style and am really enjoying stitching this piece. I'd not heard of this company before, at our crop we do a Christmas swap where all our names are put into a hat (or maybe it was more like a scrapping bin, LOL!) My sister in law, Karin, attends the crop too and she'd drawn me (interestingly I drew Karin and also bought her a cross stitch kit!) Anyway, she knew I was intending to do a beachy theme in the children's shower room and thought this would be nice in there. It's perfect! I love the colours and it's so cheerful! When it's finished I'm going to pick out one of the colours for the walls and inspire the room around the cross stitch This is what it will look like finished.

I am still stitching away at the owls These are fun to do every month and I can't believe we are at April already! Only 2 to go! April's owl is just waiting for her eyes, we ran out of thread so I will buy some in the next couple of days to finish her off and then start May's!

Friday 27 April 2012

Some recent scrapping

Last month I went away with the Chorley girls for our weekend retreat fondly called our Cropiday! A whole weekend away from the world dressed in PJ's, LOL! And last Saturday was our day crop. At the moment the only time I seem to scrapbook is when I'm with the girls. Since the building work my craft room has been a mess, all my albums were in there until today and there's quite a bit of stuff just been dumped! My mission over the weekend is to try and give it a good tidy up! This week I have created 3 digital layouts so not too bad! Most of these layouts are, again, scraplifted, mainly from Studio Calico!








Tuesday 24 April 2012

Lancaster Canal

We are very lucky to live close to the Lancaster Canal. It is very beautiful, especially on a sunny day like today. Over the weekend Charlie brought home a reading book called 'Red Robin.' It was about a canal boat and the adventures on board. Charlie really enjoyed the book and read it very well. I promised him if we had a nice day this week we'd go to the canal and read the names of the boats there, we'd also feed the ducks. Today Mark finished work early and it was nice so we set off!

Charlie did really well recognising all the letters. He's known lowercase since the first term but has only recently been learning uppercase.




 We even found a boat appropriately named for Courtney, LOL!!


It was great fun feeding the ducks!


Then a beautiful swan graced us with his presence



and then we saw a real treat! Look at Daddy Duck with his gorgeous ducklings, so cute!


 Mummy Duck was close by and it was such a sight to see them swimming off together, bless!


Here's my very special ducklings with their Daddy! Totally love these 3!♥


Monday 23 April 2012

Happy St. George's Day!

Courtney's creation came home from Nursery today, bless her♥

Saturday 21 April 2012

60 Today!

Happy Birthday to my gorgeous Mum who turned 60 yesterday! We had an enjoyable day with her, my sister and I took her out for her lunch and then last night we had a lovely big party for her. She was surrounded by our entire family and her friends. Charlie and Courtney loved dancing and boogied most of the night! I gave a little speech and we had some hilarity with the magic candles that wouldn't blow out! We all had a fab night and I know my Mum totally loved it all and that's the main thing.♥

Thursday 19 April 2012

Upstairs update!

It's been a few weeks since I wrote a post about our building work. I'm really happy now we are getting straighter at home, it's been a little stressful at times to see so much clutter all over the house but we seem to have now contained most of it into Courtney's room. The spare bedroom furniture is still in the dining room but I can live with that! I was a little worried about the loft cupboard storage as we've gone from 4 to 2 but everything we had left after the big sort out has gone in and we have some room to spare!
We had a decorator around last week to do the study and Charlie's room. This week we have been putting the rooms together! There was so much work to do! Charlie's room needed all the furniture and his bed putting together! The study was re-setting up the computers and configuring where our existing study furniture was going (although I did have a fairly good idea where I wanted it!) We've had our desks cut down to fit in the alcoves either side of the chimney breast. Here are a few photos, starting with the undecorated rooms.....because I'm a tease, LOL!!

This is Courtney's room, or at least it will be soon! It's the biggest room in the house! I'm currently looking for ideas for her room, do I go pink and girly or perhaps colourful owls? Just 2 ideas so far!



This is the shower room, it's a long narrow room with the shower to the left of the door, the sink in the middle and toilet to the right. It's only small but perfectly functional! I am currently stitching a seaside themed cross stitch for this room and have seen some fab stripy towels I want to buy! Not sure what the wall colour is going to be yet!



The toilet and sink were actually what we had in the old shower room, there's nothing wrong with them so we added new taps and toilet flush handle, good as new! Inside the shower we decided to have aqua panelling instead of tiles. It's very easy to clean! I really liked this sparkly one, it's lovely colours when it catches the light, at the moment it matches the toilet seat but I'm not sure if that's staying yet!


On the landing we have a boiler/airing cupboard.


Now the exciting photos, decorated rooms! Both rooms need the 'moved in' feel yet, both have just basics and need pictures hanging and bits and bobs putting out.
The study is a lovely soft green colour, we have an existing red blind already fitted on the velux window from when the left side of it used to be a Disney themed shower room. I'm not a big fan of red but do like it as an accent colour. I have bought a rather quirky red plaque about the Hokey Cokey and will accent with a couple of other red pieces. As I said earlier the furniture is what we already had in the old study, it's almost like the walls were created for this furniture as the drawers and bookcase fit perfectly!
My side is to the left, Mark's to the right. The chimney breast is  very plain at the moment, we are thinking of making a feature of it but as yet I'm not sure what we'll do with it.


My side!


Mark's side! (The door is to be re-hung yet!)


Charlie's room, for us (and him) is the most exciting! For a very long time we knew we'd do Charlie a Preston North End and football themed room! It has come together perfectly! Mark found the mural a little while ago on the internet so that was our starting point! It's actually wallpaper and came in about 10 parts!! We decided to go with a neutral colour for the remaining walls and I thought grey would look nice. We bought the bedding and accessories before the building work began so it's great to finally see it all set up! We love it!



I coloured in every single player! (They were all white before I did) It took ages but was well worth all the effort! I also used rub ons on the scoreboard (I forgot to take a close up of that.) Mark came up with the idea of featuring the first game Charlie went to watch which was against Plymouth Argyle, we won 2-0!


I coloured the players authentically! I even added Preston's sponsor! After I'd coloured each I wasn't happy with the felt tip overlap lines so went over each with a water pen to blend them!


Originally we were thinking of white furniture for his room. We went to have a look at Ikea and found the Mammut range. Totally not what we were thinking but absolutely perfect for a little boys room! The unfortunate thing though was that the bedside cabinet is not available locally, in fact there are only 2 stores that stock it and they're both in London! We resorted to Ebay and found a seller in Halifax, we won it and she very kindly met me in Skipton to hand it over. Not a bad buy at £4.99! It looks like new, you've never guess it had been loved before! We're thinking about adding the bookshelf for his books and toys but wanted to see how much room would be left after putting the other furniture in first. I never argue at having to go back to Ikea! LOL! The bedding isn't on properly, I've washed and dried it but we haven't bought a duvet yet!



You can't really see on the above photo but even his curtain pole has footballs on!


Do you think our little man is happy with his new room? you betcha!!♥

(this chair swivels! oh my word, the fun they both have with it, LOL!)



Sunday 15 April 2012

Happy 21st Maddie!

Our niece celebrated her 21st Birthday on the 9th but was away on holiday in Germany. Today we had a family meal to celebrate her birthday! Congratulations Maddie, we're very proud of you!

Titanic, the Musical

For quite some time my best friend, Kathryn and I have mentioned having a night out. We have been friends since we were at playschool together so for 34 of our 37 years!! We both have 2 children now and our social lives together revolve around them. Have you ever tried holding a conversation with 4 children aged 6,4,3 and 2 around you??? LOL!
We decided to go and watch an amateur dramatics production about Titanic at the Grand theatre in Blackpool. We made a real time of it by shopping in the afternoon, we both ended up buying only treats for our children! and then we ate tea at Frankie and Benny's!
The production was being portrayed by the Blackpool Operatic Players. Today is the 100th Anniversary of her sinking and whilst we were driving home last night was the time she actually struck the iceberg. Very poignant. The production was excellent, you would have never thought they were amateurs. It told of the story from her leaving Southampton with the passenger who was left behind and went all the way through the 5 days she was at sea giving facts and figures as it went through. The end was extremely emotive, the survivors were on the banking with blankets wrapped around them whilst the names of the victims were projected onto a screen.



Sunday 8 April 2012

Happy Easter

We're having a lovely Easter Sunday. We attended the Easter service at St. Peter's this morning. Rvnd. Tickner gave a lovely service which included a Christening. After the service we joined in the Easter Egg hunt in the church gardens. Pieces of wool had been tied to plants and bushes. (we think they'd used wool as it wouldn't matter if they weren't found and it would eventually perish!) We found a few strands and went back to church to exchange them with Rvnd. Tickner for chocolate eggs! We got quite a haul, LOL!





Charlie and Courtney are very lucky and received some nice eggs and gifts from our families and friends so when we got home I photographed them in the garden, as they get so many eggs Mark and I bought them the circus tent this year!


We're spending the afternoon at home playing, relaxing and watching the TV together.♥

Saturday 7 April 2012

Preston North End Corporate Day

In celebration of Sir Tom Finney's 90th Birthday a themed corporation day was held at P.N.E. We all attended with Chris, it's his 17th Birthday on Monday so we treated him. We were playing MK Dons (Milton Keynes) and drew 1-1, not a bad score considering Preston's recent run!