Rocking your world 2014; Week 13

This is the day when we focus on the good things that have happened this week, but I am starting with a bitter-sweet Friday Smile. It is a Smile none-the-less, so I hope you will accept my posting it, in the spirit it was intended. I was born into a family of eight, with six of my brothers and sisters being 'pre-war' and just Jean and I being the 'post-war' ones. Despite the wide age gap of twenty years between us all, we have always been great friends, and there has never been a serious disagreement between us. I see that as a great testament to our parents and the loving home we grew up in. Sadly this week, our eldest sister passed away, just one week before her 87th birthday. She suffered a massive stroke, and although we are so sad to lose her, we are also grateful that she was able to slip peacefully away, as her life would have been very difficult had she survived. I took this photo of us six sisters, last September when I visited UK.

We managed to get together at Jean's house, for a lovely day of catch-up chat, shared memories, fun and laughter, and I am so glad we had that last opportunity to do it. This photo is on the wall in my craft-room, and every time I look up and see us all smiling, it makes me smile again. So don't be sad for me, but smile with me. What a blessing our families are! Grace is the one in blue - I have my arm lying across her lap. She read this blog faithfully every Friday, so I always felt we were in touch.

As always there is something positive coming from this. I get an extra trip to UK as I shall be over for the funeral which isn't until Easter week. Knowing our family, and our shared Christian faith, along with the sad 'Good-bye', we will be giving thanks for a long and interesting life.

As I am going over anyway, I now have a flight booked for next Thursday, so I can spend a week with our middle son Tom, who is moving to Denmark the following week. I shall be able to help him finish clearing his flat and making it ready to hand back the keys to the landlord, and I shall also be able to go to the 'Good-bye' dinner that all his brothers are holding for him on the Sunday. So that is an added blessing for me. I hadn't expected to get over for that as we have already got flights books for a trip over in May for our grand-daughter's wedding.

Another nice thing that happened this week is that I got some mail. We have very little here except the odd brochure from the bank, and of course lovely mail on birthdays and at Christmas, so an unexpected envelope is always a nice surprise. It was from my sister Jean, (That's Jean Sraw, who many of you know from her blog, and challenge entries). She sent me some difficult maths puzzles that she tears from her Puzzler book and keeps for me. She likes doing all the crosswords etc, but I am the number cruncher! And she also sent me two lovely ATCs. This one particularly made me smile. She bought the stamp because it reminded her of my photo of Arwen 'trying to read' my Spanish dictionary. Isn't it great?

While I was looking back through my Project Life album to try and find the photo of Arwen, I saw the ones of Kim as a baby, and realised that it is exactly a year since we took him in. How anyone could abandon such a beautiful pup I don't know. Of course we couldn't be sure how he would turn out, though we knew he would be quite big, but it is probably just as well that we didn't know then what we do know now! He is pretty huge, but I call him  my Gentle Giant. He is very affectionate, and we wouldn't be without him for the world. I tried to get him to pose for me today but he went into playful mode, and kept tearing around the pool with his favourite toy in his mouth - an old brush that he wrecked when he was a baby so we let him keep it. Miki pinches it sometimes, but he always manages to retrieve it.

He is just moulting out the last of his baby fluff from his haunches, and I guess he is almost fully grown now, which is probably just as well!

I don't have a lot of other news this week. My dear friend Julie drove over to have lunch with me on Monday which was lovely. We had a great couple of hours chatting.

Today I went to the town hall and got permission to hold a Cantante concert in the Tercera Edad (Third age, or pensioners club) in Los Gallardos, like we did at Christmas. This was very popular. Some of the Spanish folk said they had never had a proper concert in the village before. Sadly we had to turn quite a few away because the hall and the ante-room were filled to capacity. So for the summer, we are going to use the big outside area at the back, as well as the hall, and hopefully there will be space for everyone who wants to come.

I had a good crafting week, and made a set of ten Christmas cards. I found all the colouring of the images very therapeutic. They are a useful addition to my growing collection.

I also joined Pixel Scrappers digital scrapbooking group so I am hoping to get some inspiration for the hybrid album of our holiday in Ireland, that has been on my 'to do' list for some time!

Here are this week's skies to leave you with. It was quite a menacing one on Monday. I can see a face in it; can you?

Half an hour later it had turned into glowing embers which I love.

I shall probably be missing for the next few weeks. Next Friday I shall be with Tom, camping in his almost empty flat. His company are collecting all his belongings to ship to Denmark on that day! So we may not have internet available. And the following week I will be down near Bournemouth with my sisters. I am bringing Jean back with me, for, hopefully, a week of Spanish sunshine, so I don't know how much blogging I will do then either. But I will be back eventually, armed with lots of photos - so you have been warned.

Now I will just link this to Annie's Friday Smiles and the Rocking Your World Challenge over at Celtic House. See you all soon.

Rocking my World 2014; Week 12

Here we are again, with another week of positive things in our lives. My Friday smile this week is this:

You are probably saying, O.K. it's a few ladies and a pile wool, what's so special about that? But it is making me smile because this week, the Lions club in Vera, gave me another donation of 200€ to buy wool for my Knit for Africa Project. Pam, the lady who organised the donation, and I, went up to our 'wool shop' on Monday, and we had such fun choosing the colours, and how much to buy of each one. At our Wednesday craft group, we tipped it all onto the table and let the ladies help themselves. I took in a few simple patterns to share, so in another week or two, there will be some little garments, and more blanket squares to sew together, ready for the next consignment to UK. So yes, it makes me smile.

On Tuesday I made a quick visit to our market. I usually give it a miss these days, because Tuesday is choir practice in the morning so there is not enough time for shopping as well, but I wanted to check on the price of the strawberries. They have gone up again slightly so I thought it must have been a short season this year, and maybe I should get one more lot for jam before they disappear. I asked at several stalls and they all seemed to be around 5€ a box (2kg), which is a euro more than I expect to pay for jam. 

Then I found one stall where the fruit was not quite so good but he only wanted 2.50€ a box. I figured they were some he had left over after a market else-where the previous day, but even if I had to discard a few, it would still work out as quite a saving. So I said I would have three boxes and told him I was making jam. He then made me an offer I couldn't really refuse - five boxes for 10€. I staggered home loaded up with these, very glad that it was only a couple of streets away! I got a few funny looks from the people I passed.

After choir practice I sorted through them all, and was pleased to find that they were actually very good. Yes, there were a few that were bruised, and they were a touch smaller than usual, but I often thinks the smaller ones have a better flavour, but over all there was very little wastage. I picked out some of the very best for us to eat, and froze a bag of them to add to my blended drinks. (We have had pink drinks this week. They look more appetizing than green ones, but they all taste good). And then, over the next couple of days I turned the rest into jam. I now have no jars left at all, and my jam cupboard is bursting at the seams.

It has been a relatively quiet week, so in between the jam making sessions, I have managed to play in my craft-room. I did a fun project that has been on my 'To try' list for a while. Now I know that my silhouette cameo machine will cut my vinyl really well, I wanted to try a larger, more intricate design like some I have seen on the internet. So I downloaded a design used for henna tattoos, and cut it out to decorate a large mirror in our sitting room. It took a long time to cut, and even longer to weed out the unwanted areas, but for a first attempt, I am very pleased with the result.

This was my first design, though in the end it is not the one I used. The lines were dark and it wasn't quite what I wanted. So I then cut a more open design, in fact I cut it twice, and I transferred it to opposite corners of my mirror. Here it is, but it was impossible to actually take a very good photo of it.

if you would like to find out more about how this was made, all the details are on my craft blog which you can find by clicking HERE.

This morning the Vera Lions Club had their spring fair at the campsite on the edge of the village, so we went along for a quick look. I bought a few useful bits and pieces, and some not so useful coffee cake slices which are delicious! Then on the way home, we stopped at a bar for drinks and tapas. It was warm and sunny, and we were happy to sit outside and enjoy it. You can see the mimosa trees, dripping with yellow, fluffy balls, behind Chris.

This afternoon I was watering the garden and I thought how lovely the flowers are now. Some are quite insignificant until you look more closely and see the veins and patterns on them. So I took close-up photos of them and played around in photo-shop. With each photo, I changed the background to black and white, so the coloured flowers really pop out at you. Then I cut them down randomly and made a collage of them. You probably won't see it very well on here, but you can click on the photo to get a larger view.

As I anticipated last week, we have not had many nice sunsets this week, but I did catch this one today, just before it got dark, while there was still some blue in the sky. It looks pretty windy up there, but down here it wasn't at all.

Well that's just about it for the plus-side of my week. I will link up with Annie's Friday Smiles, and Celtic House, and hopefully I'll see you all again next week.