Rocking Your World 2019; Week 11

Well already another week has gone and soon we will be a quarter of the way though the year. It has been a quiet week for me as I am still struggling with a wretched cough and now a sore throat as well, so I haven't wanted to do too much, but I did venture out with Chris for a hour on Saturday afternoon as it was the village carnival. This is a simple affair, and this year there were very few floats, but still plenty of folk put on their fancy costumes and joined the parade around the village. There is always a lovely happy atmosphere at this event, and lots of people turned out to see them set off from the plaza. They were led by the village band all dressed up for the occasion.

I will just show a random selection of the photos I have - some are mine and some taken from the 'official' ones posted by the Town Hall.

It is a real family affair and lots of parents dress up themselves and put their little ones in matching outfits.

In this one, my friend's baby had her first experience of carnival.

Here are some of the 'stranger' visions I saw.

As the procession passed by us, a friend stopped to pose for a photo.

Some esteemed gentlemen from our community who always go the extra mile to wear outrageous costumes. They enjoy themselves as much as the children do and you can't help smiling at them.

As for the rest of the week, well, my son had been away for the weekend and was very surprised to get a message from him Sunday night to say he found my parcel waiting for him when he got home! I only posted it on Thursday, so it must have sprouted wings!! He loves his new blanket and it is now adorning the back of a very dark settee which shows if off very well. It is where I had envisioned it going.

Yesterday my sister sent a message to say my other parcel has arrived. That was the heavy one that I sent by courier, so a week was pretty good for that too.

Unfortunately I was not so lucky with my wool order, which never did turn up. On Tuesday it was the required twenty-one days since dispatch, so I contacted the company again, and they immediately offered me a replacement order or a refund. As I had by then bought the yarn from elsewhere, I asked for a refund, and it was back in my account the same day. So I used the money to send for a blue-tooth speaker, primarily to use with my computer. I had a  pair of old, slightly scratchy, plug in speakers which weren't very satisfactory, so I had thrown them away. Then I bought a blue-tooth plug-in so I could use my little, fairly standard speaker which refused to cooperate with the sound card in my computer, and I ended up using my good head-phones instead. They were fine for listening to specific tracks etc, but not practical for full time use. Two years ago I bought a very good bluetooth speaker for Chris for Christmas, and that worked fine with my computer, so I decided to buy one the same, only as his is black, I chose a royal blue one so they don't get mixed up. I am very pleased with it. Now I can listen to music while I work, and talk on video calls to the family without using headphones.

Very, very slowly my craft room is getting sorted out. I haven't felt up to doing much, so I have just done one box at a time. I had lifted a big box out of the shelf unit to sort my ribbons into, and when I turned round, Arwen was in the gap, blinking owlishly at me, and looking very at home. I gave in and let her stay there and she was still in there the next morning, but I have claimed the space back for my box now.

Because my room is such a mess I have not been able to do much crafting, but I really wanted to make something yesterday so I looked out this file I bought from the Silhouette store a while ago. With St.Patrick's Day looming I thought it was a fitting project. I used a sheet of digi scrapbook paper and altered it to become rectangular instead of square, and printed it out to fit a new frame I had spotted in one of the cupboards I was sorting out. Then I played around with the tree and script, changing one word, and choosing three different colours of vinyl to cut it out on my Silhouette Cameo. The main image of the tree and some of the words are a darkish green, but not as dark as they look in the photo. The 'significant' words I cut from metallic green, and the rest from very dark brown. I may have to do it again one day as one line of writing should have been a little higher, and it annoys me that I did that, but for now I am quite happy with it.

Hopefully my room will be sorted by next week so I will have space to make other things.

In the meantime I will link up with Rocking Your World, and Annie's Friday Smiles, and then go to feed my zoo.