Friday Smiles 2022: Week 47

Now my Christmas cards have been sent off to Uk, I feel strangely 'unrushed', and have spent quite a bit of time just playing with some digital files and software, not because I want to use them at the minute, but I like to explore their possibilities.

However I have done some real crafting too. I wanted to try something different and I saw some paper sculpture online that I liked so thought I'd give it a go. This is called 'slice-form' sculpture and it is made by cutting lots of layers of paper and interlocking them with a series of slits. Of course they have to be perfectly designed to fit together, so I followed a link to a designer on Etsy who had several designs to choose from, and I picked a Nativity sphere. Because I had quite a bit of it in my stash, I decided to use vanilla light-weight card, and for once my Cameo machine was in a good mood, and cut all the layers first time of trying. You were encouraged to number the pieces as you cut them (there were 32 layers altogether), and once you purchased the file, you were given a link to a helpful assembly video. I have to say it was very fiddly to put together, and sometimes, as you locked a new piece in, one of the others popped out again! So it was taken apart a few times, and almost ended up in the bin, but perseverance paid off and I eventually made this.

It is lit from underneath with a small LED light base that I bought from Amazon.

This view from the top shows how the layers are combined.

I was quite pleased with the result and wanted to have a second go, now I understood how it worked, so I showed the Etsy page to Chris and let him choose a design. He chose this one, which was just as tricky to make, but if I am honest, I think it worked better. Because it is a complete sphere, with no construction underneath as a base, the light shines through better. This time I used white card which I had to purchase on Amazon to get one I knew would cut well.

The lights I bought came as a pair, one with a warm white light and one that cycles through several colour. One advantage of these decorations is that they fold quite flt, making them easy to store for another year.

I have also been busy in the ktichen, because when I saw all the lovely fresh vegetables in the market, I decided to make a batch of Picalilli, so here is my work space. The cauliflower is the biggest element and that is done in the bowl, and the rest is ready to chop. I salted it and left it to stand overnight, and this morning I rinsed it well and mixed the spices and soon I had ten jars of pickle. I used to make double this quantity, but I am not sure whether I still have a market for it, and chopping double quntities of everything would have been hard on my knees and hands, so I thought this was plenty for now.

I also made a small batch of my hot chili, ginger and garlic jam. This only makes six jars but it is an aquired taste, and doesn't sell as well as the picalilli, but it is actually the one we like, and our jar had run out, so I wanted some more for us, and maybe a couple will sell. We will see!

On Tuesday we had trmendous gale force winds, which blew over one of our large palm trees and smashed its pot, (annoying because it was expensive and newly purchased!), it tossed one of our metal garden chairs into the pool, at the deep end of course so it took both of us to fish it out, and sadly it snapped all three stems of my Echeveria succulent, so now I will  not know whether it would have opened any further, not this year any way!

Our car was successfully fitted with a new clutch on Monday so I feel safer driving it now. I am pleased about that.

I am on a TV break most evenings while Chris watches the football, which I have no interest in, so I am concentrating on my crochet and have made quite a few motifs for my blanket now. I like the way the coloured yarn is working up.

We have had some beautiful evening skies this week and I couldn't decide which photos to share, so I made a collage of some of them.

And that is about it for this week. So I am off to link up with Annie's Friday Smiles. 

Friday Smiles 2022: Week 46

Now I can officially say "Christmas is coming". Some of the magic leaves Christmas when there are no longer young folk at home, but, maybe because I believe so strongly in the real meaning of Christmas, I still find it an exciting time, and do my best to instil some of that into our home. It would be very easy for us two to think it is just another day, but I won't let that happen, so my much loved tree will come out on 1st December, along with a couple of nativity sets and a few other decorations.

But today, two things happened to bring that tingle of anticipation closer. Firstly the postman brought me a small package and inside was a gift and my first Christmas card of the year.

Then the men arrived outside with their bucket lifter and installed an angel and star light on the telegraph pole at our gate. It won't be lit for a while yet, but its nice to see the lights are going up as usual this year.

Also this week we went down to Mojacar to the main post office so I could post a parcel to my sister with most of my UK Christmas cards in it. She will put UK second class stamps on them and post them at the start of next month, and even with the cost of sending the parcel, this system saves me a lot of money, so I am very grateful to her for doing it.

After the Post office we had a ramble through the Parque Commercial, a small retail centre with a supermarket, several café-bars, and a range of small lock-up businesses which sometimes carry more interesting items than we usually see in our local shops. One company has two shops, one of which is a ladies outfitters and another is for men. They tend to be rather out of our price range, but both happened to have a good sale rail outside and I found a lovely top for me, and for Chris we bought two pairs of real quality trousers, reduced to less than half price, so we were very pleased. I could do with Annie's expertise now as I have to shorten both pairs of trousers, one of my least favourite jobs, but I will get them done I am sure.

We had a special service at my church on Sunday which was, of course, Remembrance Sunday for us. In the days leading up to it, a few folk had gone in to decorate the church with poppies and pictures, and it all looked lovely.

We had a very special service singing many of the traditional hymns, and one of our congregation played the Last Post and the Reveille on his trumpet, which was very moving.

We had some surprise visitors when five of the Andalucian Knights Templar arrived in full regalia.They brought a lovely arrangement of flowers with them to go in front of the altar, and they did their best to follow the service. Only two of them spoke English but we all got on well, chatting and sharing refreshments after the service. I don't know a lot about the organisation, but all are welcome at our church and it was nice to see them there. Here they are with Tony, one of our licensed Lay Readers who was leading worship that day.

We had some good news at the end of last week when our rather elderly car again passed its ITV, (MOT in UK), though we have agreed to take it back to our mechanic to have a new clutch installed on 21st. It is not really urgent but the last thing we want is to be stranded somewhere on the motorway because it has packed up completely, so we decided to get it fixed now.

A couple of things have made me smile in the garden. My tall succulent has opened its flowers a little showing small red trumpets with yellow centres. Having looked on google I think this is as far as it will open, and it is really very pretty. Even the stems have turned pink to match the flowers.

After last Christmas two of the poinsettias that we always put on our tri-stand in the front porch, slowly dropped all their leaves and died. We expect this as my friend in UK who owned a chain of garden centres, told me they are specially bred to last one Christmas and are not really suitable to try to keep alive for the next year as they need very controlled spans of light and darkness. But out here, and when I lived in Cyprus for a while, I did see them growing naturally and returning year after year. So when our third plant from last year, held on to its leaves, although they did all turn green, it looked so healthy that we decided to plant it in the garden and see what happened. Well in the last couple of weeks, some of its leaves are turning red, and it still looks to be in good health. I don't know how much of it will turn but we will certainly leave it there and see if it continues to survive.

We have had some heavy, thundery storms this week but fortunately most of the rain has fallen during the evenings and at night, and most days have been warm and sunny. But even on sunny days the dark clouds gather by teatime. One evning the sky was getting very dark and we though another storm was on its way, but suddenly there was a break in the clouds and a lovely patch of blue sky could be seen behind them. (It was much bluer than it looks in my photo).  It was lovely, like opening a window on a different world.

I have been seeing faces in the clouds again this week so here are a few that I spotted. Can you see them too?

And now it is time to link up with Annie. See you all over at her blog

Friday Smiles 2022: Week 45

Another quiet week but a busy one somehow. Twice a month we have a date when we can put anything out by our street bin and the coucil will collect it the next morning (if it hasn't already be taken by a passer-by). So this week we managed to man-handle a large fridge out between us. It lived in the garage and was used mainly as a drinks cabinet all summer, though it also houses fresh milk so I can buy enough for one or two weeks in one go, and also all my vegetables which do not keep well here out of a fridge. But sadly it just stopped working and it had to go. Someone took the scrap metal off it that evening and the council collected what was left the next day.

So on Monday my first task was to clean out the space in the garage where it had been, tuck away some plastic crates in its place giving us a safer pathway though everything, and give the floor a good clean. When we moved in, our family was amused to see that the garage had a marbled stone floor and a large carpet over it! But out here some garages are huge and as well as having a car parked in them, they have a living space with comfy seating and a TV, so a carpeted floor was not that strange. However, our garage is not that big, but we do not put the car in it. Houses here are notoriously short of storage so anything we can't find a home for, goes in the garage! It is now clearer and a nicer place altogether. We do intend to replace the fridge, maybe with one a bit smaller, at least before next summer, but hopefully before then. I have a much newer one in the kitchen but it is very small and doesn't hold much, which means more frequent trips to the shops as I can't store much.

But I have also had some time to relax and do 'my own things', so I have sat on the porch reading  all afternoon, finished making my Christmas cards for posting, and most of the local ones as well, and made a good start on my new crochet. I thought I would show you the first motifs I have made so you can see how the colours in each ball work up. There are five different motifs but I have started with a plain one to get a feel for the yarn, and I shall do all sixteen that are needed in this colour before I move on to a different one.

I am afraid I can't show you my mandala yet as I am still trying to find a suitable hoop. The wooden one I had seen was in Germany and it would have been ideal. It only cost 16€ but when I came to buy it I had a shock when I saw the postage. It was 150€ !! and that is posting within Europe, so we can't blame Brexit and import duties for that. I think the couriers have upped their prices massively as a result of rising fuel costs, but it will put a stop to a lot of on-line shopping if it continues that way, and will feed the large corporates like Amazon who manage to work around it to some extent. Anyway I approached the florist in our village to ask if she could get one for me, but after some fun trying to understand one another which left us both laughing, she said she can only get them up to 30cm, but she would ask her husband who does metalwork, whether he could make one. I am going back tomorrow to see what he said.

Today I did some shopping in the morning, and this afternoon I have started writing all my cards to people in UK. I usually send a small parcel of them to my sister and she posts them on which works out a lot less than paying international postage for each one. I took them in to work at the sitting room table which is under the window, but they kept blowing away so I had to close it. I have written my annual letter that goes to a few friends who are not internet users, and I forgot to move it before taking this photo, hence the untidy smudged area in the corner!

The rest of today's photos are all of evening skies. We have had some truly gorgeous weather for November. I have even eaten lunch outside most days. Monday evening certainly went down in a blaze of glory.

But in the evenings the clouds gather and yesterday we had a loud thunder storm and some fairly heavy rain. It didn't last all that long but much more is forecast for this weekend. This was the sky just before it started.

On Wednesday the sunset was criss-crossed by several vapour trails and I tried to take a panoramic photo which will my blog header for a while. Here it is before I went to panoramic style.

And here is a photo I saw on the net this week. Isn't it amazing. Nature can teach us a thing or two about resilience, and not giving up!

Annie is back from her holiday now so I will link up with her at A stitch in time and see what she got up to while she was away.

Friday Smiles 2022 :Week 44

It has been an 'ordinary' week here, but it is Friday once again so time for us to look back and find what has made us smile. Listening to the news broadcasts these days can be pretty depressing so it is more important than ever to find things to smile about, so I am starting with this very colourful piece of crochet that I have just completed. Just looking at it makes me smile.

It is a mandala called Asteria, and it was made with one of those gorgeous big balls of yarn that gradually changes colour. When I finished it I was only just getting to the lilac section and as I had intended that to be the outer layer, I decided to do one more tier of 'petals'. I used what I had learned of the designers method of increasing in the previous rounds, and managed to make one more without it curling up or pulling too tight anywhere. Of course my yarn then ran out just before I had finished so I used a small ball left over from another project which has given my mandala a dark purple outer edge which I think, finishes it off rather well. It is now being blocked, i.e., being stretched on my foam pads and pinned in place while I spray it lightly with water and steam it, so that hopefully it will stay in shape when I un-pin it. It is approximately 67 cm in diameter so I spent the morning trawling through countless web pages trying to find a hoop large enough to hold it. 60 cm is usually the largest ones, but I finally managed to track down a wooden one that is 70 cm so that should be just right. It will take a while to arrive from Germany but I will show it all again when it is mounted and hanging on the wall.

In the meantime I have made a tentative start on my big project for this winter, with the yarn Chris bought me for my birthday. It is again a colour changing yarn but this one moves rapidly fromn one colour to another over and over. It makes for some interesting confusion! This is the main colour and it is called Paris.

These two balls have the same die number, but as you can see, one is red and the other is pinkish purple. In fact the red one will become purple as I work further into the ball, and the purple one will become red!

Chris isn't sure he likes the pattern yet as it is five different motifs arranges fairly randomly so it is not symmetrical, and as we were both born under the star sign of Libra, we tend to like things to balance. But it is quite different for me so it will be a challenge and I hope I will like it when it is done.

There are four other colours of this yarn in my project, each with a place name, and as you can see in this picture, they all have two main colours within them.

The contrasts in Amsterdam are quite striking! I can see I will have to be very organised and keep the colours in separate bags, and the finished motifs, so that I can assemble it as per the layout provided, without losing my way.

During the summer I bought several plants to go in a large pot in front of our new fountain in the flower corner, but for some reason, none of them flourished. So in the end I bought a large succulent that looks a bit like an open cabbage.

It has done well in its pot but I didn't expect it to do this! Now I am wondering how tall it is going to get, and whether the flower buds will in fact open now it is getting cooler at night. It is almost as tall as me now. I looked it up on google and it appears to be from the family of Echeveria, of which there are many types, and this is probably the one called 'Gypsy'.

A couple of other highlights this week. Chris' eye operation went well and on Wednesday we went back to the doctor at his clinic in Vera, and he has signed him off, so that is a good job done and dusted.

I had a nice chat with our middle son Tom, who lives in Denmark and is moving to a different flat today. The views from his balcony are stunning. We will have try to arrange a visit again next year. This is in the city of Aarhus.

The sun has been shining most days and although the temperature has now dropped a little, it is still warm enough for my summer clothes. I did dig out a few dresses with short sleeves this week and one evening I even put on a light cardigan, but I was soon too warm and took it off again!

However today it has been more overcast and a little cooler so it was nice to see the sun finally break through at teatime. (Better late than never). No pretty colours in the sky but it looked lovely all the same.

And yes, I can see a dog's face coming down towards me. Can you?

I don't think Annie will be around today to link up with but I will visit the 'regulars' and see whether you have posted anyway.