Young and shy

Read any good books lately?

Freedom Fries has some great recipes along with the stories.
Leela's Book is so very, very beautiful. loved it!

The brave and the scary!

Halloween at the office.

A light snack will be served shortly

Having a snack at work. I bought the goodies and Anthea assembled it. Yum! Salticrax, chilli jam, camembert, salami, artichoke, red pepper and olive.

All of life is changing...

I wrote this affirmation for Ashleigh once but I want to share it now with every person who wants to change something about their life. I'm about to too! Eeck! Scary :-)

Sundowners

Left home to go and have drinks with a friend. The colours in the sky were wonderful. Swallows and flying ants were everywhere.

Mushroom season

Love all the mushrooms that pop up after the rains.

Got up early and went for a walk

Sunday morning.
At the end of this road is my house.

Tick this off my to-do list

I built a retaining wall this weekend. Only  two bricks high along the driveway so the sand doesn’t keep spilling onto the drive.
 

White tea with ginger

Some more of this delicious tea!

Pick a number

Just a moment for myself

Zoo Lake

Is no-one up yet?

Early, Saturday morning.

Blue is still my favourite colour

Pink pom-poms

From my garden.

Food styling and photography - lesson 2 - red onion

I'll be happy to receive your comments - tell me what you think. Which shot do you like best?

Stencil

I cut this stencil last night and applied it to the box this morning.
The box has an interesting story – many year ago a handy man came to do some work at the agency where I was working. I fell in love with the box he had his tools in, so I found a plastic bag, transferred his tools, gave him ZAR30, and the box was mine!

PRETTYUGLY: Brandon

A new PrettyUgly - he name's Brandon. He's a brown boy blue :-)

Lay the table

From my mother, from her mother.

Food styling and photography

I an teaching myself food styling and photography. This is my first attempt - not perfect. But you know what they say: practise makes perfect. The aim is to use only natural light, and it must look appetizing.

Weekend weather

Well, everyone is sending emails of hail damage at home and on their cars, but we only got the tail end of it and it was only 4mm, in 4 seconds.

Christmas preparations 2

Although I liked the Christmas tree made from the magazine, it didn't really match the colour scheme I had planned. So I made some others up and I believe they're much nicer. Well, I'm very happy with the result.

White on white

Fly away Peter, fly away Paul

Lone rock on a lone hill

Coming home to roost

Went for a walk in the park after work.

Butterfly wing

My piece of Labradorite looks like a butterfly's wing.

I found this on the internet about the stone – the story makes it magical: According to an Eskimo legend, the Northern Lights were once imprisoned in the rocks along the coast of Labrador. It is told that a wandering Eskimo warrior found them and was able to free most of the lights with a mighty blow of his spear. Some of the lights were still trapped within the stone, and thus we have labradorite.

http://shimmerlings.com/gemstones/labradorite.htm

...around your neck

I bought this necklace in Cape Town and am going to give it to a friend. It comes in a beautiful bag.

Paper tree

Making Christmas trees from old magazines.

Feeling happy

Immer nur Sonnenschein

Words of wisdom my mother lived by. 

I can only do this translation, which is inadequate to express the essence of this, but here goes...

Sunshine each day would be too bright

By only moving forward you’ll travel too fast

You have to experience the mist and rain

to appreciate the true joy of sunshine

Flowers for only a day

Wedding decorations

Many, many years ago I made 80 of these for a friend's wedding – when wire flowers were all the rage.

Can you smell it everywhere?

Jasmine. Love it!

Christmas preparations 1

I did the frosting on the bottles to match the die-cuts on my swing tags. Hmm, not quite as good as I thought they would look, but once you start you have to keep going until they're all done :-)

Atlas birds

Pattern from the book I bought yesterday, with adaptions.

More comfort food

My sister-in-law made the most wonderful comfort food yesterday, for lunch. Thank you! M'wah!

Use paper only

I bought these books today and can't wait to go home and make something.

String strung

I strung these beads for the girls to wrap around the Christmas tree. Only 10 weeks to go.

Grandparents

These are my mother's parents. We never knew our grandfather but our gran was awesome. When she was older she would nap in the afternoon, we would lie in her featherbed with her while she told us stories about her home and youth. It always sounded magical, even the hardships during the war seemed like an adventure to us – she was just great at telling stories.
At night after she closed her bedroom door you would hear her open the cupboard, we knew she was reaching in for her flask of brandy – she would just have the one sip, for medicinal purposes.

And the rains came

Birdspotting, at home

Constitutional Court revisited

Letting off steam

Another pic I tried to recreate. Constitutional Hill.