Hello! Hooray! blog
I really believe that it is so important to take time out to be creative, so here on my blog you will find lots of ideas of things to do in your creative time.
We spend so much of our lives focussing on our day jobs that we often miss out on time for making, but finding even small amounts of time to create something with our hands can have a big impact on our productivity and well-being.
Online tutorials: How to make bunting
Photo credit: glorioustreats.com Last week, I wrote a post about the variety of online tutorials available on how to make bunting, but for some reason it wouldn’t upload and then it deleted itself! So now I’m going to try to recreate it…I really want to have a go at making some bunting for our garden…
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A sunny day on the Quayside
Today was such a beautiful day! We had a day catching up with friends and also had a bit of time to have a potter around the Quayside. Despite the fact that we work in the town centre, we don’t actually get down to the Quayside too often – although every time we do I…
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Mary Berry’s Lemon Victoria Sandwich
Mary Berry’s Lemon Victoria Sandwich recipe was specially commissioned by the GDST for the 140th anniversary of the Girls’ Day School Trust and appeared in issue 12/13 of Verve Magazine (also available online here). Mary Berry is a GDST alumna, and all girls were given a postcard with the recipe to celebrate the Bake Off…
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Luscious Lemon Curd
I absolutely love lemon curd – sweet and tangy, it goes really well with so many things. It tastes amazing on a toasted hot cross bun! It is one of those things that is so much better when you don’t buy the shop-bought stuff. Previously, I’ve tried to buy it at places like coffee mornings…
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Making our wedding invitations (part 2)
It has been quite a while since we’ve worked on our wedding invitations. I remember lots of my married friends telling us how fast the time goes once you hit the year of the big day; I knew they were talking sense, but didn’t quite realise just how fast time would fly! We have…
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Chinese New Year
Today is the start of Spring Festival, also known as Chinese New Year, so I’d like to wish you all a Happy New Year! Many of the students who Tom and I work with come from China and no doubt they’ll be celebrating in style! We are often given gifts to mark the celebration, and…
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Falafel Wraps with Grilled Veg
This is the final new recipe that we have tried out this week, and is another from Jamie’s 15-Minute Meals. I’m really impressed with this book – loads of lovely dishes that you can make during the week. As with some of the recipes from 30 Minute Meals it took me longer than the book…
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Chicken with Tomatoes and Peppers
Another of the new recipes that we have tried out this week is Nigella Lawson’s Chicken with Tomatoes and Peppers. This is a super easy recipe to make and it’s really tasty, and you could cook it on a school night which is always great! I also think that leftovers would make an excellent lunch…
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Pork Marsala with Mushroom Rice and Broccoli with Lemon and Parmesan
Despite my intention to cook lots of new meals this year, it didn’t really happen in January – but we seem to be making up for it this month! The first meal that we made was a combination of recipes from different books: Pork Marsala with Porcini Rice and Broccoli with Lemon and Parmesan.
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A weekend in Edinburgh: Camera Obscura
One of our friends suggested to us that we visit the Camera Obscura during our visit to Edinburgh last month, and it was an excellent suggestion. When she told us about it, she said that it is quite difficult to describe, but we would know what she meant when we visited. And she was right!…
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A weekend in Edinburgh: Edinburgh Castle
It was my birthday a few weekends ago and we decided that we would spend it in Edinburgh. I’ve never been before, despite it being quite close – except for the time when I changed trains in Edinburgh in order to travel to Perth! Over the few days running up to the weekend, the UK…
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Chicken and Vegetable Cobbler
My goodness, it has been ages since I wrote a post! It has been such a busy couple of weeks – we’ve been away the past two weekends, I’ve been getting used to doing a slightly different job at work and have just generally been quite busy! But I’m back and hoping to get into…
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A walk in the Lakes
I haven’t had much time for crafting over the past few days so I thought I’d post a few photos from another holiday walk. As I mentioned in my previous post Wandering Around Maryport it’s really easy to get to the Lake District from Maryport, which is brilliant. On the eve of New Year’s…
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Wandering around Maryport
We spent the run up to New Year and the first few days of 2013 in Maryport in Cumbria. Maryport is a quiet little fishing port and is a little off the tourist trail, but that’s exactly why I love it! You can access the Lake District very easily from Maryport and it’s easy to…
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Kitsch Christmas Cake
We spent Christmas in York with my Mum and Dad this year, and had such a wonderful time! It was really lovely to relax and spend some time with them. I just had to share this photo of the cake Mum had made – she said she’d decorated it how I used to do it…
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The making of my Christmas jumper!
Every year we go on a lovely walk from Crosspool in Sheffield to Bamford in Derbyshire, which has become known as ‘The Tinsel Tour’. Tom and his friends started it years ago and yesterday was the 11th Tour (we worked out that it was probably my 6th). The main aim of the walk is to…
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Pastelitos de Boda
Pastelitos de Boda are also known as ‘Mexican Wedding Cakes’, but we only ever make them at Christmas and never really associate them with any other time of year! This recipe is from Tom’s Mum, Helen, and she’s been making them for years. It took me ages to be able to pronounce the name properly,…
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A cold and frosty morning
I love cold and sunny winter mornings when everything is covered in frost. It always looks so beautiful! Now is the time of year when I only really get to appreciate my garden at the weekend when we’re not going anywhere, because during the week it’s dark when we go to work and dark when…
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The Classic Victoria Sponge
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]I absolutely LOVE cake. I could quite happily live without chocolate, but there is no way I could cope without the odd bit of cake and a cuppa! My favourite has to be the classic Victoria Sponge, complete with vanilla buttercream and raspberry jam…mmm…so easy to make and it tastes so good! One to make…
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Jamie Oliver’s chicken pie
If you haven’t got a copy of Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals: A Revolutionary Approach to Cooking Good Food Fast then it should definitely go on your wish list. A lot of people have complained about the fact that the meals actually take longer than 30 minutes to prepare, because when Jamie does it he has all of his…
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How to make your own ipad case – pdf download
Yesterday I posted a tutorial about how to make your own ipad case, but due to a technological hitch I couldn’t include all of the photos that I wanted to (sorry – maybe it was the person doing it rather than the technology!). So I came up with the idea of creating a pdf document…
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How to make an ipad case
Last week, I became more up-to-date in the technology world because my new ipad arrived! I mainly bought it for work because we’ve recently moved to a new office and have started hotdesking. For those of you who have hotdesked (is that a word?!) the very mention of it may make you shudder. If you…
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Make your own wedding bouquet
We’re trying to keep the cost of our wedding as low as we can without compromising on the things we’d like to have, and one of the ways in which we can do this is to do the flowers ourselves. I started to do a little bit of research into the cost and I just…
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Homemade Pizza
I think that pizza is probably one of the greatest food inventions (Tom would argue that the sausage is, in fact, the greatest food invention, but now isn’t the time for debate!). With a homemade pizza you can make it as healthy or unhealthy as you like, and it tastes great cold too. We often make pizza…
Read MoreA little bit about me and my blog
I have certainly found that being creative has helped to improve my mental health over the past few years. I find that when I have the space to take time out to be creative, I feel like I am working on something positive for me. Craft can't fix everything, but it certainly makes me feel good!
I am passionate about being creative with my children as well as working on my own projects, so some of my posts will discuss how we juggle our family time with running a small business and everything else in between.
Do feel free to get in touch, either by commenting on a post or by completing the contact form.
