A Busy Start To The Holidays!

We've been busy busy busy these past few weeks.

 School sports day and then end of term leavers assembly where we said goodbye to some friends moving on to senior school and also to our headteacher who was retiring after 10 years.
Then that same evening we were off on a train down to Kent for the kids to be whisked away on holiday with their cousins & grandparents.
They had an awesome time Little Halden Farm in the middle of the Kent countryside. Climbing trees, exploring the woods, cooking on a campfire, sleeping in a big tent, having water fights and just being free!

So when they returned home on my birthday (don't ask which one!) they were all suitable knackered!
We spent another week "down south" and we went exploring the Olympic Park and tried out some sports at the Copperbox arena there. Bird liked Netball (probably helps she's quite tall!) and was shown the basics by ladies from a professional netball team. Fluff enjoyed the handball and wheelchair basketball.

We also went for a day sightseeing in London. I've been there so many times as a kid we didn't need to go on no tour bus to see it! We managed to go to The Science Museum (didn't manage the Natural History due to huge queues in the rain), Bank of England Museum, St Pauls, South Bank, Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey & Buckingham Palace.
 We also spotted a few places from the Harry Potter films. Notably Australia house on The Strand (Gringotts Bank) & The Millennium Bridge (Death Eaters destroy it in The Half Blood Prince).

So after 2 packed weeks in Kent & London we got the train back home.

Within 2 days of being home this happened:

Bird managed to drop something on her foot and break her toe! Its got to be in plaster for at least 3 weeks.

Half of the things I had planned for us to do in the next 4 weeks of the holidays had to go out of the windows as she can't really walk very well on it (even with crutches). So I've been hunting down things to do at home that don't involve much walking or trips to town.

So watch this space for the thing we've managed to find and do.

Removing Sticky Residue Without The RAGE

Just a quick one!
There's loads of pins about removing the sticky goop left behind my stickers or labels. The most popular 2 seem to be using peanut butter or a mixture of oil and Bicarbonate of soda.

I've got a small box that used to contain chunky chalks that I got from Poundland a while back. Its the perfect size for a mini first aid box for the kitchen. The only problem was the old label didn't come off very well and left a huge tacky patch on the front where I wanted to stick my nice First Aid sticker I had made.

Over to Pinterest! I found a good pin to use peanut butter on the sticky goop to remove it but alas I didn't have any peanut butter (the kids cleaned me out on Saturday). So I kept scrolling and came across this pin for DIY Goo Gone from Two Million Miles.  
All you need is vegetable oil and some bicarbonate of soda I used baking powder but its basicly the same thing.

• Mix the 2 ingredients together in equal quantities. I used 1 tsp of baking powder to 1 tsp of oil.

• Smother the area with the mixture and leave for about 10 mins. The time it took me to do the washing up!
• Wipe it off! Before i wiped it off I gave it a good rub round with my finger to make sure all the subborn bits were loose.

Apologies for the awful quality picture. The kids had faffed about with all the presets on my camera!

It seriously is that simple! I was really surprised as no matter how much I'd scrubbed that crap previously it wouldn't shift!
I'll update this post with pics of the finished product (I still need to print off my sexy new label).

I'd say DEFINITELY say that...

100 things to do this summer! Free Printable

Stuck for how to entertain the kids in the 6 weeks holidays? Here's my list of 100 things to do this summer in a handy free download!

Well summer holidays are almost upon us (unless you are in Scotland and are enjoying them already!) So I've been thinking about way to entertain this kids this summer. I've seen loads of posts on Pinterest listing 100 things to do this summer. 75% Of the suggestions are awesome. The problem I've come across is some of the things listed I've never heard of (pull taffy? play cornhole?) or things we can't really do (catching fireflies, watch fireworks on 4th of July).

So I decided to combine the best of these many lists and added a few more of my own.
As I was going back through my list I found I had duplicated a few things so ended up with 5 free spaces. Rather than make up 5 more things I've left them blank to fill in with things we might like to do at a later date.

 

Full size JPG image Download Link
PDF File Download Link

Feel free to download and print off and let me know how you got on! 

Let summer BEGIN!

Festival Time! (Part II - The Aftermath)

Well last Saturday was our village festival. And the weather stayed fine (for the most part!)
The day started with myself and the kids traipsing up to the village hall to hand in our handicraft entries. All 6 of them.
It was the first time EVER we had entered and didn't really know the drill but we muddled through. We duly registered them all and set them up. Fluff (my son) entered a "computer generated picture" and a Lego model. His Lego model was actually a case for my Raspberry Pi so it served a purpose afterwards.
Bird (my daughter entered 3 items; Again some "computer generated art", a small tote bag that she had made herself (supervised by me on the sewing machine I might add!) and some gingerbread men. We had a bit of a panic when we went to put our gingerbread men out as the other entries were on nice plates with doilies and were all decorated. We didn't have time to decorate ours and forgot a plate. So we just had to put them out on the lid of the box we brought them in and hoped for the best.

Festival Time!

Apologies for the lack of posts of late. I've been super busy preparing for our annual village festival this weekend!

Its a proper old fashioned English village fair with crowning of the Festival Queen, a procession of floats, funfair, handicraft show in the village hall (O hai Kirsty Allsopp), pet show and tug of war on the green. I love it. Its one of my favourite things about living in a village. Everyone gets together and has a good time.

I've spent many hours this past fortnight up at school painting, glueing and doing all sorts to help get our school float ready for the procession on Saturday.

Our School's float last year (If you squint you can see me on it!)

I've also been helping my kids with their entries for the village Handicrafts and Produce Show that coincides with the festival. And the boy-childs interesting choice of costume for the Fancy Dress contest.
AND on top of all that my eldest goes off on her first ever Cubs camp at the weekend too!

Phew!

Anyway, normal service will be resumed presently; just let me get this hectic weekend out of the way first!

Photos and whether we were triumphant to follow soon!

AWESOME Recycled Carrier Bag Bunting

Painted Coke Bottles

My husband loves Coke out of glass bottles so once in a while he treats himself to a 6 pack of them. This weekend he treated him self as I had bought some cider and nibbles for watching Eurovision (YAY Denmark by the way).
After he had gone through them I saw them sitting in the recycling box in the kitchen and thought that they were too nice a bottle to just throw away so I looked for some ideas on Pinterest for reusing them. I finally came across a pin which suggested spray painting the inside and using them as vases. There was a similar pin using a syringe thing to squirt acrylic paint in to bottles too.

Peppermint Foot Scrub

Summer is well on its way so I'm told! So that means its time to start breaking out the sandals and flip flops. My feet aren't the most pretty things so its nice to give them a bit of a pamper.

The original pin of this is from Amy over at The Idea Room and a post from way back in 2009. Her recent Brown Sugar Scrub recipe looks great too. Think I need to make a pretty label for my scub too!

Ingredients:

• Enough granulated sugar to fill your pot or bottle
• A swig of olive oil the recipe also says you can use coconut oil
• A few drops of peppermint essential oil  you could use other oils like vanilla or strawberry like me
• food colouring optional - see below

1. Fill your jar or bottle almost all the way with the sugar then tip it in to a bowl
2. slowly add a a small glug of olive oil and stir you want the sugar to be ever so slightly wet - like damp sand.
As Amy notes in the original post, the olive oil makes the scrub a bit of a yellow colour so I also added a few tiny drops of red food colouring to conceal the colour.

3. Add a few tiny drops of essential oil.
I didn't have any peppermint essential oil so was going to use some peppermint essence I use for baking instead but then I remembered I had some strawberry essential oil upstairs. Strawberry fits better with the pink colour so I went with that. (NOTE: I did a small tester with the peppermint essence and it was fine too. The only tiny difference I found was that the food flavouring was less oily and a little more watery but as you only need a tiny bit it didn't really make a difference to the overall mixture.)

You have to mix everything in really well or you end up with tiny red flecks where the colouring isn't completely mixed in.

I'll spare you the horror of the pictures of me applying the scrub to my feet but I will say this: my feet feel amazing. A few more rubs with this and a bit of moisturiser and my tootsies will be ready to see the sun.

Oh and because I used the strawberry oil my feet smelt like strawberry & lime Kopparberg cider which puts me in a summer mood ANYWAY! So I'd definitely say:

Nature Scavenger Hunt

 

The link on Pinterest goes to The Taylor House and the original version of the scavenger hunt list.

Well my printer ink has dried up so the list was hand written up on a piece of paper (excuse the bad handwriting).

The sun was shining, the birds were singing and the kids didn't want to go out. As soon as the words "special game" were uttered they were up and ready to go like a shot.

We didn't really have anything to collect our treasure in so we used small carrier bags (it also meant we didn't end up with huge sticks or lumps of rock as I made the rule "if it can't fit in the bag - it doesn't count"). In hindsight I guess you could use tupperware tubs or old chinese takeaway boxes so yuo can see what you have got.

So we walked down to our local nature spot - the ponds. They used to be old clay pits that got filled in with water and later on that water was used in the production of glucose in a factory nearby. Now its used mainly by fishermen and dog walkers. it's very peaceful.

We got off to a good start finding catkins and moss for our fuzzy things and worked our way down the list. The kids really enjoyed hunting for things and I did wonder if they would actually find everything but they did! 

 After we had managed to get everything on the list we walked home. We had been out for 2 hours and rain clouds were gathering overhead. The kids were ready for their lunch and I was ready for a cup of tea! 

We had a great morning and this is definitely something we are going to do again when the weather is nicer and I think I'll create a list of things to find at the beach for the next time we go to the seaside.

In conclusion:

Whats this blog about then?

Why hello!

So what's this blog all about then? Well like a lot of folk I enjoy Pinterest the pinboard-style photo-sharing website (as Wikipedia refers to it). If you aren't familiar with how it works you see a picture of something you like you "pin" it to a virtual pinboard. other people see your "pin" and if they like it they will "re-pin" it and so on.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. I like using Pinterest. I've discovered some amazing stuff on there. Some I've tried, some I've lusted over and some, some things I can't even try because I'm stuck in the UK. Certain ingredients aren't readily available in this country without buying them from specialist retailers or online. The second hindrance for me is I live in a small village. Our local supermarkets and shops in the nearest town aren't the best and sometimes even trying to find something like Chorizo or fabric pens can be a right chore. We don't even have any pound shops here!

Get to the point already! Ok ok! Well I want to see if I can replicate some of the fantastic pins i've seen. some are straight forward but others may require stuff that's not readily available to me. I'll give stuff a go and see how they turn out.

I'm going to set myself a few rules:

1. Nothing to be bought specially online or from a specialist shop. Only stuff I can get in the usual high street shops in this country. No trips to Hobbycraft for Freezer paper or Candy Melts. That sort of thang.
2. No splurging. Like most people these days, I live on a tight budget. I'm not going to skint myself trying things so thrift is the key. I'm not spending £6 on something I'm going to use once when I could spend that money on booze and cake.
3. It has to be of use. Whatever the pin it has to be of use to me, my family or friends. I'm not going to be hand felting tea cosies out of my own muff hair because nobody is going to want that shit. Same thing goes for any recipe containing Quorn or tofu.
4. It doesn't have to be a something that's made. Lifehacks count too!

What this blog is

A bit of fun, a giggle. Its about trying new stuff

What this blog is not

Endorsed in any way by with Pinterest.

I really have no idea how I will get on. This could go horrificly tits up but its worth a go!