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!

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:

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!