Festive Cheer (picture heavy!)

 Thank you all so much for the lovely comments left on my last post. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season, filled with friends, family and food!

I thought I'd do a picture walk today of all the Christmas goings on in my student house. I'm so looking forward to be spending Christmas with my family, but it's still nice to spend time with my house mates and decorate our house too :)

Here is our humble tree, complete with presents and home made decorations!

I'm sure you will recognise these little ornaments from my previous blog posts :) It's great to finally be able to display them properly. 

Also on display for the first time this year is my framed CCN Gingerbread House.

We had our house Christmas meal on Thursday, seeing as most of us were travelling on different days to get home. We didn't take the traditional route for food. We had a Mexican night! I was on cooking duty, which I love. I take such joy in preparing food for others, that we can all sit around the table and enjoy. I made two different types of chilli and a batch of rice, and we also had home made guacamole and Christmas tree-shaped tortilla chips! Very festive!

White rice and veggie chilli (sweet potato, spinach, peas, onion, kidney beans)

Meat chilli in the slow cooker (beef mince, pork mince and bacon)

After we were thoroughly stuffed from our delicious meal, it was time for presents! I received such a wonderful gift from my house mates. It was so thoughtful and perfect for me :) 

Isn't it charming? It's a wooden suitcase that's been decorated to look vintage. It's just so pretty and I love it! But even better, there were more goodies inside. 

A DVD from my wishlist, two vintage style coasters (I collect these) and an X-men comic. 

I feel truly lucky to have been given such a gorgeous gift. Big thank you to Kathryn and Lucy!!

I feel spoilt already and the big day isn't even here yet. I'm travelling tomorrow. I've got my tickets and booked seats so it should be fine, but you never know with our railway systems. Fingers crossed I make it to Glasto in good time. Yes, I am taking my stitching on the train :)

Best wishes and Merry Christmas,

 

WOW!!

Well, I could hardly believe it when I logged onto Blogger this morning and my number of followers had doubled! I thought my eyes were deceiving me, or Blogger was having a malfunction. I was so delighted when it turned out to be true! I cannot thank you all enough for becoming new followers, I really hope you like my blog :) I'm still a little confused though, can any one fill me in on how this wonderful thing happened? I had 31 followers before, and then five days later BAM - 61! Hello to all my new followers, please feel free to leave comments and ask questions about anything on my blog, I would love to hear from you. And we must welcome old friends too :)

So, first things first, thank you for all your helpful comments on 123stitch. I didn't actually make my order until I had heard some opinions from the blogging world. Now that I have used the company myself, I can heartily agree with the positive comments. My stash was posted the day after I ordered it and arrived exactly one week after that. It was all packaged up perfectly and I thought the prices were so reasonable, especially because I live in the UK. So any fellow UK stitchers out there, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this site, it's very good indeed.
Here's the stash I got. I know it doesn't look like much, but for me, it's very exciting LOL I got LHN Nature's Beauty and some threads I needed for that, and some other threads too for an upcoming spring project. Stay tuned for that!



One of my New Year's Stitchy Resolutions was to stitch a LHN design, and after seeing Nature's Beauty on Lynn's blog (thanks Lynn!) I knew it had to be that one. I've made a start on it already, although only a very small start. I had to cut the fabric twice because the first one just wasn't big enough. That'll teach me to start a project late at night, but I honestly couldn't resist!

Chilly Paws is in its final stages too, all that's left is the backstitched words to go alongside the cute Britty Kitty. I've got the fabric ready to turn this into a flatfold as soon as it's finished - not too long now I hope.

And this part of the post is entirely for Peggy-Lee, but feel free to read on :) The story goes that I commented on Peggy's post about cookies saying I had never had a homemade cookie before. She was clearly outraged by this (LOL) as she emailed me some lovely recipes for me to try at home. Well, me and my mum looked over these recipes and unfortunately, some of the ingredients weren't available here in the UK. My mum persevered though and found some other recipes on the Internet. So although we didn't get to use your wonderful recipes Peggy, I can now say I've had a homemade cookie. And here's the proof!

We did make a few more than this, but they were still in the oven when I wanted to take a picture. They are so good, I could probably get through a batch by myself :) Thank again Peggy for your kindness and setting me on this naughty path of cookie heaven!
I've got a drama performance coming up at school, but a week after that, I'm going on a school trip to Athens! I'm really looking forward to it as I'm going with my closest friends. I'll be sure to share some pictures after my trip.
I'm going out tonight to see a comedian with my boyfriend, but before that, I've got sometime to make a serious dent in Nature's Beauty.
Thanks again for joining me on my blog, it means so much to me :) I hope you all have a lovely weekend,