Tara Tuesdays - Part 11
Posted on 26 June 2012
Productiveness….oh and a bit more about my Grand Tour...! I have been having a bit of a productive streak of late and you may recall last week I told you about my knitted squares that are for my patchwork blanket?! Well, I decided to use the non-alpaca yarn squares to make up a patchwork cushion which I started sewing up this week. It took a REALLY long time and was tricky in parts BUT I am delighted with the final result which I have now finished! What do you think?! I am thinking if the cushion looks like this, how cool will the blanket look?!
Also, very recently I caught up with one of good friends Liz from my old job. A while back she had kindly knitted me some Milagro hearts that are from the “Gifted, lovely little things to knit and crochet book” by Mags Kandis (she used MY alpaca yarn I hasten to add!!!!). Liz is a fabulous knitter and we made friends at work when I saw her knitting during lunchtime in the lift lobby. 10 minutes later I had grabbed my knitting and joined her and we spent most lunch times together every day from then on in!! We hadn’t quite worked out how to join the hearts together as there is a pattern in the book to make a door hanger from them. We decided to knit an I-cord and sew it through the hearts, the finished result looks like this!
Much better than the original pattern (even if I do say so myself) and again I was thrilled with how this turned out! Every time I look at it, it will remind me of Liz! When I last wrote about my travels I had enthused (and some) about my beach trek, but we did so much more in Wales! We went to Portmeiron which I was a bit underwhelmed with but also Harlech Castle which was amazing! As a vertigo sufferer, I confronted and conquered my fear and was almost blown off the top of the Castle! It was stunning however and well worth it! I even found a fabric shop in Harlech (there’s a thing) and bought some great fabric that was a discontinued line of Sofa Workshop material which I am sure I can make something lovely from when I find the right project for it!
We met up with our friends Andy and Claire again on the Saturday and had a great meal with them and then drove to Porthmadog on the Sunday and travelled on the Blaenau Ffestiniog railway which was brilliant! I managed to get some fab shots of the train out of the window, one of which I have attached. We had a fish and chip supper in the Harbour in Porthmadog and then headed back to Arthog where we had a beer watching the sun go down. This is my favourite picture of the whole holiday (apart from my riding ones of course!) and I must have this enlarged and framed and put onto canvas, small hint there for hubby if he is reading?!
Our hosts at the Slate Shed had suggested we drive up to the Lakes and we thought that as they had seen the Landy, they must have thought we were hard core off roaders! We made our way to the Lakes on the most scariest track. This was driving at it's hairiest for me!!!! There was one bend where I just couldn't get the car to go any further. Being a non-experienced 4 wheel driver (I have only used it twice in the snow!) it didn't even enter my head to put the 4 wheel on, doh! I shouted at hubby "Why isn't the car moving, what's wrong with it?!" and was getting myself into a real pickle with a stress neck and everything, so decided to reverse down the track a bit and then put my foot down and give it some welly to get it round the bend. Why I hadn't thought of this before I don't know! There were what seemed like hundreds of gates that we had to keep opening and closing and we stopped for some pictures and tried to do some timed ones of us doing star jumps! What is so funny about this picture and the other ones not included here is that none of them caught us jumping, just the end bits!!!! It made us laugh anyway!
When we finally got back onto the main road, Si a day later went back to take a picture of the road we had driven down. If you zoom into this picture you will see it is UNSUITABLE FOR MOTOR VEHICLES! That aside, we had such a great time in Wales and I would most definitely go back there! The next part of our trip was to Cornwall but we broke the journey up and stayed at Winscombe first which was lovely. We stopped off at Raglan Castle and TreTower en route. Our hosts cooked us a fabulous meal and we had coffee and snuggled up with a roaring fire afterwards! It was a long drive to Cornwall from Winscombe which is near Somerset so we stopped off at Cheddar Gorge which was minutes away from where we were staying. That's probably enough now for this week, so more on our adventures in Cornwall next time when I get to almost the end of our wonderful trip, all good things have to come to an end at some time I guess! TTFN!
