Another Year

After the weeks of work and preparation Christmas seemed to come and go in a flash as usual. A wonderful time was had by all made interesting by my newly repaired oven exploding in the middle of cooking Christmas dinner. Fortunately the turkey was cooked so we plied everyone with more wine while we pan fried the potatoes and parsnips. No one seemed to mind. On Saturday Stewart and I abandoned the boys to a house full of cold leftovers, and while they had parties in our absence we drove to Scotland to visit his parents.

On Sunday we had a lovely day out at Glamis castle which was beautifully decorated for Christmas... unfortunately no photos allowed inside so here's one of the imposing exterior.

And on Saturday we had a drive around the beautiful coastal towns of the East Neuk of Fife in glorious sunshine but bitter cold - stopping briefly for the obligatory photo - Stewart with his Mum and Dad.

Before Christmas I showed a few sneaky peeks of things I'd been working on and now I can show the finished items. First of all the Klimt book for Jude...

Like I said it involved eating a lot of chocolate to get all those foils... especially as I made two (the first one didn't quite fit!)

And in return Jude made me this beautiful Klimt book too...

Exquisitely stitched of course.

Even inside, the attention to detail was beautiful. Thank you Jude... I love it!

The second sneaky peek was this doll... Angela had commissioned me to make a doll of her husband Neil. I've never had to model a doll on a real person before so it was quite a challenge, but one that I really enjoyed.

And this is the end result...

But what is really exciting is that you can read what Angela and Neil thought about the doll themselves because Angela has got a blog at last! I've been nagging her for a long time so please go and visit, leave her lots of comments and encourage her to keep blogging because she produces beautiful work that needs to be shared.

I've now got a house to clean, food to restock and work to finish for mid January so I might be gone a while. Meanwhile I would like to wish you all...

A Very Happy New Year!