Catching up.

I think that blogs posts from me in the coming weeks might be a bit like the proverbial hen's teeth as I am finding juggling the job at the cafe along with everything else all consuming at the moment, not to mention exhausting. I'm not sure I'm quite rocking the 'struggling artist waiting tables to make ends meet' image at my age! All I can think about is this particular waitress!

Friday was a fun day at work though as we held a Wear it Pink day to raise money for Breast Cancer Now. I brought in some raspberry ripple cupcakes which were sold alongside all the other goodies and lots of friends popped in to support the good cause.

I then worked all day on Saturday and another five hours on Sunday but despite being tired I was determined when I finished on Sunday not to waste the last couple of hours of sunshine. Rather than venture further afield we just headed out of the house and walked the footpaths around our village.

As always Hector enjoyed the extra long walk and a chance for a good run.

We stayed out for almost two hours until the sun started to go down... it was beautiful.

I was also given a huge bag of quince (is quinces a word... I don't think so, it sounds wrong?) before the weekend so I couldn't let them go to waste. They look so gnarled, knobbly and unpromising but I know they yield the most exquisite perfumed jelly. They are ridiculously hard and difficult to cut when raw but I chopped them up and boiled them to a pulp before passing them through a jelly bag.

The result liquid was then boiled up with sugar and some lemon juice and I now have several jars of beautifully fragranced amber jelly.... fifteen jars to be precise! What on earth I will do with fifteen jars of quince jelly I'm not entirely sure. No prizes for guessing what I might be giving people at Christmas!

I also had a yearning to make Welsh cakes. My Mum used to make them when we were young although nowadays she buys them ready made from the supermarket. I thought if I made some I could take her a few... except we seem to have eaten them all. They really are best eaten warm and fresh... just saying! I promise I'll make more for my Mum.

It's probably not surprising that my own sewing seems to have taken a back seat over the past couple of weeks but I just had to share these two beautiful little gift boxes made by a couple of my students, Ruth and Julia, at my weekly machine embroidery class. They are just 5 cm square and really are gorgeous. Ruth has only been doing machine embroidery with me for seven weeks... how clever is that!

So that's what I've been up to over the past week or so... tomorrow I'm back at the cafe so life feels a little like a merry-go-round right now.

What have you been up to lately?