a joyful thing

There are some truly wonderful and talented folks out there in Blogland! One such folk is Tif Fussell (aka Dottie Angel) who I must mention today as she is having her Joyful Shop Update over on Etsy. This means throughout the day today, 14 November, she will be posting lots of new beautiful handcrafted lovelies including good old favourites like apron wraps and wall hangings alongside new wares like 'lappity lap blankets' and 'perfectly peachy pinnies'... So grab your purses and give one of her wonderful items a forever home!

sunday morning

Grmphh... haven't slept for two nights! Nothing to do with the little one... he's been sleeping, well, like a baby. But it's getting wintry here and very windy and the sweet lady upstairs (and she is sweet really) torments us constantly by leaving something out on the balcony that makes a noise when the weather's bad... a really irritating 'chinese water torture' type noise. For two years it was her chairs - metal legs without any rubber feet - that made a rhythmic tapping noise that just could not be blocked out with earplugs and pillow over your head. It took us a year to establish just what the noise was and then when we discovered it she didn't believe us, so just kept leaving the chairs out. In the end we had to go and buy rubber feet and put them on all her chairs. Bliss... the noise stopped. And then suddenly a new noise - a metallic clanking noise. I swear she does it on purpose! Anyway, that's my little moan over... here's a nice cheery quilt mosaic from one of my lovely contacts on Flickr. Thank you Melissa!

what happened when...

It seems so long ago that I can hardly believe it's only 5 months since our (second) wedding. The first three months of the year were taken up with preparations and completing paperwork. We had to do a low-budget affair, so it was down to me to design our wedding invite (in Greek and English of course), make all the wedding favours and arrange the flowers. Not that I didn't love every minute of it, and with a little help from my friends, here's a taster of what I did...

Our church was right in the middle of a big park. Infact it was one of two churches in the park, so there was no choice but to add a map to the back of the invite.

I printed and folded 200 paper boats for Leonidas... it was his christening too... and we filled them with cashew nuts!

George has a small olive grove in Crete, so we filled 200 little bottles with his olive oil round which we tied a label to match the invite with green ribbons.

I also made little matchbook seed packs filled with sunflower seeds!

Here's me arranging flowers... I was a florist way back in the 90s and it was lovely to work with flowers again!

The bouquet...

... and even a few blooms left to go next to the bed.

desktop friday

It's Friday... which means a little something for your desktop to download. This week it's keys for some reason. Just follow this link to my Flickr page and download the size you need.