I don't know much about accounting...

but I do know what makes for a pretty double entry, accrual based bookkeeping system...

Honestly, the colours are just there so that I can see the difference and they'll be made bland white before an accountant sees them but I do love me some colours!

Also - I've just written a little blog for this bloke here - clicky click. He was a sweet little man. I read a bit during my lunch-ish break and found this article about local politics in the 1950's by Ray Gosling fascinating - even if I didn't understand it much. I like his description of Nottingham females but I fear the gaggles of women may be a bit more ...aggressive... now.

I'm off to see if I can actually make some entries into this without pulling my hair out.

Love,

Eleanor.

Second Blog of the Day

Don't mean to overwhelm you so I won't promote this but I've just seen this bug outside of the shop. Any ideas what it might be?? I'm posting here mainly because I want a link for the photos that I can post to Ravelry.

Poor little thing. 

Love Eleanor. 

Edit: We've found out it's a shield or stink bug!

Autumn Cleaning

A p.s. at the beginning because I want you to read it... You can still vote for us on the Let's Knit Awards. Click here. Please and thank you. :)

I cannot wait for winter! Winter is proper knitting and crochet weather and I am excited! I've finally finished my last summer project (a variation of this tee with the scrumptious Shades DK in the Volcano colourway  - it was a joy to knit with but somehow it took a couple of months... you know how it is...). So, now I'm planning my winter knits and my oh my I have ideas! I'll tell you about them another time because an odd feeling has come over me.

I want to tidy and sort.

That's right - tidy and sort. Those of you who come regularly know that it's really not my strong point. Since June's been away looking after her dad for a couple of weeks, the shop hasn't been hoovered. I know, I know, it's terrible but I have had a lot to do - a serious amount and as I see it, a clean floor isn't imperative to the running of my business but good accounts are. Bookkeeping. Oh dear.

I got it into my head that I wasn't doing very well so I spoke to my mum, who loves maths, and a customer called Dee who used to be a volunteer bookkeeper (and I'm going to mention Elaine here because she has very kindly offered to help and I will take her up on that once my bookkeeping is less embarrassing). They all suggested that I look at how other people do it, maybe buy books or check our websites or speak to bookkeepers and accountants. But I'm contrary and fiercely independent and I like to work it out myself and I found this blog here - Unclutterer.com, which isn't, strictly speaking, about bookkeeping or accounts but it does make sense to my little brain. Turns out it was the website that Dee suggested...

So yesterday, I settled down to knit a shop sample out of the divine Cygnet Merino DK and read the blog and I came upon this post  which is about uncluttering your wardrobe but as I was reading through she mentioned stash a few times, so naturally I started thinking about mine. It's a common conversation theme in this shop about how to sort out stash. It's something that every knitter has whether they plan it or not. I get a bit antsy when people buy a ball here and a ball there, smiling because they're adding to their stash. My preferred method is to buy in big enough bulk so that at least you can do something. Say, eight 100g balls of DK, 900g of aran. The only single balls that come home with me are laceweights and 4plies. But naturally, you'll have half a ball or even a couple of metres at the end of a project that you can't bear to throw away. I've started to get more fierce with my stash - if it's not going to be used, it's going. I've got rid of a hell of a lot of Wilko's acrylic that way... Life's too short to knit with yarn that you don't love ey?

But what I'm trying to say is that I'm going to try and sort my own stash using the rules that she's given us for her clothing stash. And I'm going to do it around about now because this is the new year for knitters - the beginning of the season - the time when we're thinking about big projects to keep us warm and snuggly when the snow finally starts. Oh I can't wait.

I must say though, with June being away I'm not getting any days off so all of these big ideas may well be thrown out the window because if it gets too cold I won't want to be sorting, I'll most definitely want to be knitting. :)

I also want to say, you know in academic papers (at least legal academic papers and legislation) when something refers to a man it's a convention that you know that it refers to a woman as well. Maybe a little sexist - I'm sure we could change everything to say person or people - but it's the way it is and you get used to it. From now on, when I refer to 'knitting' or 'crochet', apart from when I'm referring to a project or if I specifically say so, I'm referring to both. Does that make sense? Crocheters on the internet seem to have a bit of a complex with feeling left out - I kinda get it because there's so much about knitting out there but I love crochet and I love knitting - equal but different - but really, it feels awkward to put 'knitting and crocheting' everywhere so you'll just have to coco...

With that out of the way - I want to announce that we're having out SECOND BIRTHDAY PAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARTY! YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!

I had such fun fun fun last year. I can't believe how long ago it feels, I started this on the day because I was too drunk to knit this. So much has happened this year. But really, it feels like two minutes ago. The same as the opening which feels like forever ago and no time at all. I know you know how that feels. Odd odd odd.

Anyway - it's going to be a bloody great day and I'll most likely be drunk (especially if June makes it back because then she can look after the cashing up...) and I have my first day off in a month afterwards so I must spend it hungover, it's practically the law.

Click here to get to the facebook event page (which I think you can see even if you're not on facebook) for details.

Here's a bloody lovely, if slightly fuzzy, photo from last year with loads of customers and my entire family :)

In my efforts to organise and tidy, I've deleted nearly every photo from my laptop because I got it in my head that all of the photos I needed were on facebook but of course when you take them from facebook they're not great quality. Oh well. 

Right, I'm off to put some bits on the internet and carry on with my shop sample. I'll write a few blogs over the next few days telling you about the exciting stuff we'll be doing at the party. 

Dead exciting!

Love, 

Eleanor. 

Entrelac

Being prepared for a lesson two months ahead of schedule is not like me at all funnily enough. I generally leave it to the week before and rush to print the night before whilst manically tidying the shop and cleaning the loo. But something's got a hold of my heart - and that something is most definitely entrelac.

I started this piece a couple of weeks ago when it occurred to me that I hadn't worked entrelac in an age and I probably needed to be fairly au fait with it if I stood any chance of teaching it successfully. It's full of mistakes (I won't point them out one by one), casting off was a pretty major obstacle but it came out of my little head and I was pleased with how much I did actually remember. 

I read around a little bit - consulted the half written pattern from a few years ago and came up with this which was a lot more satisfactory: 

Although - I've cropped it to within an inch of it's life so I can't prove to you that I have actually worked out how to cast off... I have. 

Both of them need a jolly good press but who on earth presses swatches?!

I guess I ought to explain a little of what it is. As I see it, it's like a diagonal basketweave made up of lots of diamonds and half diamonds. Each diamond is knitting back and forth over a few stitches (rather than knitting a whole long row like normal knitting). Successful entrelac requires a few tricky little manoeuvres like picking up stitches in purl, ssks, sssks, m1s and I believe truly successful and smooth entrelac knitting requires a knowledge of backwards knitting (as opposed to turning and purling) which is a little bugger to get your head around but so easy and worth it once you're there. 

You can do all sorts in entrelac, including shaping and textured work, you can work massive diamonds instead of six stichers or tiny, weeny little things, work it in mohair (how very retro!), work it in Regia Lace on big needles. Once you've got the basics - it's bloody easy to snazz it up. 

So - there's the sales pitch - we've got a lesson on it on October the 14th and we currently have four spaces left - I'd love to see you there. 

Now - here's my idea right...

See that tee there? I bloody love it! It's King Cole's pattern number 3491 in Bamboo Cotton DK - Navy. 

I love this shape - sort of just two big squares, you change the pattern just above the bust whilst doing a few increases for the arm. Knit for a while and then cast off. Sew up the sides, sew up the shoulders, pick something up and knit for the neck. Boom. Done.

So, I want to do that with this: 

100% Cotton 4ply in fuschia. 

But at the top - instead of lace - I'll be doing entrelac. Boom? What do you think?

Love Eleanor. 

HTML FML

A couple of months ago I talked about changing the website  and it really was desperate. Nothing had changed on there since the August before we opened and obviously a lot had changed with the shop. I'd had a load of commissions to do though and general other things like living a life so I hadn't implemented any of my plans but one fateful day a woman came to the shop whilst I was having a lesson and started looking around the shop.

I explained to her that we weren't open whilst we were doing lessons and she said 'well, it says you are on the internet'. Apart from the feasibility problems - if you've ever been to a lesson you'll understand - it's not fair to people that are paying for my attention to have that taken away by a customer. So, on the Monday I decided to have a scootle round the site and try to see what she was seeing. I couldn't. There was genuinely nowhere on the website where we hadn't said 'close for workshops' on a Sunday but it did get me thinking about the colour-scheme and the information that we'd put out there. We were still stuck on explaining our mission statement for the opening but two years on, this has changed somewhat...

At that exact moment in time, Jazz came into the shop and we put together a summary of what the shop is about and that you can find here: just click this link. We decided to put that on the first page but it kinda made the old 'about us' tab redundant. And once I'd made the decision to change that then I thought I might as well implement some suggestions that the lovely Rachel came up with about shunting the 'location' information into the'contact us' button because they were nearly the same (I still don't know how to describe this amalgamated tab - at the minute it's 'speak to us' but I don't think it's clear enough that the directions are in there - do you? Any ideas?).

Anyway, so one thing led to another and before I knew it I was having to think of something to fill in two tabs. I've got an idea for the 'coming soon' but I'm taking a break before I do that because, seriously - HTML? FML.

I decided to fill the 'about us' tab with a photo gallery. I got it in my head because I wanted the very first photo on the website, this one:

to be a lovely, undulating, rotating smorgasbord of photos, much like this. But blimey - have you ever seen javascript? It's genuinely like an alien language. I managed to get a few of our photos in and moving like they should be I just couldn't get the image to place in a reasonable position. It was hanging about it in the top right hand corner like this: 

I just couldn't bloody move it! It was at this point that I learned was css is and I'll explain it to you in the only way that I know how - if you're a html geek, look away now because this will be painful... 

So, websites are like a series of documents that link to each other. So each of our tabs - 'home', 'gallery', 'patience...' etc - is it's own little document saved on the back of our website but instead of being called 'something.doc' like a word processing document is it's called 'something.html'. So far so easy right? But to get these documents to show what you want you have to write what's inside them in html language. 

Essentially, everything in html needs to be in its own special little brackets. To make a paragraph, everything in that paragraph needs to be enclosed within a < p > and a < / p>. 

       < p > So a paragraph looks something like this. < / p >

To make a heading, the words have to be enclosed in brackets something like < h 1> and < / h 1 > or < h 3 > and < / h 3 >. 

       < h 2 > So a heading will look something like this. < / h 2 >

If you want something in italics then it'll need to be written in < i > and < / i > brackets or bold in < strong > and < / strong > brackets (or < b > and < / b >). 

(All of this is without the spaces, I've put them there so that blogger doesn't recognise the html and use it...). 

Photos are a bloody nightmare - they look like this: 

< img src="a-web-address.co.uk" alt="a description" / >

Each and every photo has to be saved in a position that it can be linked to - it's own little document on your website. If you get the address for it wrong, say a capital letter in the wrong place, then it won't turn up because the html document is looking for something that as far as its concerned, doesn't exist. 

But really - html at this level is fairly simple, you just have to know what you want to say and be very careful with spaces and capitals and things. Not too bad. CSS on the other hand - blimey o'reilly!

So, CSS is it's own little document saved on the website that each and every html document refers back to. At the top of every html document, there's a bit called the 'head' and in that you're telling the document a few important things, like whether you want google analytics and where to refer to for the css. 

The css document is where you tell the website what you want what's in your html brackets to look like. So, I could decide that I want all of my < h 3 > brackets to be 23 pixels high and all of my < p > brackets in the main body to be in Times New Roman. I would write that something like...

h3
{font-size:23px;}

p

{font-family:"Times New Roman";}

So it's still working with brackets - this time it's just those pretty wiggly ones. What that would mean is that every time I write:

< h 3 > My Heading < / h 3 >

< p > And then my paragraph < / p >

the html document would refer back to the css to know what style to make the the stuff in thebrackets. Does that make any sense at all? 

Right - as far as I'm concerned that's all fine. But then you get to this issue where everything has a margin (the space outside of it), a border (pretty self explanatory), padding (between the border and the content) and then the actual content. Those four elements can be different colours, sizes and styles. I still haven't got my head fully around that, but it's every single bloody thing. So as I was making my gallery, every element of it (each photo and then each bigger photo as it was hovered over) was affected by every single bloody box in there: 

So in this picture, the actual photo with the purple arrow, was affect by the box outside it with the red arrow and that was affected by the box outside of that with the green arrow. Every time I changed one thing, everything else had to be adjusted so that the whole thing fitted into the space that the css page had left for the main body of our pages. I'm not sure that makes any sense really, and if it doesn't then it's only because I don't understand it myself. 

For the past week I have been changing each element of the whole shebang to different weird and wacky colours and sizes so I can identify exactly which wiggly bracket refers to what (difficulty compounded by the fact that for every normal instruction, there also has to be one for when it's hovered on...). 

Another thing to share about this process is how exciting it is to look at these kind of things every day: 

'Borrowed' from this blog....

I don't suppose you can tell with a photo this small, but the writing in the middle of each spot is a six digit code for the colour that it is. So the lovely alice blue that's at the back of most of our website is actually: 

#F0F8FF

And, yep, you guess it, everytime I want to use it I have to find where abouts in the css the element that I want to change is and then write some squiggly brackets with something like 

background {color:#f0f8ff} .

Romantic, hey?

I keep saying this, but I genuinely didn't think that this would be my life when I opened a yarn shop. Thinking back to the beginning I honestly thought I'd have weekends, time to knit, time to get over hangovers... It's not a complaint because I'm really pleased that I can do this. It's hard work, the finickity aspect goes against everything I'm about and I wish I knew enough about it to speak fluently as it were (that would make it so much easier to google problems I'm having, as it is this website has become my bible) but it really is a pleasure to learn something new isn't it?

Right, I've just had my lunch as I've reread this so now I'll make a coffee and settle down to some serious shop sample knitting and blog reading - it's amazing how much passes you by when you take a week out. Tomorrow I write lessons, today I knit. 

Love Eleanor. 

Watcha Knitting?

The question was asked at work when I placed two balls of yarn on the table as I emptied my bag to find my keys. Two balls of acrylic DK yarn that I had just bought from from the shop whilst dropping off some postal receipts with last Monday, one cream and one black. Now, anyone who knows me will be aware that this is not my usual knitting material as I generally knit with my own hand spun and I know that sounds strange when I'm part of the shop but thats me and how I am!!

So the answer to 'watcha knitting' was 'I'm not going to knit anything with it' Why do people always assume that balls of yarn=knitting, why not crochet or as in my case, weaving? Eleanor  and June look at a ball of yarn and envisage a jumper, summer top, socks. I look at it and think weave, play, put it under the embellisher and see what happens !!

I have the urge to weave a long band with Celtic knot work on it so the next step is to sort out some new heddles for my inkle loom ( lost the last lot or maybe threw them out by accident)

The next day I turned up at my usual coffee shop before going to work with the loom ( yes, I take weaving to knit club sometimes-rebel that I am) and started to make heddles with pink cotton.

I don't like PINK!!!! says the coffee shop manager, 'it's not for you!!' I reply and enter into a conversation about weaving carpets and learn the Italian word for heddle which I promptly forgot.sorry Franco x

The heddle making continues into lunch break much to the bemusement if the young people that I work with, they have just about got their heads around seeing a spinning wheel in the staff room most Tuesdays but this is something more confusing!

I started to warp up the loom and continued this at knit club ending up with 67 threads which made the design look more like a bar code that anything else :-)

I found a pattern on the Internet although I would like to design my own at some point soon just so I can put my own 'stamp' on it. Wonder if you could have a skull and crossbones band, would be a wicked strap for a bag!!! or maybe elephants!!

This is the progress so far .

Will keep you updated if I produce any original designs :-)

Well, Well, Well....

What an eventful week it's been! I'll do this in bullet points because I really have a lot of work to be getting on with...

• I WAS HELD HOSTAGE LAST NIGHT! Bloody HOSTAGE! Haha. It's no massive deal but I can talk it up as a party piece ey? It was really odd, June was coming back to give me some receipts when a lad who was apparently calmly walking down the street suddenly ran into the shop and slammed the door shut. A second or two later and June would have been in the shop but as it was I was stuck in the shop with a mad man and June was stood outside and neither of us knew what to do!  So I called the police and expected them to come soon but ten minutes later, and after he'd eventually left the shop, they called back and asked if he was still there and for a description of him. Ten minutes later the police came and I said 'well what's the bloody point?! Twenty minutes later!? I could have been dead!'. And they said 'well, we were out looking for him'.... Not for the first ten minutes you weren't because I hadn't given a bloody description. Unbelievable. I don't quite know what to say but I'm alright, the shop's alright and I've never seen him before so I don't imagine he'll be back. 
• I've made some crosses with wire, stinking glue, some sticks and a saw!

• I've made some changes on the internet like I said I was going to and I'm doing more but I've spent three days trying to do one thing but now that one thing looks like it might actually be working!
• I have a date!

That's it - I'm off to get this one little bit working... 

Love Eleanor. 

An Ode to Picmonkey (when I'm feeling less giddy...)

I am often asked how to take photos of knitting/crochet in the shop - that sort of thing becomes important when you use the internet for Ravelry, blogs or things like Etsy or Folksy. My answer is always something like 'errr....natural light...?'. Truth be told, I'm terrible at photography and it's not something that interests me in the slightest. It's a means to an end - it allows me to show you what I'm talking about instead of using my terrible grammar/vocabulary to express things.

I do notice when people photograph things well though - just look at this blog. She was a regular poster to the dear departed Remnants but I don't see her around Rav so much now it's Remrants. I'm mentioning her because I remember she once wrote a few detailed posts about how to best show of your FO's and if you're interested you could have a little stalk but what I really want to talk to you about is how to make terrible photography look a bit better:

The answer is www.picmonkey.com.

Around this time last year I was frantically trying to get the patterns on the internet and we were using a website called Picnik which was fine if a little slow and we only really had access to very few bits and bobs. Then they sold out to google who decided to move it over to googleplus. We signed up to googleplus and I thought I was going to have to cope. I found a few other websites that might do just about what we wanted but I was sad that picnik was closing because as it was loading it told you a story about how it was 'spreading the blankets, buttering the bread, the ants were marching in, applying suncream' - cute!

Anyway, it was over, somehow I survived but one day I decided to have a quick google about picnik and low and behold it appears that some of the magicians who wrote that programme were working on a new website called Picmonkey. I was so excited I rushed there straight away and..... hated it... Somehow I couldn't work out how to even get a photo up to edit. I don't know what I was thinking about now, it's so easy!

Let me take you through a few steps that I use regularly:

This is the main screen. I've put an arrow pointing to 'edit a photo' (I swear it wasn't there when I first tried it!). All you have to do to edit a photo is either drag a file and drop it onto that square or click on the square and search for the file like you might do when you're normally opening a file. 

I'm going to work on this photo :

When you've done that, it'll look something like this: 

I was hoping that it would be on it's side as that's what it looks like in my files - but that's life. If you have to rotate something, click on the rotate symbol on the left hand side and it'll look something like this: 

And then you can mess around either rotating by 90 degrees using the swirly arrows, or flipping using the double ended arrows or rotating by tiny increments using the slide-y bit at the bottom. Make sure you click on 'apply' before you move onto something else (but because picmonkey is made for normal people, it will ask you if you really want to move on so quickly if you haven't). 

The next bit that I use the most is the 'exposure' button just underneath there. When you click on there it looks like this: 

And, (here's where you know this is an idiot's guide written by an idiot), you mess around with these slide-y bits. The 'brightness' bit is often useful for me, my photos tend to be a bit dark because I don't know how to place lights/place things under lights to get the best effect - sometimes it just works and often it doesn't but the 'brightness' bit is always useful. Here's what my photo looks like now:

It's got to be better - now you can actually see things! Looks a bit chalky though - know what I mean?

So, I pop down to the 'colour' tab and crank up the saturation and temperature, so it looks something like this: 

I'm worried now that I've gone too far the other way. So I'll pop back over to the crank the exposure down a few notches but since it's been bright enough for me to notice things, I can see that at the bottom right, my finger got involved somehow... So before I do anything else I'll click on the 'crop' button and it'll look something like this: 

All you need to do then is drag those little dark grey splodges at the corner of your picture out to where you want them to be. The bit inside the highlighted box is what will stay when you click on apply at the left side. My only tip here is the rule of thirds. Apparently, if you split your photo roughly into thirds then you're onto a winner. With this one, for example, I'll keep the grass roughly to a third and the sky roughly to two thirds, like this... 

Finger gone!

And then I went back to 'exposure' and twiddled downwards on the brightness slider and I came out with this: 

Which I all of a sudden like a lot more because the clouds are back! 

All the we've used here are the free functions. For now, there are other functions that are free too but I think that's just whilst they're testing them so at some point you can either pay for the extras or  stick with the free bits. 

All of this can happen in a matter of seconds if you're used to using it. Dead good. 

And now I just want to show you the other part of picmonkey which I haven't messed around with much yet (I think it's newer) but I am loving. The collage section! Go back to the main screen and click here: 

Once you've clicked on that, it looks like this: 

And from here you can either click on the upload photo button or the 'tiles' button:

Where the orange arrow is to change the formation of the tiles or the purple arrow to upload photos from your files. I tend to do the uploading first because then I know how many tiles I've got to use. 

Once you've chosen you tile formation and and uploaded all of your photos, it's just a case of dragging each photo into each tile one by one. The nice thing about this is that as you use each photo, they put a little tick on the photo which is something that's so useful but I've never known it done before. Brilliant. Anyway, I've put the photos that I've done today all together in a collage here: 

and just so you can see how bloody brilliant it is here's the first version with the last version. 

Good job! 

Right, I'm off to do more editing for my blog post tomorrow. A good one!

Love Eleanor. 

Ode to Picmonkey

I have a favourite website (besides ours of course) and it's called Picmonkey. I genuinely feel like I'm in love. Which reminds me - those of you who don't follow our facebook or Twitter, I shared this photo t'other day and I honestly fell in love. How does it make you feel?

I can't get over how much more handsome he is with yarn in his hands...

Anyway, back to picmonkey. Seriously - I don't know what I'd do without it. It's a free, online, photo editing  software programme and it makes me smile every time I use it. Me and Masa wrong three poems to it - here:

Limerick 

There was a young yarn shop owner, 

Who found it difficult to hone her, 

Photography skills, didn't want to pay bills, 

So she found pic monkey and sang 'my Sharona'. 

General Poetry

Oh dear picmonkey, fair and true,

What would this humble LYSO do without you?

I'm shit at photography, and editing too, 

But you make my photos look good, you do. 

Haiku 

Oh pic monkey true, 

What would I do without you?

You make my pics good. 

But - seriously - we've spent so bloody long writing these poems that I have no time to write a proper blog post. So I'll leave it at that and write a blog post with some serious content tomorrow. Sorry....

Love Eleanor. 

A Present and a Request

A little while ago I got a call from a lovely lady from a local school - Candleby Lane School in Cotgrave to be precise. Click on the link above - it looks fantastic! They're doing something interesting there; they have a sort of mini farm going on. What a marvellous idea! The kids help muck out, look after and enjoy the animals. I'm a firm believer that all children should spend time with dirty fingernails and the smell of a muck heap in their noses - never did anybody any harm and generally does a lot of good. So far, so good ey?

She didn't just tell me about the school though, really she rang me to see if I had access to any spinners to see if they could do something with the fleece from their school sheep. I said 'Ohohoh yes, I have access to spinners' so here's where you come in... She wants to give you a whole fleece (that's the present) in return for some spun yarn (and it might be nice to give them some of the processed fibre too) so that the kids can see all of the parts of the process. I know spinners love to pass on the skill, it's one of them there 'dying arts' ain't it?

I asked for a few more details, and a photo of the sheep, and she sent it to me but our e-mail apparently went a bit mental and we didn't receive it so all I have is that she is called Lily and she's a Welsh Cross Charollais.

I did a little google to see if I could find a picture of what she might look like and I found this really cute thread - 15 years old and breeding sheep!? Good man.

I've replied back to Jan, who got in contact with me originally to see if I can get a photo. But until then, if you're interested, and they'd be really very grateful, give us an e-mail on knit at knitnottingham dot co dot uk or a ring on (0115) 947 4239 and we'll get you in contact with Jan. I'm sure it would do no harm to get in contact with the school directly either.

Isn't this a wonderful little project!!??!

Love Eleanor.

Edited - Sunday 05/08:

Blimey - this has caused some controversy! We seem to have struck a nerve about what a spinner's time is worth and whether it's worth spinning fleece that may not be top grade quality even for a good cause like this. Hmmm... I understand, I've been a bit burned out by knitting for other people recently. So much so that I'm having August off commissions. I might have a think about it and write a blog on what I think a skilled craft person's time is worth, ey? Until then I'm putting my head back under the parapet because I've got more pissed off about strangers on the internet than I should have done really - I'm sure we've all done that at times...

Anyway, we appear to have some talented and willing volunteers for the project and I know that the kids and the school will be most appreciative. But what I really wanted to show you is that some photos turned up! Here! Isn't she cute!?!?!?!?

Love again, Eleanor. :)

Watch Out

I'm about to tell you how much work I've done again... and about an argument... Ha. I'll keep it short and sweet but first, I read something lovely over my holiday and thought I'd share it with you. It's from a book called 'The Pleasure and Sorrows of Work' by Alain de Botton and he says:

"When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others."

Blimey - my job must be the most meaningful in the world then. It just stuck out in my head so I thought I'd share.

Now, I need to show off about the work that I've been doing:

These are going to be our new gift vouchers! Printed business card style to be a bit less cumbersome than our present A5 size ones... As I was searching the internet to find places to print this I found some proper chip and pin kinda cards that you can have printed! I would bloody love to have those! The Bead Shop have/are going to get some and apparently they're sparkly! Well jel. 

In the end we went with Instaprint who offer a good price, are quick and are local! I think, should you ever need to use them, you should ask for Helen because she's bloody wonderful!

On top of that I've made a bloody brilliant poster! But I can't take a photo of it because my phone's still not right from the last time I broke it... Suffice to say it is wonderful, awesome and marvellous - you'll just have to pop into the shop to see. It does have this on it though:

We've also started planning for our birthday bash and I have BIG BIG BIG BIG BIG surprise for you BIG! I've done a fair bit of work towards that but I can't tell you about it or I'd have to kill you. 

And then, I'll just mention that I'm in a dispute with Payzone, the actual issue has been sorted but I'm gearing up to put a mega complaint in so I won't say too much yet. Suffice to say, they won't get away with what they think they've got away with. I just feel sorry for the young lad Andy who I was on the phone to earlier. It's unfortunate that the smaller cogs in the machinery get the brunt of people's frustrations. 

Later this week should be a better blog post but I wanted to say 'hiyaaaaaaa' to everybody that reads the blog and isn't on twitter or facebook. Hiyaaaaaaa!

I'll leave you with this beauty of a photo. It's my nephew Seb at Stonebridge City Farm (which is fab btw) trying to make friends - an excruciating experience to watch....

He's the one stood behind the slide. He just kinda stands there staring at the kids he wants to be friends with. Reminds me of his aunt...

See you soon. :)