Hot and bothered and needing more washi tape

The sign of a true Brit is the ability to find something to say about any kind of weather.  It's part of our heritage; it means we never have nothing to say when we meet someone new.  It's either too cold, too wet, too windy, or, in the case of the last couple of weeks - too hot. Boy we've had some high temperatures - up in the 30s and whilst that is lovely if you are relaxing by a pool on holiday or lazing on a beach with a gentle breeze keeping you cool, it's not so nice if you are sweltering in the office.  We don't have air conditioning in our homes or local offices - because for 51 weeks of the year we wouldn't need it.  But it would have been handy recently.  The school I work in has been unbearable and the demand for fans in classrooms has outstripped the amount the caretaker has in store.  If you find a fan, you don't dare leave your desk for long as when you come back, someone will have 'borrowed' it 'just for a minute'. Come to think of it, that's how I 'obtained' the one I've been using ;-)

To be honest, when I've been at home, I haven't ventured into the garden much until the evenings because it's been too hot, but this has meant that I have a perfect excuse for getting a bit of crafting done.  {It's also been the perfect excuse for not doing the ironing, hoovering or cooking many hot meals.}  Now I'm not a great card maker, but I always admire cards that other people make.  I follow Sarah on Pinterest and Twitter and she finds some fabulous cards and there is one design that involved using washi tape that I particularly liked so when we were invited to the 30th birthday of the daughter of a friend of ours, I decided to have a go myself.

I can see this design working for all manner of occasions and I may be tempted to do it again.  I may just need some more washi-tape ... (any excuse)

I've found a few more scavenger hunt pictures recently and have updated my flickr album which you can find here.  Having searched for a dinosaur, I found a book featuring 1000 dinosaur stickers and then saw that the local supermarket has a treasure trail for children where you have to find various stickers.  I'm not sure who was most excited when I saw this one, me or the 4 year old standing next to me.  But I was the only one who pulled out their phone to take a photo!

Fantastic floristry

It was the EK crop on Saturday and I was SO looking forward to a day of cupcakes crafting.  It was a smaller group than normal which meant that there were TWO cupcakes each - yay!  Salted caramel with fudge cubes on top.  Yum. Yum. Yum.

Karen had designed a beautiful layout with a variety of hand made flowers as an embellishment.  Karen has a rule regarding layouts, if you can hold the page in one hand and it still lays flat and doesn't bow down at the edges, it doesn't have enough embellishment on it!  But when I opened my pack and saw the raw ingredients for about 40 flowers - my little heart sank, until Karen told us that she had run off as many cut outs as she could get out of the paper and they wouldn't all be needed! 

I must just draw your attention to the larger flowers with the fancy middle.  How gorgeous are they?  So lovely! All achieved with a bit of clever folding.  I almost had to have another cupcake to boost my sugar levels when I saw the one that looked like a rosebud that you fold around in a spiral.  We had done these in a previous class in vellum and things did not go according to plan!  However, either I have grown more dexterous in my old age or it's easier to do with paper, because they rolled and bloomed and stuck brilliantly.  It's so lovely to see a flat piece of paper transform into something so pretty. 
Another truly successful part of the day was Karen, Denise and I all managing to tick off another scavenger hunt photo.  Something or someone out of place.

There's a children's playground outside the hall we use for the crop so we pushed all the toddlers off the play equipment (not really) and raced to the smallest slide we could find.  So - three scrapbookers going down a slide, I think we fit that category (even if we didn't fit the slide!)

 

One month in

Well the great summertime Scavenger Hunt 2013 organised by Rinda is well underway! Today she has posted the first 'linky' for people to show their pictures.  Be sure to check it out on Rinda's blog.  And I have to say that at this moment in time I've been quite fortunate in finding a fair few of them.  However, we all know what that means in reality.  I've ticked off all the easily accessible ones and now am left with those that will either need a little bit of thinking outside the box or lucky finds.

I've put the ones I have found together as a set in Flickr.  You can find them here  and I've also made sure that when I have shown any of them in a blog post I have added a tag of  Scavenger Hunt 2013.

I think the one that made me smile the most at finding was my take on the Police car. 

 

One thing that I am enjoying this year and which is a sign of how times change in a short space of a year, is that people are adding photos via Instagram, the phone app that lets up upload pictures and link them with a hashtag.  It's a fun, instant way of seeing something and one of my favourite apps at the moment.  I also love the 'Beautiful Mess' app which lets you easily add text and graphics to pictures. 

This is such a fun project and I'm so pleased that it is becoming a popular annual event.  It must be hard for Rinda to know what to include.  Something that is 'easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy' in England may be as rare as hen's teeth in the US.  For example, one year the hunt included an outside washing line.  Something which almost every English household will have within 10 feet of their back door.  Yet apparently quite the rarity in the sunshine states of America.  Who knew?

 

But I think that the thing that has had us all in a quandary has been the picture in the clouds.  A brilliant, inspirational idea.  How we are all commenting on this one.  Either people have wall to wall blue sky (a la Arizona heat for Deb Turtle) {trying hard not to be too jealous of this dilemma} or we have wall to wall cloud cover with no blue bits in between to make a picture.  But when that cloud does break up, I reckon the streets of England are full of people walking around looking up at the sky and tripping over in the street trying to make out a shape in the clouds.  And how many of us have watched a shape forming, had an absolutely brilliant thought as to what it looks like and then by the time you scrabble around in your handbag, find your phone, put the phone into camera mode, point it at the sky and ... it's gone.  A sudden gust of wind has dispersed that beautifully formed picture of a horse/unicorn/teddy bear and it now just looks like - well, a cloud. 

 

One thing we must remember though is to always have your camera or phone to hand with batteries charged, you never know when a photo opportunity will present itself.  Take this morning, driving into town on the way to the supermarket.  Stuck in a queue of traffic, I saw three American wartime Jeeps parked outside the church.  With American servicemen in the driving seats and women dressed in authentic 1940s clothing and hairstyles.  Totally out of place - right?  A perfect scavenger photo - right? Let me tell you that shouting out, no don't move on, wait a minute I need to get a photo, where is my phone, why isn't it in the pocket I normally put it in, oh there it is, quick turn on the camera, does not work.  When the traffic lights turn green, the cars behind will not understand the whole 'need to get a scavenger hunt photo' concept.  And so another missed opportunity to chalk up to experience - but a lesson learnt.  Do not put phone in handbag while a passenger in a car.  You never know when you will need it! 

 

 





Scavenging via Instagram

What did we do before cameras had phones?  I think it's fair to say that I rarely venture out without my phone but frequently leave my camera behind.  Which is great because it means that I have been able to snap a few scavenger hunt photos that I would otherwise have missed.  I've been pretty lucky really and when least expecting it I have found

A tower.  Believe it or not, this building used to be my primary school! It was turned into a private home in the 1970s but had been a school up until then.  It dates back to 1850 apparently - I know for a fact that my grandmother, my mother and I all went there.  And now it's up for sale again.  When I looked at this website, I couldn't believe how it has changed since I sat there learning my 'times tables'. Anyhow, the square structure on the roof is definitely the picture I will be using for my 'Tower'.

A funny sign.  Looks as if however you are feeling, you need to pop into this cafe for a cup of coffee.

These candles look good enough to eat!  The Laura Ashely shop in town is closing down so of course I had to pop in for a last browse.

A cloud in the shape of something.  Boy am I struggling with this one!  And because I think you need quite some imagination to see what I am seeing, I've added a few pointers.  I think it looks like the profile of a face.  But now I'm wondering if it is more like a cow standing sideways.  I think I may be revisiting this one!

Now I know the prompt said police car or fire truck and this quite clearly doesn't come into either of those.  I saw it chained to a lamp post outside the supermarket on Friday and it made me smile.  Is this for chasing criminals who are not looking to get a quick get away?  I need to check to see the rights and wrongs of photographing police cars, I don't want to get taken away in the interests of my scavenging!

And finally, an animal in an aquarium.  Just look at this little cutie sunbathing under his heat lamp!  I say 'little cutie' but I'm not sure that I would want to actually reach in and give him a cuddle.  I prefer my pets with soft fluffy fur on!
So that is 15 done now and whilst part of me is standing back with a warm satisfied glow, I know that I am now left with a few that may cause a few issues. 

Scavenger Hunt progress

Anyone fancy a trip down the local pub?  Any excuse to grab another photo for the scavenger hunt!

Does this look familiar to anyone?  This is the pub we went to when Deb, Carrie and Alison came over and it has been shut for about a month for renovations.  I went there last night with friends and it is totally re-vamped in there.  It looks the same from the outside but the inside has gone quite trendy.

I don't know if anyone else is doing the same as me for the hunt photos but I am taking anything I see that fits a category and then at the end of the hunt, if I have more than one photo for any one item, I shall choose my favourite.  Which is a roundabout way of saying that I don't really like my 'theatre' photo.

It is our local theatre and they have a wide variety of productions going on there.  It's where I went to see the Strictly Come Dancing show a few months ago.  I was chatting to someone at work and said I was going there to take a photo on my day off and the Head of Art overheard and assumed that I was going to look at the Art Exam exhibition the school has going on in one of the galleries.  She was so happy that I was going I didn't have the heart to tell her my real reason.  It's an unusual place in that there are the studios where shows are performed, there's art gallery space and there's also a local museum.  See, Cecil Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia in South Africa was born in my town and there is a museum wing dedicated to him there too.  It's not as attractive a building that I would have hoped to include! There was a poster advertising a skeleton of an archeological find in the foyer and I was grinning as I said to my husband "Look, I can tick off Dinosaur too" at which point he guided me away and said 'Deb, it's a horse'. 
 

And finally a picture of me with a crafting tool. I am excitedly starting my next quilt and it seemed an ideal picture to show the kind of crafts that I am enjoying at this point of the hunt.
I do have some instagram pictures that I've found too and need to find out how I can get them onto my blog, ideas anyone?

Hello Monday

• Hello to meeting up with a friend I haven't seen for far too long.  We only live about 10 miles from one another but it seems to take forever to find a date that we are both free.
• Hello to waving off our daughter for a short trip to Spain.  If I say 'The Only Way is Marbs' - I think the UK bloggers who have heard of TOWIE will know where she is off to.  It's a friend's hen weekend and much planning has been going on.  Not to mention fake tans, fake nails and fake eyelashes! 
• Hello to hopefully tracking down another Scavenger Hunt photo.  I had a successful weekend:

Coco is always up for a nap so that was an easy one.  I also have an alternative of this that I put on Instagram, I'm not sure which will make it to the final 'cut'!  Then on Saturday my husband and I were in the car and I had a sudden brainwave that there was an old windmill in one of the villages near us. It was built in 1787 so it's a wonder that there is anything left but it looks remarkably well preserved!  Then I was out on a dog walk and discovered that there were quite a few people out fishing - how very convenient.  But hard to take a decent photo on a phone camera with a dog pulling on the lead.

• Hello to another busy week at work.  Trying to organise 160 five minute long meetings for the new girls joining us in September.  It's a logistical nightmare!
• Hello to being able to finally share the news about my work colleague who has not only appointed an agent, but has signed publishing deals in the UK, Italy, Germany and Holland.  So exciting!  Her book will be out in print by November, needless to say there will be a book signing event in the office.

Scavenging again

I was so excited when Rinda announced the subjects for the Scavenger Hunt recently and mentally tried to think of places that I could find the things on the list - and there are only a few that made me think 'where on earth am I going to find THAT?'.  But as we all know, the most unlikely things can turn up when you least expect it so cameras at the ready girls!

So I thought I would share the first 3 that I have captured

 Stained glass.  This is the frame of a mirror that we bought on a weekend away to the beautiful seaside town of Southwold.  I love the colours in the different types of glass and it's one of my favourite decorations in the home.

 Oh yes, the outside bench was not a problem at all, and it gives me chance to show that quilt again!  (Thank you for your kind comments on it.  The fabrics came from Pelenna Patchworks and I was so impressed with their service and quality of fabric)

 Now for a civic building, I wasn't sure which to choose.  You see our town is a town of two halves.  It is a really historic town, so a lot of the buildings look like this - which is the registry office.  You register births, marriages and deaths here and if you want a civil service for your wedding, this is the place you come!

But there is also a modern side to the town, and these are the Council offices.  Now, which photo should I choose for the scavenger hunt?  Decisions, decisions!

 

Is anyone else likely to put any of their pictures on Instagram?  I noticed that Amy had an adorable picture of someone fishing there this morning with the hashtag #summerscavengerhunt2013.  Should we choose the same if we decide to show any photos that way? Or should we each choose our own # title so Amy can keep hers seperate for herself?  What are your ideas?