The Sense of a Birthday

Hi there,

The wind is finally calming down, but according to the weather it will be back to gale force winds Saturday morning, along with some risk of snow!! We are not quite ready for that - break us n gently please Mother Nature!!!

Today I have two crafty finishes to share with you, a cooking disaster and an audio book review :)

The first crafty finish is my October cross stitch. I have only just finished it as I ran out of the thread for the backstitch, and then as I had started the new one, this didn't get completed. But it is done now and here it is:

The second creation is a birthday card I made using the larger toppers from the Papermania Art Deco 'Roaring Twenties' collection. I thought this image made a lovely birthday scene - just what all us ladies would like :). Again I used a monochrome black palette, and here is the finished card:

So I would like to enter this card into the following challenges:

Artistic Inspirations #144 Feminine

CCM #152 Winter Birthday

Deep Ocean #117 White and one other colour (Black)

Creative Moments #81 Winter Birthday

audsentiments 145 Anything Goes

The cooking disaster....well I decided to make my own mince pies this year. We are away at Centre Parks next week, which is the only time we are going to see OH's family before Christmas, so we will be taking all the presents (of course I still do not have all of them!). Therefore, I made some mince pies and froze them raw. However, I had some pastry left over, and as I am never very good with pastry I decided to make a few extra, cook them and take them into work as a taste test. The problem was that by the time I actually took them out of the oven, they were a little blackened - opps. I did still try the pasty and it has the texture of burnt pastry, so hopefully once somebody else cooks the rest of them it will taste like normal mince pie pastry lol.

AUDIO BOOK REVIEW

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Forty years after finishing school a letter arrives for Tony Webster which makes him re-examine the memories of his past, and throws him back into his old social circle. His serious school friend committed suicide, but nobody ever really knew why, but why has the mother of his old girlfriend left Tony his friends diary in her will. How did she get hold of it? And what is in the diary that is important to Tony?

This story is written from the perspective of the main character. Whilst it does have interest and intrigue it is not exactly captivating and often goes off on a tangent. While this does make it seem more realistic it also means that often you are left wondering what was meant by something. Also there is not actually an ending, or a conclusion to the story, which really annoyed me! Still, fairly interesting to listen to.

Thank you for looking and reading,

Hugz Tinz