Pages

Tuesday 31 July 2012

A Kitten Called Betty - July Photographic Challenge

This months subject for the AKCB challenge was "Street Photography". 
I posted up quite a few shots, but for the purposes of this blog I have chosen just my favourites. 
If you would like to join in, either to take part, or just view what others have posted, please comment on this post.









Friday 27 July 2012

Closer to Nature

linking up to a newly discovered blog, Mum's the Word, this is my "Closer to Nature" photo


Green Day Friday




Linking up with Green Day Friday at Raindrops and Daisies

Thursday 26 July 2012

A quiet moment

. . . sitting in the shade on the decking, I could see

1) The lovely Rog


2) Broken Trellis


3) Tomatoes waiting to ripen





4) A red lamp holder




5) Cassie in the shade


 
Summer is here at last, lets make the most of it.





Wednesday 25 July 2012

Just a quickie . . . . .

. . . to let you know that this blog will be an Olympic Free Zone.

Tuesday 24 July 2012

Through 90 degrees

Some black trousers I'd recently bought needed shortening, so everything was set up on my work bench.


As the sun was shining in through the window (hey whats this? sunshine?), believe it or not, that actually made it quite difficult for me to see what I was doing, so a little bit of re-arrangement was called for.


Having moved the bench round through 90 degrees so the sun was coming in on my left side, it was much better.


I do so love my studio.

Monday 23 July 2012

Chalet cleaning

We have this outbuilding at the bottom of the garden. Because of its style we have nick-named it the Chalet, but really its just a glorified garden shed, the gated part on the left side is the Coach house, i.e. bike shed!


A couple of weeks ago, Rog got fed up with looking at the very grubby white frontage, so he set about cleaning it, 



. . . and a very good job he made of it, too.
We might even have to call it The White House now!

Friday 20 July 2012

On the lookout for Bustards

The Great Bustard was extinct in the UK until fairly recently when they were reintroduced on Salisbury Plain, which, being used by the military, is closed off to normal people, and therefore a relatively safe environment for these shy creatures (as long as they wear their earmuffs on what we usually call "shooting day", one day a year when they practice with the canons or some such). You can read all about the bird itself here, and you can read about the Go Bustard project here. Warminster Art Society arranges an annual fundraising competition to help raise funds for the Go Bustard project, this year there are 12 decorated Bustards in and around Warminster, which you can read about here. So far I have found three of them, the first is Cordath (a joint venture by Cordens, the hardware store, and the Athenium Centre)



The second is Jigsaw, this is in a shop window in the Three Horseshoes shopping precint




and the third one is Buttons, outside my newly discovered favourite shop (which I'll mention again in another blog) Thinking Outside the Box.






I have read that there is another one in the library, so I'm off to see that soon, and if you would like to have a look for them yourself, you can find the postcodes here.

Green Day Friday

Linking up with Green Day Friday at Raindrops and Daisies 


Following my lovely Other Half, who nearly always wears green clothes

Monday 16 July 2012

Suite dreams

The first dining suite that Rog and I bought together was way back when Alex and Oli were little more than babies, sometime during the last century. But I can still remember it as if it were yesterday, we made a trip to Ikea in Croydon, and brought it home on the roof of the car, then the little lads "helped" their Dad to assemble it. I dont remember how much we paid for it, but it wouldn't have been a huge amount, as money was quite short back then. As the chairs were wooden seated and non-standard in shape, I made some seat cushions from thick foam and covered them, it took me ages, but I was quite pleased with the results, photographic evidence exists somewhere, but I'm not going to bother to look for it now. That suite took a whole lot of bashing and battering from two growing boys and their friends, and by the time we moved away from Surrey it was looking decidedly shabby, so we took it to Wiltshire with us, but promised to invest in a new one at some future time. The house in Devizes had a really large and useful breakfast bar in the kitchen, so we never got round to buying the promised suite, and the old dining table just sat unused in the garage for over three and a half years, until we moved here.

By that time it was far too grubby and mucky to use as a dining table, so we put it outside the chalet (garden shed) to use as a potting table instead.


Meanwhile, indoors we still needed somewhere to sit and eat, so we used our large oval garden table with the original Ikea chairs - the seat cushions I had made were well past their sell-by date and had been removed, so I just tied on the garden chair cushions to make them slightly less uncomfortable.


Obviously this was only ever intended to be a temporary situation, and once we were fully unpacked and settled in, the hunt for the promised dining suite began in earnest. With four sons, two D-I-Ls (and counting) and a smattering of grandchildren, it really needed to be something quite large. Last week I found the ideal suite on ebay, large enough to seat us all, at a pinch. It only had eight chairs, two of which were carvers, but as the number of times we'd need to seat more than that would be very few, extra chairs could be drafted in from other places to make up the numbers. So I kept an eye on it for six days, and, keeping my fingers crossed, I was delighted to see that no-one else was bidding for it. With only twelve hours left of the auction I put in my bid, and I'm sure you can identify with my absolute joy and delight when I found out I was the only bidder and I had purchased this magnificent dining suite for just a fraction of its probable value.


Suite dreams indeed!

Friday 13 July 2012

The doors

. . . with apologies to Jim Morrison fans, as this is not a musical post.

I was aware that some of our upstairs doors didn't match, but I've only really just noticed that they are ALL different.



l-r, the little bedroom, the office and the guest room


l-r the airing cupboard, the studio and the main bedroom.
The studio door is actually quite a bit darker than the little bedroom door. The bathroom door is similar to, but not the same as, the door to the guest room!
Guess we're going to be doing a fair bit of door changing before long!

Green Day Friday

Linking up with Raindrops and Daisies for Green Day Friday



Thursday 12 July 2012

10 on the 10th

I recently found this here, organised by "Rebekah at a bit of Sunshine" and decided to join in. Basically you take 10 photos on the 10th day of the month, one every hour, roughly on the hour, to catalogue your day. I found it yesterday morning, and only managed 9, but I didn't think 9 on the 11th would be a very good title. So here goes.

8am  A torrential downpour, quite a normal occurrence for this summer though



9am  Time for tea and biscuits

10am A walk down to town for a quick bit of shopping





11am Shortening a pair of trousers


12 noon  The suncatcher on my studio window, and the sun is actually shining now



1pm Pasty for lunch 
(one between the two of us, and shop-bought rather than homemade)





2pm Cutting the very small patch of grass at the front of the house
(him, not me!)


3pm  Taking down an evergreen tree that has grown too big for its boots


4pm Time for a gin and tonic



I've added the Ten on Ten link to my sidebar, now I've taught myself how to do that, I might add some other stuff too, you never know!

Sunday 8 July 2012

More progress this week

The rather stark blind in the dining room was taken down, a batten fitted for a curtain rail, and then curtains were hung. 



As there was no blind at the kitchen window, having been removed by the sellers, the blind from the dining room was put up there. 



Rog made this row of coat-hooks for the entrance hall, we'll stain and finish the wood when we decorate the hall - but probably not until next year.