Grow Your Blog 2014 - + a Giveaway!

Hello, Bonjour,  Bienvenue and welcome!

I'm hoping that I'm welcoming people over from The Teapot, as well as others from the Wonderful Vicki's Grow Your Blog event. 
  I hope that you'll also go and visit lots of other craftily inclined blogs throughout the Internet. This is an opportunity to see what talented peeps there are around the world and to admire their work.

I introduced myself over at The Teapot, but as the Wibsite is still playing silly b*g*e*s and refusing to upload photos, I'm going to show some here. They are not foodie photos, so I hope that Food lovers will bear with me (Menus for next week will be posted tomorrow)

So, here are the real Management in the Dormousehold:

Meet Pomme, the CEO, here overseeing some of my crafting activities from the comfort of one of my storage boxes. Er, thanks, Pomme, I needed that! We adopted her from a refuge in Roanne in 2005, when she was about 2 1/2 years old.

Here we have the Middle Management team, George and Millie. They are brother and sister, born in 2010. Often found curled up together, they enjoy playing with The Red Dot of Doom (a laser pen)
Here is a Lolcats (which I've used before) which sums up their attitude

And finally, we have the Office Junior, Bib, rescued from certain death in 2012:

She considers her role in life is to make George's life a misery (while hiding from Scary Millie) and to eat as much as possible. Knitting is an impossibility when she is around, as she tries to eat the wool - although, to be honest, George can be as much trouble. He has an uncanny ability to smell wool, and he loves nothing more than carrying out a lightening raid on my knitting bag and carrying off a ball of wool!

I enjoy cooking, and while I'm not very experimental, I do have a vast number of recipe books. As I'm trying to lose weight, using a mixture of the 5:2 diet and sensible Hairy Dieter inspired eating the rest of the time, I do tend to stick to my trusty Hairy Dieters books and my 5:2 recipe book at the moment. Do come back another time if you'd like to know what we eat and how you can try the delicious food too! You can even become a Follower here, as the lovely Keith did, recently.

GETTING CRAFTY

 

I know that this blog isn't quite the Crafty People blog that the Teapot tries to be, but I do enjoy making cards too. Here are some of my cards:

Made for an 80th birthday

with an example of my calligraphy inside

Trying out stamping

A snowboarder, drawn for a boy's birthday

The full card

And recently I have discovered Zentangling, which I have started to use in some of my cards

My giveaway for this blog is 5 handmade cards with this image of a cat, which I have Zentangled. (& maybe a few other goodies too!)

 

 It's an image I created for the charity Spanish Stray Cats, but I'm sure they won't mind if I use it once just for you dear people. Just leave a comment here, and I will enter you for the tirage. I really hope that if you are a cat lover, you will go to the Facebook page of Spanish Stray Cats (follow the link) and at least "Like" their page. Maybe you will be moved to do more to help these lovely people who are trying to make life better for the numerous stray cats in their area. I knit rather wobbly blankets for the cats to keep them warm in the cold Spanish winters & made some cards for them to sell

My giveaway for The Teapot is
5 handmade cards. I can provide cards for special occassions, or just five general ones. I will also throw in a handmade bookmark,  Plus also a card with a short quotation (chosen by you, bien sur!), calligraphed by me (Do you know, I don’t think that there is such a verb!) It will have to be short, as my hands are becoming artritic and I find it difficult calligraphing for too long!!

To be eligible to win that, you'll need to leave a comment over on the Grow Your Blog post

I hope that you have enjoyed looking at some of my crafting, and meeting the Management team. If you haven't been over to the View from the Teapot, you can find out a little more about me over there. I am looking forward to spending some time visiting the over 300 talented people who have signed up for Vicki's Grow Your Blog event, and I hope that you will also try to visit some as well. 

Thank you to Vicki for organising this, and thank you to you for visiting me - wherever you're from!

                

Growing: it's a good thing!