I am back from Yor

k, and we had a brilliant time- lots of playing with these monkeys, (plus one more who was t
oo tiny to appear here- just two weeks!) two are mine and there are two more sets of siblings, a two and a three, can you guess who belongs together? We are at
Newby hall here, which is brilliant, I balked at the ticket price but it was so worth it. There was even a sculpture exhibition with hammer, goggles and chisels for the children to have a go- we got a good half hour of relative peace whilst they bashed away! Our hosts were good enough to offer to have our children one day so that Simon and I could browse in

York and they even gave us some birthday sending money! First stop was
Bettys, before the rush began.I had a delicious china tea with rose petals which was very special, and a fat rascal- a huge warm cross between a scone and rock cake. It was lovely as always. We did a bit more mooching, I shopped at Craft Basics which is my favourite of the York craft shops, then on to Borders, we were lucky enough to visit on a day with 25% off with a voucher from the Guardian. I sat on the floor with a stack of lovely crochet books but settled on this
Nicky Epstein one, I could see so many brilliant ideas here and can't wait to have a lit

tle play. It was great to celebrate
Simon's birthday in York and I settled on a tree stump cake- mainly because it could be made from Marks and Spencer
Swiss rolls which everyone knows are the best shop ought cake in the world for the money.
Simon's sister and I descended into hysterical giggles putting this together, but it was delicious- and unusually for me required no green butter icing!
So we are back home for the last couple of weeks of the holiday- I am making the final push on the secret project, I've packaged up my P-I-F parc

el and really feel like I'm really making progress. I also was lucky enough to receive a give away package from
Wanda. Look at this cute little bird charm, and I love the buttons and lace- thanks so much for another sweet parcel Wanda, you are very generous. I have also had some more thoughts on the Kent
crafters picnic- so if you fancy meeting
here on Sunday 30
th at 11am, do please come along and bring your picnic. I will dedicate the next post to the picnic wit some more details and hopefully a little roll call of those coming along. See you soon!