December photo a day challenge.

Well lets give it a try but I'm promising nothing. The challenge is to post one photo a day through December.
Here is day one.
A chocolate house I made which will be sold to raise money for the Girls Brigade Kenya trip. Please excuse the mess in the back ground.

Busy, busy

Well I've had a busy few weeks. We went up to York and met with Hannah, Ron and Carter for a day of Christmas shopping and a meeting with a Star Wars Storm trooper.

I've been busy knitting and have made several different styles of woollen hat for the winter. I've also made the table centres for the church coffee shop tables - ready to go out in December.

They are cheap and cheery decorations using sock snowmen in decorated jam jars.

Reindeer noses to sell in the church.

Label found HERE

Christmas Wrapping.

I'm determined to be more organised this Christmas. I'm wrapping presents as I buy them so spent a pleasant hour or so looking for ideas for Christmas present wrapping.

Some of the nice ones I found.


 http://pinterest.com/lesleya/wrapping
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All above images from pinterest
http://pinterest.com/lesleya/wrapping/




http://pinterest.com/arlineah/ribbons-and-bows/

http://pinterest.com/barboo/that-s-a-wrap/

Travels

What a hectic few weeks. We had a busy but restful holiday in Scotland visiting Oban, Staffa, Iona, Mull and finishing off with a few days at my sister's cottage in Lochgoilhead. We stopped off at my mums in Edinburgh on the way back, then stopped again at York to visit my daughter and family. The next week Hannah came to visit and we had some girly time shopping and chatting.

Also another excuse to go on a carousel - one of the many joys of being a grandma!!

Ben More

Another beautiful, sunny day and we walked for hours around Benmore Botanic Gardens HERE. Needless to say we got lost but enjoyed wandering around the paths till we found our way back to the coffee shop.

The leaves on the trees are changing to their glorious autumn colours.
Lot of bushes with unusual flowers on them.

 A spectacular path of Giant Redwood Trees

We also had to contend with a Highland traffic jam when a herd of these fellows decided to wander down the main road in the village.

Inverary and Lochgoilhead.

When I was young I used to love the comedy programme The Vital Spark. The boat from the programme was always moored at Inverary and we used to love to visit it. The boat disappeared when the programme finished and I haven't seen it for over 30 years. Imagine how delighted I to see that it is back at Inverary.

We have been really lucky with the weather -beautiful and sunny with no wind. Inverary was reflected in the loch and looked lovely.

We ended the day snug in the cottage at Lochgoilhead, with a log fire burning and this view from the window.

Staffa, Iona, Mull and Oban.

I've tried several times now to visist Fingal's cave on Staffa and the weather has always been too bad for the boat to go out. Well I got out at last.

Mark and I travelled out from Oban to Mull, then got the very small boat out to Staffa where we landed and walked along a rather precarious path to Fingal's cave.
There are a lot of very strange rock formations on Staffa.

After Staffa we visited Iona.
It is so beautiful and peaceful. I would love to spend a few days there.

We finished off the day back in Oban