Happy Halloween!

Just a quick post to wish everyone a happy halloween and to share this year's pumpkin carving effort. 

Seeing as until last year I'd never carved a pumpkin, I'm still relatively new to the whole carving thing. This year's pumpkin was grown by my Grandad, and is relatively small so trying to hollow it out was a little interesting. We decided to go in through the bottom, rather than the top, to make it a little easier. 

And here's the finished pumpkin:

I also figured this would be a good place to post the pictures of the Halloween costume that I wore to work last Friday for our Fantasy Fun Day:

Front

Back

So, Happy Halloween everybody!

Another twenty-second birthday

Last Thursday was my wife's twenty-second birthday, and in true me-style I had to make her something. Simply buying a present is never enough. For quite a while I had no idea what to make her, then after looking on Pinterest, I found this, and decided that it would be perfect. 

After a quick trip to Wickes to buy supplies, I set to making the string heart, starting with a piece of timberboard:

I then spray-painted it in silver, trying to make sure I didn't get any of our bedroom painted in the process. After three or four thin coats I decided it was covered well enough, as I still wanted the wood grain to show through:

Next, I grabbed a piece of brown paper and sketched out a heart shape, trying to ensure that it filled as much of the wood as possible without being a very warped shape. This is the heart I ended up with, and then taped onto the wood:

 

Then came the noisy bit (which definitely confused my wife to hear); hammering in nails around the edges of the heart. I tried to make them evenly spaced around the shape, although this inevitably didn't quite happen.

Once I'd carefully removed the brown paper, this is what I was left with:

Now it was time to attach the string. I actually used some red double knitting wool I had lying around. After tying it around the bottom nail I proceeded to fill in the heart, making sure each nail was used at least once and then just playing it by ear to make a pattern that I found pleasing. To finish off the heart I wrapped the wool all the way around the outside of the heart to help shape it, tied the wool to the bottom nail again and then used a little clear nail varnish to help secure it.

After finishing the string heart, I had the slightly interesting job of trying to hide such a large present somewhere in our one bedroom flat without my wife catching sight of it, or any of the supplies I'd used to make it!

Here's a quick picture of my wife on her birthday, with the cake I made her:

Bad at being crafty

Since moving back to England, I've been surprisingly bad at being creative. I haven't yet finished the cross-stitch I started in Spain, or the Birthday Blanket that's been ongoing since last October in France. I also actually haven't started any other projects, as surprising as that is!

All I've managed to do is do some baking, such as this apple and cinnamon cake:

Aside from the lack of crafting I've completed, and the baking that's been done, mostly my wife and I have been settling into the apartment. We've still been doing some tidying and organising of our stuff, including buying things for our new home like the microwave we picked up today:

But speaking of being crafty, I've been having a little look at what Christmas gifts to make for people and decided on what to make my mother and grandmother so as soon as I've managed to finish the cross-stitch from Spain, I'll be making a start on those. I will get better at crafting again, promise!

A New Chapter

It feels like an awfully long time since I posted on here, but I've been more than a little busy. Since returning from Barcelona on August 26th, my wife and I have been in the process of moving ourselves 100 miles from our hometown. We picked up the keys for our new rented flat on the 28th and proceeded to move all the stuff we'd been saving in a storage facility those 100 miles ... all in our Fiat 500! It's taken us five journeys (and around 900 miles) so far and we still don't have everything here. 

That first week where we went back and forth three days in a row was very tiring, and then just a week after getting into the flat, I started work! A new flat and a new job, especially when you've spent the last year getting to stay at home and be crafty all the time, seems rather crazy, but there you go. Why wouldn't you want to do everything at once?

You might be wondering why we've moved 100 miles away from the rest of our family, but the answer is simple: my wife still has a year of university to complete and Oxford is where that is. I wasn't about to let her go off on her own now, was I?

In just under three weeks, we've mostly set up our flat the way we'd like it (thankfully it was furnished) and a lot of it has just been waiting for services to be switched over and on. We managed to get a Sky subscription installed last Friday and the phone line and internet have only been active since yesterday (thank goodness for iPhones!) so we're really getting there now. 

So here you, a quick look at the place we're calling home:

Bedroom

Lounge

Dining end of the lounge and door to the kitchen

We're especially enjoying having a separate kitchen with an oven and actual space to prepare food. That and being able to put up the frames we had stored has been really nice, along with having much more space to be in than we had in our teeny tiny French flat!

Well, what do you think of our new abode? Any ideas of where we can get a cheap chest of drawers to supplement our clothes storage? Any of you moved home recently too? 

Leaving Barcelona

Four weeks and 1800 photos later and we're about to hand back the keys to our rented apartment here in Barcelona and jet off back to sunny (or not so, as the case will probably be) England. We've had a thoroughly excellent time although both my wife and I are feeling that it's high time we were back to our homeland, looking forward to our exciting move to our new flat in a couple of days time and getting on with 'real life' again. 

Over the last four weeks we've seen a fair bit of what Barcelona has to offer, delighting in all the Gaudí buildings, walking round several museums and exhibitions, and throwing in a decent number of beach trips for me too. 

As a little taster of the fun times and sights we've had and seen, peruse the following photographs, but don't worry, I shan't put them all up!?

Roman ruins of Barcino

La Pedrera

The Gràcia Festival

Monastery of Pedralbes

Amazing dolphin show at Barcelona zoo

Maze in the Jardins del Laberint d'Horta

Nova Icaria beach

The Sagrada Família

Park Güell

We found Gaudí!

Yummy tapas and sangria

The 'Magic Fountain'

All in all, a wonderful stay in this city and I've almost no doubt that at some point in the future we'll visit again.