Dom and Tracey

On Friday Dom back home from nursery with Tracey Turtle. She's with us for whole weekend. On Monday she'll be back at nursery to be ready to visit other kid next weekend.

Dom took whole thing rather seriously, he showed her diggers on construction site near our street on our way home. They played his train set for most of weekend :)

'Look Tracey - here's my train!'

'This is an instruction, they showing how to put rails together :) '

Tracey became pals with some of Dom's toys - specially these two :)

She also likes Dom's room and wall deco :)

Dom was very eager to show Tracey how hard is using Mummy's crafty punchers :)

They read about sharks before sleep.

On Sunday they had very long walk along the river, watching birds, horses; smelling flowers on the bushes and collecting shells.

They reached park near next town ( 3 miles walk from our place) and played hide-and-seek in Janus sculpture :)

At the moment they both have some resting time after dinner and possibly they'll play more later :) Trains again or maybe dinosaurs or transformers :) Only they know this for sure :)

Just bit crafty :)

Really hard to say that I'm busy crafting lately...

Dom demands lots of attention, he is not interested in playing alone which is good I think, cause when we're playing together I can try to teach him new words or at least try to correct wrongly pronounced.
Since few days we are playing with his new train set, rebuilding rails, laughing when Dom decided that he wants to have tree on the rail bridge just in the front of coming train :)

He likes crafting, specially stamping :) I have set of small kiddy stamps from Lidl shop he loves to use.

Start of stamping

More then one stamp in one go :)

'Done for today Mummy'

But not only he had a chance for crafting this passing week. Mum of twins asked me for beaded piece for her son - football fan. First we agreed for black and white piece, but then I found out that Bailey is Arsenal fan so I realised that his piece should be in different colours and I made new piece. I sent his Mum pics of both and looks like he will have both pieces :)

Arsenal and Newcastle United :)

Last week I decided to re-do some of older pieces which stop to look good enough for sale eg.

Silver seed beads start to loosing the colour, so today I re-do this one and now it is looks like this:

I think now this bracelet looks much, much better then before. You can find it in my etsy shop, look for Tobisia's Lil Thing :)  I hope I'll find a time to re-do rest of my older pieces.

Around the UK

Since I moved to the UK I tried to see as much places as possible. For lots of people England means London - but England and the UK is so much more then London.

Yes I was in London. Twice. First time in 2005 when visiting my uni friend.

Parliament and Big Ben

London Bridge

London is huge with lots of cars, people, buildings... Too much of everything for me I think. It is beautiful city with lots of history, but with all this speed you can feel there on the streets is really hard to contemplate history and just enjoy the place.

I met my partner in 2006 when he came to the UK. We like North East where we are living. Here something what we found in South Shields (if I'm not wrong) in 2006

Little metal ships between the buildings

Or this beauty not so far from Tyne River.

Bridges in Berwick upon Tweed

We were on Holy Island in 2007 - amazing place even when raining :)

Remains of Lindisfarne Priory

Lindisfarne Castle

We were lucky to be there during festive time :)

Medieval life :)

We can say we are in love with Morpeth :) We are going there as often as possible and our boy like the place too :)

Turner's Gardens - very beautiful in the end of Summer :)

We also saw a bit of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Lake District and Cumbria.

Skipton Castle

View from Skipton Castle

Carlisle Castle behind me - things happened there centuries ago not always were romantic...

I think I stop here for now, cause I don't want to overload you with pics and names. Better to left something for next post about trips :)

Believe me Great Britain is much much more then London and only from you depends what you see. You can find here castles, gardens, priories, hills, lakes and lots of history in any place you stop.

Sewing and baking

Today I decided it's time to try again sew stuffed toy for Dom. My first attempt few years ago was complete disaster :) I tried a sock rabbit - I'm happy nobody saw it :)

How do you think, what I tried to sew today?

Oh yes! Dinosaur! T-Rex :) Result -pitiful in my opinion :) Great - in my partner's opinion plus Dom likes it, so... look:

Template ready :)

Before stuffing

Done :)

Dom and his new T-Rex :)

Good as a food :)

What do you think about my doggie?

And this was my morning :) Afternoon I thought 'Maybe I bake some cake' and I did :)

You need:

2 cups of flour, 3/4 cup of sugar, 1 cup of milk, 1/2 cup of oil, 3 eggs, 1 tbsp of bicarbonate soda, 2/3 tsp of mixed spice or only cinnamon, 1 tbsp of cocoa (or more), 100-150 g fruits - fresh, dried or frozen (or which is easier a half of jar of blackcurrant jam).

Mix all, spoon onto baking tin (can be spring tin, square tin, any kind you have) and bake in 200 C for 35-45 minutes (wooden screw comes out clean). You can bake it as muffins too - baking time around 25 minutes.

before placing in the oven

Cooling down after baking :)

Decorated with chocolate and coconut shreds :)

You can decorate your cake in your way :) Enjoy!

Busy day with Dom :)

We had busy day today - Dom and me :) He has midterm break and I decided that even with his cold is no point to keep him whole week at home.

I took him for little trip to Newcastle. He loves buses.

We make little shopping first - Dom choose nice T-shirts for himself :) and then we go to Discovery Museum.

Nice ship :)

Roman times

Oh bus!

I'm not sure I like horses...

Where is this rabbit???

I'm regulating the river :)

What a gun!!!

I think we check every single exposition in museum :) Dom was coming back to some pieces few times eg. regulating river :)

Then we went to nice bakery in Chinatown for snack - so many buns to choose from, plus all these tasty drinks :) Yummy!!!

Happy face :)

Then we went to Hancock Museum to see Dom's faves - dinosaurs!!!

Hey fishy, fishy :)

What a strange chap!!!

Hello friend :)

Bit of reading :)

Hi!!! Nice helmet!

This is my new friend.

By the way home we make a break in Whitley Bay for some slides on playground area, then have short walk on Promenade and we ate some fish and chips before heading back home.

We had beautiful, sunny bit chilly day and we back home happy and still full of energy - specially Dom :)