My Busy Craft Life

Hello again everyone! Have I bored you enough with my holiday stories and pictures ? LOL, nah come on admit it, you loved a free trip to France! :) This time I was prepared and pre-blogged a lot before going away for our bank holiday weekend to Herstmonceux Castle for the medieval weekend. Do you remember the festival pics from last year ? Well it was great as always :) You may remember my WIP when I showed you these: These were the buttons for my 15th century cotehardie. After dragging the dress to France and not getting anywhere with it in the meantime, I was working every night last week to get it finished. Hemming by hand takes a lot more time than on the machine I can tell you that! Sadly enough, by Friday evening the dress was hemmed and the buttons had been sewn on but I still had 9 button holes to finish! You guessed it, this also had to be done by hand... So on Saturday I wore my winter kit (it was a bit chilly anyway) and was allowed to sit in front of a fri...

The ferry left at 10am so we had to get up at like 7 to pack and have breakfast. We dropped off the rental, and headed off. After we had dropped of the luggage in the cabin (this time we had one!), we went outside on deck to take some pics. The weather was amazing! Here you can see the harbour of St. Malo. One final look to St. Malo as the ferry pulls away.... Just thought this was appropriate as it said 'Bretagne' on it, hihi Obviously a French ferry :) We were slowly steaming ahead... All the way to England... if you look closely you can see France very small in the background here. VERY small... And that was it, that was our week of holidays... I hope you enjoyed coming with me and seeing all this, and that I didnt bore you too much! I had brought lots of things to do and to craft and you will see the result of this soon. I have to finish a few more costumes and time is running out on me so bear with me as I try to get the crafting, working, and blogg...

As promised, something about the French food. WARNING: this post will make you hungry! I do this thing where I photograph my food while on holidays. I just love food :) So here is a selection of what we had during our trip: Dinner on the ferry, we had a three course meal and this was the dessert: Grand Marnier Souffle! Well, the bf got my drink and the souffle was a little undercooked but the pic is nice :) Arrival in Rennes, galettes! I love galettes :) Galettes are Breton crepes and are made with 'black flour'. In Brittany, galettes are savoury and eaten as the main course, and crepes are sweet and eaten for dessert. This particular galette had cheese, mushrooms and egg. Champagne and chocolates at the birthday party of the bf's mother Closeup on the chocolates, they were very Halloweeny :) The white stuff was some sort of meringue, but I didnt try it. With all those dentist appointments I really kept the sweets to a minimum! At the birthday dinner...

As our time at the hotel had come to an end, we drove back to Rennes via Dinard which we had decided to visit. Dinard is a small coastal town about an hour's drive from Rennes and is completely lovely. It had a gorgeous roman/gothic cathedral. I think the main building is roman and the little tourrets have been added later in the gothic era. Some of the houses still had this really medieval look to them I found this statue inside a courtyard, it was a giant bridge with lots of little people sculpted on here. I dont know about you, but I liked it :) Dinard seemed to be a very touristy town, made obvious by tons of people with cameras hihi. So naturally there were lots of shops selling typical Breton things and even these little ships. Passing the farmer's market where lots of jam was on display The Jules Vernes fountain that I spotted on the way to the beach. The portrait had been completely laid in with little tiles, mosaic style. Whoohoo! We had reac...

I realised I may have mixed up the photos a bit but that's ok... After one of our visits I had all this energy left and there was a gorgeous flower trail (hortensias I think) near the hotel so I decided to have a nice walk in the sun. Armed with the backup camera (as someone forgot to charge her batteries oops!) I headed out... The first few flower bushes were definitely not hortensias... Oooh purple! It was really hard to get the right shade of purple on film but I think it kind of worked, these were gorgeous! Some pinks too... And more purple :) Nope, am not at all obsessed with purple ;) After trying to take my own photo for a while, a lovely Dutch couple passed and offered to help out. Yay, me with 'les fleurs'. Ok half of them are less than vibrant but it's the thought that counts. Still a nice pic though :) Back at the hotel the bf was enjoying a nice Breton beer... While spiders started to inhabit his shoes. Yes, we were definitely...

After seeing family and friends, we went to the country side and relaaaaxed... it was lovely :) The hotel was in the Arthurian Legends area and I found an exhibition about Morgaine that I really wanted to see ( Morgane à Mélusine in Chateau de Comper en Brocéliande) . That wasnt my best idea... The exhibition was nice but a little boring and it wasnt very big so that we had a lot of time to spare afterwards. The bf suggested a spontaneous hike (without any food or water and not wearing the right attire but yes we went hiking). So we went to the Valley of No Return... In Arthurian legend, the Val sans Retour (Vale or Valley of No Return) is an enchanted land in which the powerful sorceress Morgan le Fay imprisons her lovers. The spell is eventually broken by Lancelot. The Val sans Retour has been identified with an area of the same name in Paimpont forest in Brittany, southwest of Rennes, which tradition has long held to be the site of the legendary forest of Brocéliande. Th...

Hi all! I havent posted in about a week and that is because I was away on holidays :) The funny thing is that I had actually prepared several posts so no one would actually notice my absence but when I got back work was so busy and I am stressing to finish a dress that I just didnt get around to blogging... Plus we had a lot of photos to go through and while I really want to share some pics with all of you, I didnt really want to upload 300 photos! Yes, we were a little snap happy hihi. Anyway, our holiday was lovely :) As we went to France I didnt have to organise anything which was absolutely fine by me! Ok maybe for one tiny mishap... you see, we somehow managed to forget to book the flight which we didnt realise until about 2 days before departure. Oops! Luckily we were able to book the ferry which took us to about the same place anyway but then we didnt have a room and on a 12-hour ferry overnight ferry trip not having a bed is kind of exhausting. In the last minute we booke...