The week that all our stuff arrived

Hello Again,

This week was rather busy as we are still moving into our new place.

After my post last week Sunday we went and browsed a whole lot of home departments for inspiration and also to see what the general prices were for the stuff that we still needed. I totally discovered these two cute rubber duckies in the bargain bin at John Lewis. I really wanted them but 5 pounds is still quite a lot to pay for them in Rand terms and T pointed out that we don’t have a bath tub in our apartment. So I kept my future house, bath tub included, in my mind as I put them back in the interest of saving money.

I mean it’s purple and sparkly come on! This was made for me.

BATMAN ! Made me think of my friend from university back in ZA.

Just a picture of our street in case you are interested. 

I have found that I like wearing socks around the house as my feet do get a bit chilly. These were part of my Christmas present from my aunty-in-law. They are super cute. The text says “BEARY TIRED”

Monday I spent the day doing housework and laundry and ironing. I will see, I might make Mondays my housework day. I do do a little housework each day but there are some things which I only do once a week. Like changing bed linen ect.

T was working not in his usual office last week and there were some traffic issues so he landed up coming home quite late and he had picked up the groceries on the way home. Because I hadn’t started supper since he had the groceries he bought us each a Pork Pie. I had never had one before but it was very yummy.

Because T had gotten home late, I had stayed up and cooked late, so I had taken my night meds late. Some of them have a side effect of making you sleepy which is why I take them at night. And they are active for a certain period of time, so if I take them late, I wake up late too. This having been the case on Tuesday when I got up I was in a very sleepy moochy mood. So I stayed in my PJ’s ALL DAY! And worked on some art for my Redbubble account.

Moochy PJ face 

I started by digitizing some sketches from my sketch book that I did last year. The one pictured below is of my friend’s cat Ziva. She is a sweetie whom I love. The reason I often digitize my pictures for Redbubble is that it gives them cleaner edges which print better and I can also delete the background so that if they are printed on a Tshirt it comes out isolated. I obviously don’t do this for my illustrations which are watercolour etc.

Then looking through all the Redbubble products I realised that the one item my designs don’t really work well on are Mugs. Because the mugs need a long horizontal design. So I did some sketches and inked them. I have not yet digitised them, that will happen next week. The three animals are Pangaea, Zoe, and Salty. My families pets. 

T was pretty late getting home again but my mood instantly lifted as he walked through the door. What did I spy him carrying? A Tete a Tete daffodil ! Well the bulbs anyway. I was so happy. I love growing plants.

Tuesday night / Wednesday morning 

And oh my, have they grown in just the little time which I have had them. I think that they are supposed to take a couple of weeks before they flower but mine looks like it is threatening to throw out a bloom anyway!

Progress shot, taken Sunday afternoon. (Today)

Wednesday, the first of February is my Mr’s birthday! And guess what, he got a massive delivery of “presents!” Well actually it was all our stuff that we shipped that got delivered. I was very impressed with the service. In Cape Town, South Africa I have always had trouble with deliveries. The companies give you vague time slots like between 8am and 5pm and then often they don’t even arrive that day and they don’t tell you anything. Well this company here in Edinburgh was lovely, they called me ahead of time to let me know that they were stuck in traffic and would be late. And they were only 20 min late anyway. They delivered 27 parcels.

I spent from 10.30 am until 6pm busy unpacking boxes. Unfortunately we don’t have cupboards or bookshelves yet so a lot of the stuff landed up just lying around. But we had taken an inventory in ZA before the stuff was packed so I wanted to go through the stuff and make sure that it was still all there and nothing was broken. Unfortunately 2 things did break, the glass in a picture frame, and the glass on a candle holder, but they were quite minor and glass is fragile. Plus I was pretty impressed that of all the stuff we shipped only 2 things were damaged.

At about 2pm I suddenly realised that I was starving and shaking from so much unpacking.. I also realised that I had barricaded in the microwave and the fridge so I had a hard time getting to any food. Haha. But I managed. Below are some progress shots of all the mess.

I am so happy that we packed T’s radio. It has been keeping me such good company.

That evening T and I went out to a restaurant to celebrate his birthday. I was secretly relieved because the kitchen was still in no state to cook in. We went to a little Italian restaurant nearby that was very nice.Our waitron was an old Italian man who didn’t speak English very well and he was so charming and sweet.

On Thursday I got up to a lot of things. First I finished sorting out and tidying up all the things that had been unpacked.

Then I came up with some quick valentines designs for my Redbubble . It was quick because I already have a template set up that I use for my yarn puns.

Then I decided to go out for a walk and to look at a yarnshop called Be Inspired Fibers that I had not been to before. It was also a very nice day for a walk. It was 9 degrees Celsius. I didn’t need my earmuffs or my gloves.

A pretty church that I spotted on my way.

The 2nd of February is mid way between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. It is also sometimes thought to be the first signs of spring. Well my walk agreed with this as I had to go through a large common, I think that it is called The Meadows, and there were little flowers popping up everywhere.

I then made it to the yarn shop. It was about a 30-45 min walk there. The shop is smallish but very warm, in temperature and in aesthetics and the lady working there was very friendly. I saw a beautiful sock yarn by OPAL that I really wanted. You can see it here. But in the end I decided that I can’t spend all our money on yarn and since I already have sock yarn at home I must work with that. The one which I wanted was black and purple and had sparkles. ❤ Just my thing.
When the shop keeper saw that I was checking out the sock yarn she struck up a conversation with me about knitting socks. I told her that we had just arrived here and that my husband wants me to knit him lots of socks. She agreed that this was a great excuse to do lots of knitting and buy pretty yarn.

On the way back I stopped in the Meadows again and sat on a bench while I told my sister and T about the pretty yarn that I had seen.

That evening I had a cooking adventure. We had left over mince from Monday night and I decided to make some wraps with cheese to use up the mince. I made the wraps from scratch using this recipe. The only problem is that I don’t yet have a measuring cup or measuring spoons. I have my little scale and T’s spoon for making coffee that is about 2Tbsp. So I had to try and convert the whole recipe to be either grams or Tbsp measurements. Haha. And then I also don’t have a rolling pin so I had to flatten them out by hand. But they turned out pretty good if I do say so myself.

On Friday I went out again. This time I went to go and buy some nailpolish. In ZA I had a huge nailpolish collection. It filled 2 sets of drawers. They were those little ones you get to hold crafts or make up. About 30cm tall and 20cm wide if I recall correctly. Anyway I have a bit of a nailpolish addiction. But I left all my polishes in ZA, I gave them to my sister actually. We are also wanting to save money to buy a house or flat in the future so I didn’t want to go and splurge out on polish. So I asked myself, if I could only have one colour of nailpolish what would it be. I went with a very dark burgundy colour. The bottle name is Black Cherries.

I also bought a clear to use as a bottom and top coat as I find my manicures last much longer that way.

I also went and bought a Turnip.. or Swede. Actually I still don’t know what I bought. T had asked that as a friend E was coming over for his Birthday supper, could I please make haggis, neeps and tatties. I already had the haggis and the potatoes  just needed the neeps. The problem is that apparently in scotland people call Turnips, swedes, and they call Swedes, turnips. But what I bought looks like a Turnip to me, and since it was for the Neeps… I guess I think like a Scott? I don’t know. My mother used to grow turnips in her garden and they were always this big, but T says that turnips are supposed to be smaller.

Then I cooked the haggis. We actually made a lot because T had read the label and although it said serves 3, he decided it was too small and bought 2 of them. So we ended up with a lot. I also had to cook it in the microwave instead of the oven because it called for tinfoil which we do not have yet.

In the end it all was delicious so that’s what matters. And look how classy we were… drinking wine out of little glass cups because we don’t have wine glasses yet.

I also finished my next pair of socks! They are a Stylecraft sock yarn. They took me a long time to finish compared to my other 2 pairs of socks but in my defense I did have a very busy week.

My fancy photoshop skills to hide my hair leg haha

Saturday was a very exciting day for me. First off our internet got delivered! So we now have uncapped internet… yes this means I can blog at home and I can watch as many youtube videos as I like! The package also included TV so we have that now too.

Then in the afternoon I went to my very first Knitting meetup. I found the group via a website called Meetup. There were 5 of us there in total and everyone was super friendly. We all got on and they also helped give me suggestions on where to go and buy fabric for sewing with. (That is my plan for this week. I have 5 stores to go to so I will go to one a day hopefully).

 

I was also super duper inspired by something that someone else was knitting. It is called illusion knitting. So if you look at it straight on it looks like normal stripes but if you look from an angle it can form a pattern or even a picture. I really want to make a cushion cover like this now.

And of course my sister was sending me pictures of my little fur baby whom I miss so much. But I am very glad to see that she has settled in and she seems to have claimed my sister and her BF as “her people”. Which is kind of funny because my sister doesn’t really like cats and also Salty used to attack her when she was little so now my sister really doesn’t like Salty. But Salty sleeps in my sister’s room a lot and she likes to sleep on my sister’s homework. She even ran into my sister’s room when she got into a fight and got hurt.

Wow this landed up being another rather long post. Sorry for all the pictures and I wouln’t blame you if you decided it was too long; didn’t read. 😛

Well that’s it for now, see you again next week.

❤ Diella