Hello there
Just back from our fab holiday in Italy which I will be posting about later. Here is a pic of the views that surrounded us all week, this was taken from one of the lovely villas that we visited – it was a wonderful holiday on all counts especially as we went all inclusive for the first time which was very luxurious!
I have just finished the page about my time in China so hope that you enjoy all my pics.
See you all soon and thanks for visiting.
I am still working on sorting out all of the pictures from China but have done these for the Scavenger Hunt so this is a little taste of what I did there.
Morning
The view from my hotel room in Guangzhou – from the 11th floor overlooking the park.
Button
Am emergency button in the hotel room bathroom.
Square
These beautiful boxes of tea were for sale in the hotel I stayed in – sadly I did not have enough weight allowance to bring one back this time but I will when I go again later in the year.
Kitchen
This was one of the wonderful restaurants I visited – a famous beef restaurant where you had a personal hot-pot on each table to cook all of this lovely stuff!
Theatre
We visited a historic house and museum where they had this beautiful puppet theatre with goldwork hangings.
Street name
I have started learning Chinese – being in the country surrounded by signs made it much easier, like this road sign outside my hotel – ‘shan’ means ‘mountain’.
Fancy
The chairs in the lobby in the hotel I stayed in.
Landmark
This is the 5 goats statue in Yue Xie park in Guangzhou, this is linked to the story of the founding of the city. Here I am with my colleagues Mo and Chris on a rather wet day out.
Fashion
It was easy to see what was in fashion in China as washing was hanging everywhere, this is one of the student dorms on the campus in Guangzhou.
Words
Loads of lovely Chinese words everywhere which were so beautiful, these were at the back of the classroom where I was teaching, these symbols mean ‘teacher’.
Half a face
One of the things that was strange in China was that all of the adverts featured very Western looking women with pale skin which is very prized in China. This was a picture outside a beauty salon. Seems strange that in my town there are lots of beauty salons offering spray tan and in China the most popular thing is whitening masks!
City
A picture of the other city in stayed in , Shantou. on display at a museum we visited – a small city by Chinese standards at about 5 million people.
Hello everyone, I hope that you are all having a lovely weekend.
We are and it started with lovely daughter Ellie’s 21st birthday on Friday. I can’t believe that she is not only celebrating her birthday but also that she is nearly at the end of her time at Uni! It only seems a few weeks ago that we were dropping her off at her halls.
As I type she is sitting writing her dissertation, she is doing very well and is about 3/4 way through this. She is also applying for jobs in the heritage industry so I am keeping my fingers crossed for her as she has worked so hard.
She is still volunteering at Greyfriars, the National Trust Tudor house in Worcester where she worked as a Conservation Assistant last year but has also been doing voluntary work archiving material from the old Worcester hospital.
We were going to go to Leeds on a day out and visit Temple Newsam house but got sidetracked by some new charity shops in town so had a day of retail therapy instead which not only gained us both lots of new clothes (including some lovely tops for Ellie’s work wardrobe) but also donated some funds to charity! A win win situation. I love shopping in charity shops, we have some fab ones in our town with some really expensive labels at a fraction of the cost.
Ellie does not really want to be 21 and out in the big wide world – she would rather be a Disney Princess so I bought her lots of Disney gifts for her birthday – here is her pile of pinkness and her and Jake posing , they look very 60s hippy chicks here.
We also had a Disney fairies birthday cake with a sparkler in.
One of her presents, from my sister -in- law Amanda, was this beautiful blackwork picture.
She also celebrated with her friends in Worcester – in fancy dress of course – the theme was Army Girls.
So have a very happy 22nd year – we are all very proud of you!
My Mum also arrived on Friday as we are off to the Italian Lakes on Wednesday – lucky us.
So take care and I will see you all in a week or so!
I have decided that I really do like Spring best out of all of the seasons. I like all the others for different reasons but there is something about the start of warm sunny days after the cold of Winter that makes you very happy! I have had a very lovely weekend and I hope that you have too.
I have been very relaxed this weekend which was wonderful, I had a quiet week at work as I was only in the office for one day after getting back from China on Monday and as I have felt very tired and jet lagged I had not planned anything for this weekend beyond a bit of sorting in the house and garden.
As it has been very good weather I have spent a good few hours in the garden and we had our very first BBQ of the year this evening, in March – a minor miracle!
As you may remember we had our very last BBQ of the year last October the 1st and it was so lovely this afternoon we thought we would seize the moment. The clocks have gone back as well so we had another hour of daylight so I pottered round the garden a bit more.
I have had to do some major work as well as the general post Winter tidy up as the very high winds in Jan meant we lost quite a lot of the trellis. I had taken half of it down some months ago meaning to replace those panels later but the rest has gone so I took it all down this weekend. Sadly I have lost quite a bit of the lovely clematis and ivy but the good news is that my camellias are blooming for the first time in 5 years!
I think it looks just as nice without the trellis – pity my neighbour’s cat Henry will have nowhere to climb and scare the birds now! I found a lot of pigeon feathers underneath the laurel bush so I think someone met a sticky end in his paws.
Also took some pics of my lovely Virbunum plant which looks so pretty at this time of year.
I have also been working on all the Chinese pics so that I can publish the page later on in the week, I took so many pics that I have spent a long time choosing which to use and resizing them.
I am set to have a nice relaxing week at work then I am teaching for a couple of days before we leave for our holiday in Italy! We are off to Lake Como the first week of April, lucky us.
Mum is arriving next weekend and Ellie arrives midweek – just in time for her 21st birthday! How did that happen, my little baby being 21? This is the first of the special birthdays this year as Jake is 18 in mid June, I am 50 at the end of June and Nana is 100 mid July.
I do hope you all have a lovely week ahead with lots of sunshine and nice things, take care and thanks as always for visiting.
As might have been expected I found some lovely things in China! I thought I would put these in a post rather than with the other pics I have been working on for a separate page so that they will appear in the tags at the side.
China is of course famous for silk and while in Guangzhou (which was formerly known as Canton) I went to the old 19th century area for a visit and found this beautiful piece of embroidery on silk in an antique shop there. There were many pieces to choose from but I bought the lion as that is a very traditional Chinese symbol. I love the bright colours and the detailed stitching. There were so many lovely things in the shop (that I could not afford) like caps and gowns and stitched shoes.
I also came across some lovely cross stitch kits – these were being sold by a street vendor on one of the bridges near the hotel I stayed at in Guangzhou and worked out at about £1 per kit so were a real bargain. I have just started stitching the Emperor one to remind me of the dressing up with Mo that I posted about last time.
The first group of people I worked with in the city of Shantou gave me a gift to say thanks at the end of the week which was very kind of them. I was thrilled when they gave me this beautiful set of local lace.There are about 12 of these in the set they gave me. They told me that lace making was brought to the area by missionaries in the 19th century so they thought the present was appropriate as it was a blend of West and East which was so lovely. They didn’t even realise when they chose this gift what a textile addict I am so it was perfect!
I was lucky enough to be taken out on a brilliant day’s tour of cultural sites when I was in Shantou. I spent most of my time in China teaching but had 3 rest days while I was there and the school I was working at took me to a historic house nearby where they had museum displays. This is part of a wedding carriage and is appliqued embroidery on silk.
Puppet theatre has a long tradition in Chinese culture and in the same museum there was a puppet theatre display with beautiful goldwork side panels.
I am still working on the rest of the pics to choose some for my page – I took so many so am spending a lot of time editing them and hope to post that at the weekend.
Thank you for visting and see you all soon.
I’m home after a very, very fabulous and exciting nearly 3 weeks in China.
It is the first day of Spring today and the weather has been lovely and sunny and there is blossom on my neighbour’s tree and everything is looking very good.It is quite significant that I am home to see the blossom as I have been starting to learn Chinese while I have been there and the Chinese name for England starts with the word Ying which means blossom (the Chinese use similar sounding words for foreign names).
My name in Chinese translates as ‘a beautiful forest’ because ‘A’ ‘Li’ ‘Son’ relates to those 3 characters. I think that is a lovely name, especially as I love being outdoors so much.
Here is my first name on my name plate from the first group I taught.
I am still feeling a little disorientated due to the time difference – it took 22 hours to get home yesterday and my sleep patterns are still very disrupted and I keep waking up and forgetting where I am!I am also very tired as I have been working very hard while I was there with at least 12 – 14 hour days. However it was brilliant fun. I met so many lovely people and was looked after really well. The food was wonderful and I got to see quite a bit of the country and some of the historic sites despite only having 3 days not teaching out of 20 days there.
I am sorting out the 1,000 plus pictures I took while I was there so that I can create a web page about the trip but meanwhile I have included a pic for this post.
Apologies for the quality of this as it is a picture of a digital photo that we had taken in the Yuexie park which we visited on one of our rest days. They had a stall where you could hire costumes and have photos taken so this is me and my colleague Mo dressed as a Chinese Emperor and Empress. We chose this costume as I had been treated so well in the first week I was there I felt like royalty and my other colleague Chris had joked that it was because I was princess. It was great fun dressing up and we certainly amused the people in the park, there was a huge crowd watching our photo shoot!
I will be back later in the week with more updates, in the meantime sleep is calling!
Thanks for visting.
Well this is it for a few weeks as I will be off tomorrow and will possibly not be able to post for a while as I may not have much internet access in China – am planning to create a ‘My time in China’ page when I get back to upload all my pics to – to add to ‘My Time In Nepal’ page, slowly I will be adding more exotic destinations to this little old blog!
I have been working on Spring Ornie exchange stitching for the last couple of weeks but thought I would share the finish from a while ago. I have been working on some Spring Ornies for me, inspired by the nicer weather we have had recently.
This is another one of the Quaker ones from The Workbasket site, once again stitched on sparkly evenweave and with my favourite Silk Mill thread and some little beads.The backing fabric I have had in my stash for a while.
This is a close up of the stitching, my new camera is so good at these sort of things!
And this is the backing.
Well I hope that you all have a lovely time while I am gone – take care and thanks for visiting.
I am posting this early as I will be away in a few days so Jake has strict instructions to upload this post to the link on Kathy’s blog so you can all see it. Most of these pics were taken in Spain again. This completes a year of taking pics for the Scavenger Hunt and I am still really enjoying it, I love taking pics and get very excited when I get something good for one of the words!
5
Lots of the Spanish houses have beautiful ceramic house number tiles so here is a number 5 from my street.
Music
This is on one of the roads I cycle along in Spain, the local council have recently fenced the road and painted the fence in multicoloured blocks with lots of musical notes along it, no-one seems to know why this feature has been chosen but it looks very pretty.
Train
Not strictly a train but a train track and station. I took a couple of quite boring train pics which I was planning to use then came across this model railway on one of my cycle trips in Spain which was in someone’s front garden! It was a large layout about 10 feet in total with a little model village as well as this train station. I can only imagine the owner has a very understanding wife!
Love
This was really hard as there are so many things that I love, my kids, my family, Spain, camping, travel, embroidery but I decided that I would post about something I have not posted before. The first thing I fell in love with would have to be reading and I still think books are the most marvellous thing. One of the great things about being on holiday is the amount of reading I do and this was the pile of literary love that I treated myself to at the airport – they were wonderful and I read the whole pile in 3 days!
Cupid
This was the only Cupid I saw in the whole month, not a very good pic but from a local shop window.
Food
Sandwiches Spanish style – the lunch that Mum and I shared on our trip to Elche.
Empty
The road down to the beach on one of my cycle rides.
In the sky
Nothing but blue! Taken from my terrace on Feb 13th.
Crowded
A picture of a crowded lemon tree taken on one of my bike rides.
Heritage
How spectacular is this – the front door of the cathedral in Elche.
Black and White
The Spanish love ironwork on gates and balconies and this is from one of the neighbouring houses.
Leap Year
This is quite a boring pic but a very exciting event – on the 29th Feb Leap Year Day I will be flying to China for nearly 3 weeks with work. I am very, very excited as you can imagine and will of course take lots and lots of more exciting pics than this one!
Warning this is a very picture heavy post – look away if you are not into random exploration into photography or go and make a cup of tea if you have a slow internet collection while it all loads!
First of all I would like to say a very, very big thanks to you and you and you, in fact all 5, 476 of you that visited me last month! I was really impressed to find that when I checked my stats yesterday I have leapt from my average visits of around 4,500 per month which I have had for the past year to the stunning figure of nearly 5,500 last month.
I am thrilled (Jake is grudgingly impressed though cannot imagine why people would want to visit a blog about stitching, photos and Spain!) Now I know that lots of people arrive here by accident through a search for something else and maybe don’t stay for long but I am very humbled by the fact that anyone comes here at all and love the fact that so many of you come back and comment and have become my bloggy friends.
I have had another very lovely week in Spain and have been indulging in some photography as well as an accidental fiesta.
It has become commonplace for me to just come across things happening when I go , we will just be visiting somewhere and something fab will be happening and this has become a bit of standing joke that not only do I get great weather for all my visits, ( I always say that God feels sorry for me because I live in Yorkshire whereas my Southern cousins sometimes get rain!), I also get events happening that we knew nothing about.
My last trip to Elche in October coincided with a wonderful medieval market and we visited the town last week only to find that they were preparing for a carnival at the weekend which we went back for on Saturday.
The reason for the carnival was not entirely clear, it was not a religious festival as far as we could work out and the people we spoke to said it was like Halloween, which we realised was more like the US version of Halloween than our UK one in that the point was to wear fancy dress of any sort (unlike our UK Halloween which is mainly witches etc) and have one great big street party involving brass bands and discos and general merriment.
Anyway we had a great evening watching and admiring the many costumes , early on the evening it was mainly children who were dressed up , princess costumes were a very clear winner with Snow White as the most popular but Minnie Mouse was a close second (she was also very popular with the adults later on).
Ellie would have loved it, being as you know a Disney Princess and a huge fancy dress fan, so maybe one day we can all go dressed up.We of course had to drink red wine and eat tapas in the little bars around the central square (just to be sociable you understand) and did not leave till about 11 – the rest of the town were due to carry on partying till 3!
There was a lovely mix of home-made and bought costumes and these pics give a flavour of that – I love the plastic cup hat and the robot got loads of pics taken. The band shot was just a random coming together of a group of people at one point before we left, love that about Spain – totally mad place but totally wonderful!
Elche is a very beautiful place with so much to see and its Palmeral (Palm Park) is a Unesco World Heritage site.
I have also been trying to take lots of lovely arty pics with the new camera that I got for Christmas which is very good (thanks kids!) and has very good definition for close up shots as well as a zoom lens that works (yey!) so have really enjoyed exploring all the different places.
Whenever I read things about painting and photography people often talk about the light being really good in places and I have never really understood what that meant. However after spending a lot of time taking pics in Spain I have realised that the colours and the way that the light reflects off the stone and the sea really changes the way that my little snaps look.
These three pics were taken down at the beach and the salinas (salt lakes) that are a bird reserve where I often go for a bike ride.
I come back with pics that have the most amazing blue sky in them and the contrast between that and the sea or the way the sun hits the stone is wonderful. The pics below are of the Basilica Santa Maria in Elche.
I have also taken a few close up shots of the great vegetation there is – this time not only a cactus from my terrace but beautiful ornamental cabbages surrounding a pool at the park in Elche.
I hope you have enjoyed the pics, I will be back at the weekend with my Scavenger Hunt pics for this month, I will be posting them early as I am off to China with work next week which will be very exciting!
Thanks for visiting and making a little blogger very happy!
Well we have a few more real ones this week but I am very pleased to say that the Winter Exchange ornie that I stitched has made its way safely to the USA to Dawn.
This was a design that I have had for a few years and have stitched before, this time on my favourite sparkly evenweave with Silk Mill thread over one. This was a surprisingly quick one to stitch – must be getting better at the fine count work!
I have also finished a Spring ornie for me from one of my Quaker designs – no pics as yet as I have been not been in much when it has been light.
I have had a very busy week not only catching up from after our visit from Ofsted but also preparing for my trip to China! I will be leaving for that in 18 days but meanwhile I am off to Spain for a week of sun, sea, sand and biking! Can’t wait.
So have a lovely week and I will see you on my return. Thanks for visiting.
Stitches of Time 