A weekend away

Last weekend we had a few days away with some old friends, one of which had just celebrated her birthday.

 

We enjoyed staying at a great house again. I wish I lived here for all the great photo backdrops!

And we enjoyed cooking and eating some great food, including this naan made by birthday girl. Note the many uses for a wine bottle :-)

We also enjoyed some of our favourite beverages, including champagne (birthday girl's favourite), great wines (wisely chosen by birthday girl's guitar playing other half) and great coffee - our friends are as obsessed by good coffee as we are so we always take the coffee machine, grinder and fresh beans with us ;-) And last but not least we had this amazing ginger beer that I've been dreaming of ever since, made with birthday girl's favourite cooking gadget.

Of course there was also time for some crafting by the kids and us big girls.

 

Including a new addition to my ever expanding array of polymer clay necklaces, this one using a metallic grey clay.

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Has anyone else been having troubles with the new Blogger interface? The formatting is doing my head in... arghh!

Weekend excursion - Winterland

Our big girl had been saying that she'd like to go to 'the snow' and also go ice skating one day, and while we can't get to the snow this year, when I saw an ad for Winterland "Sydney's coolest festival" at The Carriageworks we thought we'd take the kids for a look.

I love The Carriageworks as a venue, with it's huge warehouse spaces and industrial feel - plenty of photography opportunities!





And I've been to the design & craft market Finders Keepers, but, while it had a nice feel to it, the Winterland was strangely quiet. We had some afternoon tea, listened to the band a bit and had a look around.



The ice skating sessions were all booked out (maybe people came just for that?) and I couldn't see any sign of the crafting that was meant to be happening on this particular afternoon (did I somehow miss it?). There were some interesting decorative pieces:





And there were a small handful of market stalls, including one with beautifully designed brooches and baubles. I bought a pack of hand screen printed linen scaps (thinking they'd make a nice little feature panel in a zip purse) and happily took them home, but left feeling a little flat for all of the stallholders and wondering what had gone wrong with Winterland - wrong marketing and PR? not enough marketing and PR? just not enough there to hold people's interest? So it was a nice outing but there just wasn't that much to look at or do.



Anyway, we still enjoyed our outing, not least walking back to our car past the lovely iconic skipping girls (pics to come).

Hope you're enjoying your weekend.