In the Bleak Midwinter...

Our weather has just been incredibly dull lately - days and days where it feels like it's rained all day, or if it isn't raining then it's been blowing a gale. In order to bring in some brightness and cheer into our sitting room I started to put up some of our Christmas decorations early (last week - I know some people put them up in November but this is super-early for us).

All I've done so far is the mantlepiece - I just love all my candle holders :) We bought the electric light (to the left of the photo) from Ikea when we were there last month & I really love it.

We bought our Christmas tree this morning so at the moment it's in situ in the sitting room but is still drying out - I'll get it decorated tomorrow while Peter's out at work: he never gets into the whole 'decorating the home' thing so I'm better off doing it while he's out!

It was my birthday recently and this is one of the presents one of my sisters gave me :) She bought the crochet book when she was over in America on business and I LOVE it - there are tonnes of patterns that I want to try...I'll be ordering some yarn soon (I've still got an order for a pair of wrist warmers in King Cole's 'galaxy' in black) so I will keep an eye out for anything suitable for some of the patterns in this book too ;)

I've been out beach combing whenever I can but it's been hard as the weather has been so bad and I'm wary of slipping on wet rocks....

But when I did go out I managed to get to my favourite beach for finding sea glass and sea pottery treasures!

Aren't they beautiful?! To me each piece is like a piece of a jigsaw - I always wonder what item it would have come from originally, who would have owned it and handled it daily and how it ended up broken and tumbled by the sea.

I absolutely ADORE sea glass in this colour - I only ever find it on this one beach and it's very rare even there so I pick up even the tiniest little pieces.

A while ago I started selling my pieces of sea glass/pottery over in my Etsy shop - I'm so happy to be able to share these treasures with people all over the world :) I love finding them but it seems a shame for me to hoard them all in bowls etc in our house instead of being able to sell them and then people can make beautiful jewellery etc with them.

I finally made it over to St. Finan's Bay yesterday for some beach combing and I found some proper proper treasure -- not just one, or two...but THREE sea beans! These are seeds from plants in the tropics/South America that have drifted over here on the gulf stream. They are about as rare as hen's teeth and will get me in the records book for this kind of thing. 

 I also found some tiny plastic pieces

 ..and this made me smile!

 Finally these printer cartridges were lost as cargo somewhere in the Atlantic last year and have been washing up on beaches in the Azores, on the British coast and here! I'm collecting them up and will be sending them back to HP where they will be recycled. I found seven of them yesterday!