The Alphabet prompts

Yesterday saw the start of a series of new prompts through a Facebook group I belong to as part of an autumn journalling experience. I’m not going to showcase every single prompt here, but as the second letter of the alphabet was B and I was inspired, I thought I’d share with you what I chose to do. Apart from many other things …
B is for Bear.
I have started my Christmas shopping; selected my Secret Santa from a hat at work and visited a pub yesterday aptly named The Bear. It was this pub that inspired me to create a winter print and also (to add a couple of other words beginning with B) a picked up a bargain in a high street store before heading back home and tackling some more bag making on the old sewing machine!

That’s five bags made for 15th November and some of these are made from fabric bought in Bolton!

A winter Bear Gelli print for Christmas cards…

A bargain book for £1 on machine embroidery…

More progress has also been made on my book – I’m participating in this for the fifth year – to write a draft novel of at least 50,000 words in the month of November

I’ve just written 3,420 words (still a long way to go).
Now, I’m off to bed. Good night all you lovely bloggers 🙂

a November wedding: the spider and the butterfly

Today, November 1st, is the beginning of a cousin’s married life and the start of National Novel Writing Month.  This has meant that the crafts were put on hold today (unless you can class my photo as a craft or even my writing).

I managed it.   I managed to write 1,695 words on day one of NaNoWriMo.  At first, I was faced with a blank page and I thought I’d struggle to make a start on it, but it flowed.  Whether this is because I’ve been thinking about the 50000 word novel for a while, or because the house is quiet remains to be seen.

The day’s been interesting.  We travelled into the city for a family wedding (my husband’s cousin) and the forecast wasn’t that great, but the sun shone.  The little church has been the venue for several family members including my in-laws and they chose the same hymn as my husband and I had at our wedding.  According to my father-in-law, everyone has ‘Morning has broken’.  I’m not so sure.  There are so many hymns people can choose from, but some words just ‘stick’ don’t they:  ‘The blackbird has spoken, like the first bird’ (humming it now, can you tell?).  You don’t have to struggle to remember them and there’s no need to grasp a hymn book while trying to hold onto your fascinator during a winter wedding.

The church is pretty old; unusually it still has pews unlike many churches nowadays.  There’s a little arch that you have to walk through to get to the church and the aisle is so short that it’s possible to hold your breath for a minute and the father and bride have reached the front!

The church cobwebs were also noticeable.  At one point, the perfectly coiffured hair on the bridesmaid became the cobweb: my sister-in-law had to surreptitiously remove a spider happily crawling through the braiding.  The said spider returned, climbing up the bridesmaid’s back later on in the service while a tortoiseshell butterfly distracted everyone’s eyes away from the bride and groom coming back from signing the register.

The young bridesmaid and pageboy were my niece and nephew; they had more fun tossing the confetti rose petals on the floor that at the bride, but I did manage to take this photograph before the bride headed off to the reception.