Memories of summer days, but winter's on its way

Made two things yesterday, one a card using a Crafty Individual stamp which has a definite summer feeling to it and the second 'thing' with more of a winter feel to it.

First, the card, which is for a friend's birthday coming up soon.

Think I may have gone a bit 'pearl' happy here as I used one of those pearl maker tubes (mine is from Waco) and it sort of took over.

Background papers are from a Tilda Winterbird collection and the stamper card was coloured with Distress Ink (what else) in Peacock Feathers.  One of the many things I love about DIs is the ability to remove colour with water so I stamped the ladies and then used a water-brush to 'bleach' their body parts and coloured with pencils.  Last task was to search my button box for matching colours which means tipping them all out on the table of course.

Pretty chilly here this week so I nipped to our local pork butcher on Tuesday (do other places have speciality pork only butchers I wonder) for a ham shank and some dried peas and soaked both overnight.

Doesn't look too appetising at first but after cooking the meat for 2 hours and then adding onion, peas, bay leaf , thyme and black pepper you simmer for another couple of hours and end up with this pan of scrumptiousness.

No colourings, no preservatives just honest stick-to-your-ribs food.  It was delicious last night

MrB has taken a container-full to his Mum's and the rest is in the freezer - yum.