Bibles and festivals, babies are the best, and the month ahead

I know, I haven't posted in ages, bad me. But I have done lots of work, been to the Christian festival momentum, and spent the past 3 days enjoying a 10 week old baby boy! Of course, all of this means that very little sewing has gone on since the blocks I posted for QATWII. But the coming month holds promise, I think - when I get my sewing machine down to Bath!

Momentum was amazing, despite camping (the root of a lot of grumpiness). The worship was wonderful, the talks really interesting, and I splashed out and bought 2 new bibles! Shocking, I know, what could I need 2 more bibles for? Well, this is one of them:





This is the official Momentum/Soul Survivor bible in a year. It's arranged with one passage from each of the old and new testaments and a psalm each day. They also have this great blog where they explore the day's passages and what we can take from them. It's really great for if you've never read the bible before, or if you read it but then can;t understand how it can teach you anything, because the blog talks you through a particular focus or lesson you can learn from it each day. That's not to say that that's all you can get from the passages, but it helps to give at least one meaning to what you're reading!

And this is the other bible I bought - this one pretty much explains itself in its awesomeness:







































See what I mean? Bible in graphic novel form! Amazing! I mean, there are some dense bits of bible, like leviticus, numbers... I could go on. But this way they're fun to read!





And just a few pictures of the people I went with:






In worship...













The octopus posing...















I spent a lot of my time with these guys - and they're a lot of fun!

And me there as well!









And I had a blissful day today - I was getting in my newborn hours for Nanny College with the grandson of my mum's receptionist. He's 10 weeks and a day today, and he spent all afternoon fast asleep on me! He's so tiny and delicious and perfect, and I wish I could show you a photo - but I do not post photos of other people or their children without permission. But I assure you he's beautiful and placid and thoroughly lovable! And I would keep him if it weren't for the fact that his parents want him and stealing babies is wrong.

So that's me caught up! I'm back to Bath Thursday evening, and working Friday. And back at college in a couple of weeks. I'm seeing the boy tomorrow for lunch, and hopefully I'll see Mandibles and Bilbo before I go. But we'll see! All that's left to do is link this up to the Small Blog Meet on Lily's Quilts!

Love love xx

The Wife and Moving, Uncover, Rolo filled Cookies

The wife was round yesterday. She moves back up to Newcastle and into her new house tomorrow. Aside from our trip to London in August, I'm not going to see her for probably about the next 6 months. Don't ask me how I'm feeling about this.

Anyway, she was round yesterday, and we did a little more in this booklet called Uncover. We've been working on it for a while, doing one chapter a week. It's basically a walkthrough of key parts of the gospel of Luke, with questions about how the messages in it relate to today's society and problems. We've been finding it to be a great way to open us up to talking about our problems and then praying about them. And then we made cookies!

These are cookies we'd been planning to make for a while, ever since we saw them on pinterest. But when we went to the site with the recipe, we were a bit disappointed. This is a frustration I often feel about pinterest: you see a great idea for something to bake, pin it, click on the link, and the recipe asks for a box of some kind of cake mix. I'm sorry, but cake mix is not an ingredient!! But the site was pretty good other than that for instructions, and it was a great idea, and we had the rolo's. So we dug up my classic cookie recipe and played with it a little to make the cookie mix. And came up with these:

Okay, so they don't actually look much like the pin we were trying to replicate. But they were gooey, and chewy and so, so good!!

 Some of them had the rolo's melt and you got this amazing caramel bit which was just glorious! And who cares if they're not exactly like what we pinned? These were better, because they were near enough to us that we could eat them!








Recipe, you say? But of course!

3 oz butter
3 oz granulated sugar
3 oz brown sugar
a few drops of vanilla essence
1 egg
6 oz self-raising flour (substitute on tablespoon of flour for 1 tablespoon cocoa powder)
pinch of salt
3 tubes of rolo's

Cream butter and sugars together.
Thoroughly incorporate egg and vanilla essence.
Incorporate flour, cocoa powder and salt.
take spoonfuls of mix, squash a rolo into it and shape mix round it. I found 2 teaspoons were a good way to do this!
Drop rolo filled spoonfuls onto parchment-lined baking tray, well spaced.
Bake at 180 degrees C (fan oven) or gas mark 4 for 15-18 minutes. They will sink under fingertips when you poke them. This will pass as they cool.
Let them cool for 5 minutes on the baking tray, then transfer to cooling rack. Eat one whilst they're still molten. Enjoy.

Never say I'm not good to you!

Love love xx