Author Archives: penny

About penny

I live in Norfolk, England in a cottage on the edge of the Norfolk Broads where it can be peaceful and beautiful, or wet and muddy, or occasionally wild and windswept. With me is husband Tim, Henry the elderly and opinionated tabby cat, and Higgins, the miniature dachshund with a massive personality. You’ll find me chattering on about wool and textiles, knitting and crochet, recipes, books and patterns, exhibitions and shopping and of course, the adventures of a small dog! Planet Penny has a Facebook Page, you can find me on UK Handmade and I am featured on Channel4/4Homes Favourite Craft Blog List.

And the winner is…

…a scary thing to do fairly, but I think got it right with a numbered list,

Anne@andamento
Geraldine
Magic Cochin
Thomas
Jen
Aimee
Greedy Nan
Gina
Toffee
Elizabeth Burton
Jacqueline
Hilary
Rachel Fenton
Jane
Eva SB
Vanessa
Jenni
Kate

and the use of a random number generator.

And it’s Elizabeth Burton! Congratulations, Elizabeth, once I have contact details the little bird will be winging it’s way to you as soon as possible.

The next event coming up will be my 100th post so if you were disapointed this time I will be giving away another Planet Penny creation to mark that milestone as well, and if you REALLY can’t wait that long I can link you to a gorgeous giveaway at Silver Pebble. I’ve got my eye on it, so I don’t know really why I’m lengthening the odds this way…

Emma made a special necklace for my daughter’s birthday which was beautiful. No photo alas, but if you visit Emma you will see all the lovely things she makes.

Happy Easter…

Have you eaten enough chocolate yet? I must admit to not having many family Easter traditions in place here on Planet Penny because as a one parent family when the children were small, they would have Christmas with me and Easter with their other family and an Easter egg Hunt for one is a little boring (and also very fattening!) But this Easter just happened to coincide with my daughter’s birthday so an excuse for chocolate and champagne!

A request was made for a very special chocolate cake, as seen on the cover of this month’s Sainsbury’s magazine.

Much agonising from me as I have rather lost my cake baking confidence. Cake and I cannot safely exist in the same space, one of us has to go, and it’s always the cake. I’m afraid all the pep talking from my Weight Watchers guru has not brain washed me into portion control and point counting in these circumstances so I find it easier to confine my baking to those occasions when I have several mouths to feed.

It involves a lot of chocolate and cream and eggs and sugar and melting and cooling and more chocolate (and scraping and licking) oh! and raspberries – now they’re healthy…and in the end there was this…

…which I think worked rather well and was transformed with candles into this…

…and was voted the best chocolate cake ever.

Higgins had an Easter present too, all the way from Korea and very beautifully packed.

Inside was this…

He wasn’t very grateful.

And went to bed to get over it. He was eventually persuaded to get out of bed when he realised he didn’t have to actually have to go out for a walk in it…

And even tried a few super hero stunts…

But when Henry the cat (who refused to be Robin) gave him a smack for looking silly he gave up and went back to bed…

It’s a hard life having to be cute all the time…

Higgins and the Robot

Ha! Now that’s got you wondering hasn’t it, and I’m not going to tell you about it till the end!

I’ve got quite a backlog of photos in the camera because all this tinkering with the blog and the studio has meant I’m really behind on posts. I was also full of good intentions to make pretty Easter things (I have to confess to 5 blown egg shells which didn’t get painted LAST Easter -I’ve forgotten the excuse I had then) . It’s been pretty inpossible to find any of my equipment however, seeing as it’s all packed in boxes in the spare room, and I’m trying to bring it all out slowly so I can sort it to avoid the minestrone type mixture of stuff I usually end up with when I’m working.

I did have wool and needles to hand though so I’ve been able to do a little knitting project AND write a knitting pattern so I have been putting in more than my twenty minutes of creativity a day.

Firstly, I managed to get a picture of the Twisted Hazel which I gave my Mother for Mother’s Day several years ago. It’s qite slow growing, and that first year had just the one catkin so it’s doing pretty well now.

The little daffodils sheltering underneath look so pretty. The miniature ones do so much better in this windy spot because they don’t get flattened as easily. It was even warm enough for not just one, but two ladybirds. I’ve only just spotted the second one.

With a birthday in the family this weekend and a celebratory lunch I’ve got the Easter Tree up and ready. This is where the painted eggs are supposed to hanging… Anyway, the little decorations look pretty, and the pink primroses set it off nicely.

Then there were the egg cosies, knitted in my favourite wool. (Hasn’t it gone a long way since I did all that dyeing last year? Time for a fresh batch with new colours very soon)

I’ve put the pattern in the tutorial section which you’ll find at the top under the banner.
And now for that robot… Several years ago a very clever person, someone who got their priorities in life just right, invented a robot vacuum cleaner. It was HUGELY expensive and I said at the time, if I ever win the lottery I’m having one of those. Well time went by …and I still haven’t won the lottery… but the price of the vacuum cleaner went down to a nearly sensible price, and Lakeland featured them in their catalogue and I thought ‘Why not?’ So Kryton came to live with us. He sits under the work top in the utility room until he’s needed, charges out with a triumphant little fanfare when he is switched on, trundles round the room humming and sucking away and spins frantically round on the spot with a blue light flashing when he finds a particularly filthy bit . Once he’s finished he wheels himself back to the docking station and parks himself with another fanfare before going back on charge, the light on top pulsing red like a heart beat. Occasionally we might have a little problem and Kryton stops, gives a mournful little toot and says, in a strongly American accented female voice, ‘Please clean Roomba’s brushes’ . I can’t tell you how disconcerting that was the first time that happened. Anyway, it’s great to be able to drink coffee and watch the vacuum doing its stuff without me and if that makes me sound totally lazy, well…

We also had an amusing moment when Higgins, as a very small puppy, went behind Kryton’s curtain and climbed on top, stood on the go button and rode out on top looking very surprised! Not a lot fazes Higgins, but you can imagine he’s not Kryton’s number one fan, especially when it chases him round the room with the filth detector light flashing. When I got to the end of the studio painting I took the vacuum out to clean the floor prior to painting it and, as Higgins does like to be in on everything, he joined in.

Sometime I must tell you about the day he met a seal…

The White Cube

The studio is finished and is scarily, eerily, white…. I feel I must exhibit something in there, this white cube. Actually Higgins has already done that for me. When Kit popped round to admire it and I proudly flung the door open there, in the middle of the room, was an artfully placed pile of poo…oh dear… a budding yBa?

It’s amazing what this whiteness does for a space. It means that whatever is placed in there suddenly asumes a huge importance. Even a pencil on a table, a coffee cup, a dirty sock becomes a statement. I’ve got to get in there with my stuff PDQ before the mystique scares me half to death.

The challenge is to fill it with colour and to stamp my personality on it and to get CREATIVE. I’ve been talking about it long enough. I’ve actually popped over to see Marmalade Rose and asked to join the Twenty Minute Challenge to instil a little discipline into the proceedings otherwise I could spend far too much time arranging things artistically on shelves…

In the meantime I’m going to add a little more colour to the blog. I’ve been popping out in the garden on and off wielding the camera and recording the fleeting moments of spring flowers in bloom. It’s a grey day today and the crocuses are over, but we can still enjoy them, and a little sunshine.

Underneath the weeping willow and the bottom of the garden, not fairies, but Iris reticulata…

…miniature cyclamen..

… the last of the snowdrops…

…and primroses.

That’s better. I’m now buoyed up to go and shift piles of books and start filling shelves…

p.s. If you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to put your name in the hat for the ‘Little Bird’ draw!

Grand Official Opening…

…and prize draw. Now, without further ado, I can announce that the new look Planet Penny is properly up and running. I would like to thank two people to whom so much is owed. Craig, the website guru who guided me though the incomprehensible aspects of ‘computerese’ with great patience, offering a virtual hanky when my whimpering got too loud to bear, and Thomas, author, illustrator and creator of the lovely flock of sheep munching the daisies in my woolly world on Planet Penny.

I must also thank Thomas for so kindly providing fireworks and refreshments for the party since I am sitting faintly in the corner covered in emulsion paint and clutching a glass, .

When you’ve helped yourself to glass of bubbly and a cupcake, do take time to say hello and introduce yourself. To celebrate the new look and the completion of the new studio (This weekend- Hooray!) I am giving away a little needle-felted bird sculpture to the first name drawn out of the hat, the felt hat of course. I’ll do the draw on Easter Monday to give you plenty of time to join in.

This little bird has been needle-felted out of hand dyed Merino wool until firm and then decorated with hand dyed Blue Faced Leicester yarn.

He’s very tactile, I do like making things which just sit in the palm of the hand. He sits happily on a shelf as an ornament, makes a great pin cushion and even works on a dressingtable as a place to pin jewellery.

So please leave a comment and get your name in the hat for a chance to give a little bird a new home.

In the meantime, Cheers!

Getting Sheepshape

Here we are, in the new look Planet Penny, where the sheep are more colourful and jollier than the poor chilly ones living in the fields nearby.

The doors are open and you are welcome to pop in and have a look round, but I’m afraid we’re still dashing round with paintbrushes and the vacuum cleaner so we’re not quite ready for the fireworks and cake just yet.

Besides, I have a headache…