WOW: That Birthday Buzz

WOW = WIPs On Wednesday

Hip hip hooray! These roses are counting the years of my life, that's why there's so many of them! It's a whole armful but I'm not complaining, it's good to be alive! I celebrated my birthday over the weekend and whilst I was still feeling a bit drab from my head cold, I had a really beautiful day at home with my family. Every year I always say that I don't want to celebrate my birthday because I think I'm too old for all this fuss. Actually I think birthdays are best for children, once you're an adult they feel a bit silly to me. But every year my family just ignores me and carries on celebrating it regardless. This year I put my foot down and demanded that if anyone was planning to buy flowers, they had to be potted plants because I'm over bouquets. I've had too many bouquets lately to celebrate my design finishes and I find that I'm always worried about them dying. Well, they ignored that demand of mine.. but given that roses were involved, I'll forgive them 😸

This is my most useful gift of the year: it's a pot of thyme. I love herbs and thyme is something I use so much of. I have grown it myself, but its always been stringy and knotty whilst this pot is lush and springy, it's the nicest thyme I've seen.

Those of you who follow my Instagram will have seen that we bought a cake this year. Really, this is something I want to stop doing. The problem is, I'm completely out of practice. I just don't do any baking and haven't done for about 20 years and although I'm always planning on getting back into baking lovely family occasion cakes... well, I simply haven't. I've been quilting instead. Obviously this has to end or we'll never enjoy real cake again.

I've been all around town over the past 5 years looking for honest to goodness quality cakes. And I can tell you that every single time it's been a let down. I don't know what happened to proper cake bakeries, but the cakes on offer these days just aren't authentic enough. This cake was horrible. It contained layers of custard that was the cheap and nasty flour and sugar kind rather than the egg kind and the taste was, well, awful. Then whole of the outside of the cake covered in a kind of sickly, sugary mock cream. Just awful. We only took a few bites of the slices and the rest went into the bin. It was such a waste of money and a disappointment too.

On a happier note, when I was clearing out my cup and saucer cabinet last month, I re-discovered this autumn rose design that I've been carting around me with for over 30 years. I've always loved it. It's so romantic and the brown and yellow tones seemed so fitting because I was born in autumn so it made sense to have some golden roses to use during the fall season each year. Well, for as long as I can remember, my DDs have never liked this tea set, I recall that they have previously used the words 'ugly' to describe it. 

Well, what a turn around this year was! Suddenly they both set upon it and declared they they had never seen this autumn rose set and what's more, they think it's beautiful and love it very much. Really, I don't know what to think! I'm just glad that my cupboard spring cleaning has proved useful - I have my cups and saucer sets on rotation and there'll be more gems like these making a reappearance after many years of neglect. 

Today I'm going fabric shopping with my DD because I'm in a pickle over what fabrics I want for my new BOM design. I thought I knew, but nothing feels right. You know how I am about fabric selection - it's going to be a long day!

What's Your WOW? 

An InLinkz Link-up