Welcome to Melanie’s December monthly news and yet another crazy, busy month. I think this is the most unorganised we have ever been, we haven’t even started to send cards yet and it’s Christmas day in a few days! When you run your own business, work never really stops. Even when I am doing general life chores, there is always something in the back of my mind that I feel I should be doing for work. Juggling is hard and I’m sure many people in our situation feel the same. Rest assured If I haven’t replied to your email yet… I am thinking about you…and and an email is on its way!
So here is our Merry Christmas message to you all. It’s pretty short and sweet! We did 5 takes as we are not actors and we are not YouTubers. When you start recording and think… ok I will just wish everyone a Merry Christmas and then start to speak…. what was initially in your mind doesn’t actually come out of your mouth. It ends up more like gobledey gook! We definitely need more practice. But when we did manage to say one sentence coherently.. Lily seemed to know and joined in on cue! SO that was a wrap!
December Wreath Making
It’s been really festive this month right from the get go, so it has been really lovely. The month started with a festive wreath making course, which I shared with a lovely friend called Yvonne. There were meant to be three of us however Cerys, who actually organised our girls day out, ended up catching Covid and was out of action completely. It was such a shame as it’s normally the three of us out having fun just before Christmas. We will make up for it next year. So Yvonne and I started the course with the setup below…
Wendy our guide from Blodau Blodwen Flowers gave us a demonstration and helped us when needed. The photo below shows the first of the greenery going in. We added the larger foliage at the back and then some more dainty foliage in the mid layers and more interesting foliage at the front. I knew I wanted to add the burgundy flowers at intervals, so made sure I had enough of them to space around from the start.
This was the half way point. I varied the darker green and the grey green background foliage. Once that was all in, I used the red berries to accent the wreath in equal spaces. I have to admit to having help at this stage to make sure I placed them in and secured everything correctly.
As you can see the finished wreath is below, along with a pretty burgundy bow to match the berries. I was even ready with some battery operated lights which even come on and go off, on a timer! I was so pleased with my efforts.
The finished Wreaths
Overall the wreath making course was brilliant, far better than I thought it was going to be and we even got Mince pies and Mulled Wine (non alcoholic of course!) Here is a photo Wendy took of us with our wreaths. Don’t they both look fabulous! Definitely something to do again next year.
Cottage Decorated
The cottage is decorated! We got our tree this year from Roberts Garden Centre in Lampeter. Their garden centre is really lovely, has loads of plants and easily accessible if you are in the area, pop in to see them. Robert is really lovely and accommodating. He managed to get the tree into our car, we have a different car this year and we were wondering how we would get it in. Amazingly in the front seat with the seat back!
We have the usual baubles but also some new ones too. I felt we needed a bit of a change as we have had the same baubles for the last 4 or 5 years, so it was nice to cheer the tree up a bit. The red berries are always a fabulous addition, you can get them in the wreath making section in most all rounder shops.
Here are a couple of the new baubles, they really stand out well. I wasn’t sure about the black one when I saw it, how it would look on the tree, but I think it works well. You can see me in the reflection too.
Here is our stairwell and its decorated with lights and a multitude of Gonks again. It’s great as this time of year the evenings are so dark. Adding the lights on the banister really helps. We can get up the stairs without the need for putting a bright light on. It’s definitely very festive.
Melanie’s December Monthly News Lily Got a Christmas Groom!
Luckily Lily managed to get a groom this year at Christmas time, so she got to be in the Christmas backdrop! We love it! All of Dylan’s backgrounds are fab, but Christmas is definitely the best. She even got a neckerchief which I will get her to wear on Christmas day too.
We have already hung Lily’s stocking…. She has some treats, a present from my friends daughter and I chose her a Robot toy. Lily is very good with her toys, she loves the smaller soft toys but rarely shreds them. So she has most of the toys we have ever bought her. We keep them in an empty beanbag made to store soft toys for kids. Best thing we have ever bought to keep them all tidy! I hope she approves of Mr Robot on Christmas day!
Melanie’s December Monthly News Santa Run and Aber 10k
We also have been and completed our Santa run and our Aberystwyth 10K, both of which were fun and I have added photos below. The first one shows all of us friends ready to start…
This one below shows myself with Harvey behind. It was a really cold day but we were treated to mulled wine half way around… hot and alcoholic!! I can’t say that it helped with the speed though! Harvey and I both won prizes in the Santa run! I don’t think we won because we were fast, as no records were made, but we came first in our age categories and were rewarded! Harvey with a large box of chocolates and me a bottle of prosecco.
The Aberystwyth 10k run was much harder than expected, I have to say I did run out of energy fairly early on, however I made a new friend running around and we kept each other going to the end which was really lovely. The photo of us all below, shows a lot of the same friends as in the Santa collective above. This was taken after the race… but the photo below this show us in a café fuelling!!
We visited a café for breakfast, I purposefully sought out a café that did porridge and look at we found! Chocolate chip porridge! Its been a bit of an epiphany as I have started adding chocolate chips to my porridge at home now and I can thoroughly recommend it!
Merry Christmas From our House to Yours!
Finally, we hope you have enjoyed reading our Melanie’s December Monthly News. We would like to wish all of our readers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. All the best to you in 2024. We hope to have plenty more blog posts next year. Hopefully more videos, more business posts for artists and of course some dedicated artwork posts too. We haven’t really been able to post any of our artwork prior to Christmas for obvious reasons. We will post them all in the New Year. Watch this space! If you missed last months news, head over to Melanie’s Monthly News in November… you can catch up!
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