Teacher’s gift

It’s the last day of school for 2008 tomorrow!  And they have two days of teachers strike for the first two days ‘back’ in 2009!

This is what we gave Dian’s teacher as a thank you gift/Christmas present.

The bookmark was woven by Dian (with a little help from me), using a weaving loom that I have had since I was her age!

I made the notebook cover to fit a standard A5 notebook, so it can be easily replaced when the first book is used.  There’s a zipper pocket for pens and the inside cover is done with contrasting fabric.  A strip of elastic is attached to the back to close the notebook.

This was quite fun to make, the hardest part was working out how to actually make it!

teacher_gift_1

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teacher_gift_inside

Yummy Vegan cooking!

Ok, I never thought I’d be deliberately cooking vegan.  Some dishes in my current repetoire are naturally so, however ME actually buying a complete vegan cookbook?  NEVER!

And yet I did.  This one – The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen

Totally drool-worthy!  Apart from the fact that I totally can’t stand even the smell of olives, there are very few recipes in here that don’t sound fantastic.  And since I leave the olives out all the time, unless they are the major ingredient then it’s really not going to make a difference to what I think of the recipe.

Yum, yum, yum!

Another lovely visitor to my garden!

This was almost heart attack material!  I went into the garden this morning to stake a tomato plant that didn’t hold up too well in our recent wild weather.  Then I looked down and the first thing I saw was brown scales under the mulch!  Of course my first thought was “SNAKE”, and it was right where I was about to step, and then I realised that it had legs.  It’s an Eastern Blue Tongue Lizard.  He’s about a foot long, so definately an adult.  Lovely!

Blue Tongue Lizard

He’s lost his tail, and you can tell it was fairly recently as it hasn’t grown back yet, and I’m really, really hoping that it wasn’t my cat who did that to it!  So until I can get a fence around the vegie gardens, which I need to do before the chooks arrive anyway, she will be an inside cat, or very closely supervised outside.

Blue Tongue Lizard without a tail

After Dian arrived home from school I showed her the lizard and then we fed him/her some banana and apple.  Obviously it liked them, ate them all up!  He’s a most welcome visitor in our garden as Blue Tongues eat snails and slugs.

Isn’t he beautiful!

*sneeze*

Is it dusty in here? I’ve been away so long it must be.

(The above has been shamelessly plagiarised from Fitcat.)  I thought it such a great way to come back after a huge blogging absence that I stole it from her blog.  I’m sure she’ll forgive me!  LOL!

There’s a lot to catch up on, so I’ll be doing a few blog posts over the next few days.