January weather

Hello there! Welcome to Sunday Sevens number 68… here’s a round up of what I’ve been up to this week 😊.

Sunday beach walk

If you saw my post midweek, you will know that last Sunday afternoon, we made the most of the lovely weather and went for a lovely walk along Catalan Bay beach. The beach in winter is a really special place I think, all that wonderful nature and no one else there to spoil it for you! Here’s my post in case you missed it.

Med Steps

I made it up the Med Steps this week at long last. There has been talk that our Med Steps 5 team from last year may have another attempt at 5 times round in one day again this year…. if that’s the case, we need to get an awful lot of practice in!

Little Box of Crochet

I have long been an admirer of Little Box of Crochet from afar. The monthly subscription box looks like a fab idea, but my experience of monthly magazine subscriptions coming out to Gibraltar put me off (like issues going missing or several all arriving at the same time). I recently saw that there were some one off purchases available on Etsy so I bought a box.

This week I got the card in my letter box to tell me a parcel had arrived for me at the post office- it was my Little Box of Crochet. I’m thrilled with it, but am saving it until I have some free time to enjoy it properly :-).

On the subject of Crochet…

There’s a new crochet group starting in Gibraltar. Remember Gib the crochet ape from last week’s Sunday Sevens? Well he’s now the mascot of the Gibraltar Crochet Collective. If you are in Gib and want to join in, please have a look at the Facebook page to find out more.

Watercolour lesson

I have really missed my watercolour lessons. I hadn’t been able to make it to one since before Christmas as I was poorly one week, then I had a poorly Little Postcard off school the next. This week I managed to get there at last! I really enjoyed having a go at painting these primulas.

A Saturday staple

Every Saturday lunchtime something happens here in Gibraltar… we almost always seem to be on Main Street or in Casemates and we get to see the historical reenactment of the Ceremony of the Keys. Former service men parade down Main Street in historical uniforms and the tourists love it. Here they are in action.

Sunset from my window

We had a lovely sunset last night, and this is the view I had looking at it from our dining room window. Isn’t it lovely? Sometimes I have to pinch myself about how lucky we are to have this magnificent view.

Looking ahead…

This is something for next week, well next month actually. There is so much wonderful creativity going on in Gibraltar that I have decided to dedicate a whole month of posts on my blog to creativity here on the Rock… I can’t wait to get started – February I’m ready for you!

Sunday Sevens is a weekly blog series created by Natalie at Threads & Bobbins blog

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Sunday Sevens. It’s been a funny week weather wise here in Gibraltar, it started off gloriously sunny and relatively warm for January and then the rain and the cold came…

Sunny Sunday afternoon

The weather last Sunday was truly glorious. We had a lot of stuff to do so we couldn’t properly get out but we popped to Commonwealth Park for an hour to let the Little Postcards run off a bit of steam. It was so lovely to sit on a bench in the sunshine for a while.

Dressmaking class

After two weeks of drawing out a pattern, rubbing out, remeasuring, then cutting and sticking, I finally have a paper pattern for a DRESS! I’m really excited about starting this one. It’s based on the pattern I used for my princess-line top but has been lengthened to become a dress. Sorry for the uninspiring photo… you can’t really jazz up pattern paper on a grey desk!

Crochet fun

May I introduce Gib, the amigurumi ape. I hope you will be able to see a bit more of him in the future, as he’s going to help a friend of mine and I do something crochety (if that’s a word?!). I will keep you posted on Gib and his upcoming adventures.

I forgot to include this photo last week… it’s the crochet project I completed before beginning Gib. These shark slippers were made for a friend.

A cold snap

The sunshine of the weekend and early part of the week ran off and left us midweek. The rain came and brought the cold with it too. For those of you up north in the British Isles, 4.5 degrees C may not sound cold but for us southern softies it’s a tad nippy. This was the temperature when I got into the car at 8am one morning.

I was talking to one of the granddads outside school one afternoon and he was saying he was shocked to see his dashboard tell him to beware of black ice! That is something you really don’t expect to see living in Gibraltar. The cold weather did bring snow to the region. Sadly not to Gibraltar (much to our disappointment) but you could see the snow on the tops of the hills along the coast from up the Rock. There was a lot of snow in Malaga, and along the Costa del Sol. It was the first time Marbella had seen snow for decades.

Grrrr!

I don’t make a habit of wearing skirts, tights or heeled shoes but I had an important meeting to attend this week and I needed to be smart. Feeling very far out of my comfort zone I headed off up the street to my meeting when – squelch – I stood on one of those really annoying wonky paving slabs with dirty water hiding underneath.

Dirty water sprayed right up the front of one leg, and another load up the back of the other one. Fortunately I managed to clean myself up and headed onwards. Help my goodness if I didn’t stand on exactly the same paving slab on the return journey (photo is of the second dowsing which wasn’t as bad). To any passers-by on the outward trip when an expletive may have slipped from my lips, you have my utmost apology.

Sunset

Thursday evening’s cold repaid us with the most beautiful sunset. I was rather trapped between buildings at the time for football training, but even so, you can see it was a belter.

Seagull sentries

I went for a bit of a wander one afternoon this week and ended up climbing up into Upper Town. I passed this sentry box which had been claimed as an ideal lookout for these two seagulls.

Final make of the week

I was a bit crochet crazy this week, after a long hiatus without my hook. This ‘Bunny Ballerina’ was made using the same pattern book as Gib, the ape. It was a Christmas gift from my lovely little brother. The book’s called ‘Amigurumi’ and is by Lan-Anh Bui & Josephine Wan. It’s full of lovely patterns of all sorts of animals. I think I’ll be making a few more of these…. This one is off to her new home shortly to live with a newborn baby girl.

That’s all for this week, I hope it has been a good one for you. You may have noticed I haven’t done any painting for a long time (since well before Christmas). I have missed my first two watercolour lessons of 2017 by being poorly last week, and then this week I had a poorly Little Postcard off sick on watercolour day… Everyone is fit and healthy now (touch wood) so hopefully I’ll get the chance to get my paintbrushes out again next week!

Sunday Sevens is a weekly blog series created by Natalie at Threads & Bobbins blog.