August competition results!

So, I have listed all the commenters who were so kind as to leave me a note during August, removed my comments and my mother’s (sorry Mum, nepotism and all that, but I’ll make you a bookmark for Christmas if you’d like!) and have picked a winner, via www.random.org, my trusty online number-out-of-a-hat-picker!

So, without further ado, the person who will be getting my little package of chocolate, bookmark, postcards and lanyard is…Doggoned Mysteries! Congratulations, I’ll be sending you an e-mail shortly asking for your postal address, and I’ll get the package in the mail as soon as I can thereafter!

However, with so many lovely commenters through the month of August, I have been regretting only posting that I’d be giving one prize. So, I’ve decided that two runners up will each be getting a large bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk as a consolation prize. Those two people are (once again, after consulting Mr Random.org) Existere and Kathleen! More e-mails are on their way, and well done to both of you.

Doggoned Mysteries’ blog is one that I’ve only recently discovered (via my mother, who would tell me all about her every blogpost, so I thought I’d better start to read them for myself!). I’m really enjoying what I’ve read, and am glad that my mother has the habit of passing on things which amuse her!

Existere is a new mum to two gorgeous babies and so could probably use the sugar energy from the chocolate! I’ve been following her blog for a few months now, and really enjoy her way of writing, as she generally manages to be humorous even in the hardest of times. And Kathleen is a new commenter to my blog (I believe – correct me if I’m wrong!) and I love to meet new people here so this is great!

Well done to all of you. I hope the postman gets the parcels to you nice and quickly so that you can enjoy the sugary goodness!

Don’t forget the giveaway…

Only a couple of days left to enter!

I’ve had lots and lots of comments this month, and can tell that I’m going to have lots of fun on Tuesday working out a way to pick the winner! But you still have a couple of days to load my site up with more comments and give me a little more work!! And remember, there’s also a decent sized bar of Dairy Milk chocolate as well as the things that you can see in the picture. Give it a go – what do you have to lose?!

Click here for a link to my original post about the giveaway, which has all the entry details in it. Good luck!

Fairtrade Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Chocolate!

The world truly is a bright and sunny place to be! Hurrah and Huzzah for the people at Cadburys who have ensured that AT LAST I can eat my favouritest chocolate in the whole world without feeling guilty about the little children who have been paid farthings in order to make production of this sweet sweet chocolate possible!

Imagine my delight when I was in the supermarket and I saw this gorgeous baby adorned with that lovely blue and green logo on the side! However, I have a confession…

I got it home, thinking that it would be a wonderful addition to my little giveaway, so I took a photo of it, and carried on with what I was doing. However, unfortunately muscle memory wasn’t to know that I was having a giveaway and so the next time I looked down, it looked a little more like this;

I apologise most heartily – the gorgeous, creamy, chocolatey goodness called to me in a voice sweet and clear, and I was powerless to resist. However, I have been back to the supermarket, just to make sure that it wasn’t a figment of my (frankly, overworked) imagination, and replaced it with this;

Yup, as a measure of my guilt, contrition and (boundless, so it would seem) generosity, I substituted the previous paltry 49g bar for a whopping 230g of the best chocolate EVER! You just know that this alone is going to bump the postage way up!

Anyway, remember, only eight days left in which to post comments and tweet etc and generally get entries. You know you want it!

Giveaway!

It’s time! I’ve finally gathered the things and taken the pictures and here I am. Firstly, thank you to all of you who have helped me to get to 70,000 visits, and thus giving me the reason to celebrate something!

And now to let you know what is in my giveaway this time;

Here it is! One lucky person will be receiving this little bundle of goodies. But lets go through it bit by bit.

First up is my lanyard. I made it because my white lanyard which holds my work pass is absolutely disgusting to look at now, having been worn for some months, and I’m not sure how washable it is. I also have a lanyard for home, on which I hang my house keys in case I go out and don’t want to carry a handbag. I find it really helpful to have when I run to school and back and don’t need a purse or phone, or when I dash out the back to hang out the washing. It saves me panicking about locking myself out! This lanyard is made from cotton which, I am informed, is washable to 60°, and also tumble-driable (although I’d remove the metal first!). It’s in red and green as they are the national colours of Wales, so I thought that a giveaway from the capital of Wales should really reflect that in some way! I’ve attached a keyring, and then a clip to the keyring which is holding a trolley token. I’m not sure if this would be any use outside of the UK, not knowing how big the coins are which are used in ‘foreign’ trolleys.

Next up is this bookmark, made out of thread cotton in a variegated blue thread. I’ve lightly starched it so it should hold its shape, but it’s not so stiff that it would be awkward to place in a book. I’m enjoying my foray into lace crochet in between various other objects.

Finally (and maybe most important!), the chocolate! I’m including a bar of my favourite chocolate, Green and Black’s fairtrade Maya Gold. Yum! Also in this picture you’ll see some postcards of landmarks of my home city. I love my photos (you may have guessed!) and wanted to send some pictures to show you what Cardiff looks like, but couldn’t choose and so decided to buy a couple of postcards instead.

So there you have it. And now to what you need to do. Leave a comment. That’s it! I’d like it if you’d tell me what your favourite chocolate (or other confectionary) is, but I won’t get narkey if you don’t! Extra credit will be given if you tweet about the giveaway (+2 entries) or blog about it (a massive +5), but please let me know that you have, with a link left in a comment. I feel obligated to point out that getting the extra entries really does pay off. Dancing on a Blade of Grass won my last giveaway, and she had blogged about it and received the corresponding extra entries! Oh, and also, I don’t know if you remember, but on 1st August I said that every comment left during August would be eligible for an entry. So comment on my other blogposts too! I’m writing a post every day for NaBloPoMo so there’ll be plenty of opportunity! And I’ll be willing to post internationally, so everyone’s welcome to the party.

The giveaway will be open until midnight BST (my local time) on 31st August, so until the very last minute of this month. I will then (hopefully!) draw a winner on 1st September and post about it shortly thereafter.

Good luck!

 

**EDITED ON 22ND AUGUST TO ADD:

I’ve added another prize to the giveaway. The lucky, lucky winner will also receive 230g of the best chocolate in the world;

Yum! Good luck once again!

I’ve not forgotten…

…about the giveaway I promised! I’ve noticed that I’ve now passed 70,000 visitors, so the giveaway is imminent. I’ve got one gift, and am working on a second. Give me a day or two, and all will be revealed!

August giveaway

I will be holding a giveaway later in the month, when I reach my 70,000th visitor. More details will be published nearer the time; suffice it to say here that there will be opportunities to enter via blog comments and tweets. Also, EVERY COMMENT posted to this blog during the month of August (except for my own comments of course, duh!) will equal one entry to my giveaway.

Keep visiting, and hopefully we’ll get to 70,000 sooner rather than later. Then we can all see what I’ll be giving away. It’s a surprise for me too, as I’ve not thought about the prize yet! It’ll be good though, and may even involve more chocolate!

A nearly giveaway…

I was going to do a minor giveaway today. I recently sent off for a free Eaga ShowerSmart tap widgetty thing which reduces the amount of fluctuation in the mains water flow and thus (apparently) saves you money, if you are on a water meter, or at least gives you the peace of mind that you are doing something small for the environment if you are on a standing charge. However, I got my wires crossed, and imagined that it was one of those gadgets that you fit over the end of a tap to turn it into a spray of water rather than a stream (which also apparently saves money) and so now I have one of these ShowerSmart whatsits and no mains powered non-electric shower to use it on. So I was going to offer it to one of my British readers, as I guess that the postage might be a little heavy to anywhere else.

However, as I’m feeling a little lazy this evening, I decided to Google their website to see if they had a picture I could borrow, to show you what you could get, and discovered that they are still available, free, to all UK households. So, if this sounds like something that you could use, hop over to their website now and snaffle yourself one. Goodness knows that every saving on a utility bill is a welcome one, credit crunch or no! (I had a lovely surprise yesterday when my quarterly electric bill was only £104 – I’ve really been trying to cut back on electricity usage, and it seems to have paid off. I can’t remember the last time my bill was this low!)

Oh, and if anyone knows where I can get myself one of those end-of-tap-spray-maker-widgetty-thingies I was talking about before (for free, preferably!), please let me know!

Dandelion Jam

First of all, I’m amazed by the wonderful response to my giveaway! There have been forty five entrants so far, with many kind enough to either publish a blog post or advertise it on Twitter. If you haven’t entered yet, you have until Saturday night, British Summer Time when the giveaway will end.

Next up, my latest experiment. Yup, the title of the blog post gives a fairly strong clue – I’ve been making dandelion jam! I’d never heard of this until earlier in the week when Annie at “A Year In The Life Of”… mentioned it. I googled it, to double check that it was a real thing (sorry, I’m very cynical sometimes!) and found lots of information and recipes.

So, I picked 350 dandelions, plucked the petals and used them to make my preserve.

First I boiled them, then let them steep overnight, then removed the petals, added sugar and lemon juice and boiled again until it reached setting point.

And here is the finished product! I was surprised by how lovely this tastes. It’s sort of like honey and lemon, made into jam. I’m surprised just because I’d never heard of it, and given how delicious it is, and how cheap and easy it is to make, I would have thought that more people would have been making it!

So far, everyone I’ve given it to has enjoyed it, and at a cost of only £1.30 for five and a half jars, I’ll definitely be making this again.

My very first giveaway!

As promised, albeit a little later than intended, may I present my very first giveaway! I’ve been dying to do a giveaway for a few months now, but decided to wait until a landmark, and give away some things to celebrate.

So, here is what is up for grabs;

I tried to find things with a Spring theme, in the colours at least. I am loving these pale blues and greens at the moment, and wanted to pread the love!

First up, and most important (in my humble opinion!) is the chocolate.

Three bars of gorgeous, creamy, organic Green and Black’s milk chocolate. Yum! (I don’t think I need to say any more about that)

Next up is this hand-made (by me, of course!) purse.

It was crocheted with a cotton yarn, so should hopefully hold its shape pretty well. It’s exactly the right size for my digital camera (which is fairly compact) or alternatively would be great for holding a couple of bank cards and some coins when you just want to put some in your jeans pocket and dash out of the house. It has no seams so (in theory!) nowhere to unravel and drop all of your money! Oh, and the button was handmade (not by me, unfortunately) and I bought it when I bought my kid mohair yarn in Penybont on holiday.

Third, I am offering this necklace.

I could have done a better job with the photography, and I apologise for that. It’s made up of glass and pearl-like beads, strung onto fine wire. Very delicate for wearing in the Spring and Summer.

Finally, a greetings card;

I don’t know about you, but whenever I hear of a new baby arriving, I never seem to have a card in the house ready to send off there and then. And if I do, it’s always a pink card with a baby boy having arrived, or a masculine navy blue, and the new arrival is a girl. So, I made this new baby card with that in mind. It is in shades of green (again, the picture’s not so great – sorry!) and you’ll see that on the picture of the baby, there’s a tag in which you can fill in the new baby’s name. It’s blank inside so you can add your own personalised message.

So that’s the bundle. I may or may not add other things before I post it off, depending on whether I find anything worthy of you all!

The Rules – If you want to enter, leave a comment on this post and you will get ONE chance to win this collection of goodies. If you want to have mutiple chances, Twitter it with a link to this post and get TWO extra entries. If you write a blog post about it (again, with a link to this post) you will receive FIVE extra entries. Please leave me another comment with the permanent link to your blogpost/Twitter homepage so that I can go and have a look!

I am willing to post internationally, so have a go, wherever in the world you live. The giveaway will close at 10pm, British Summer Time next Saturday, 2nd May. I will then pull a name out of a hat (or online random number generator, whichever seems like it would be more fun at the time!) and hope to announce the winner next Sunday, 3rd May, subject to other things not getting in the way! So you have plenty of time to spread the word and get more chances to win. Good luck!

 

***THIS COMPETITION HAS NOW CLOSED!!! Thank you very much to everyone who entered. Come back in June for my next giveaway, bigger and better than ever before!!!***

My 500th post

Another milestone, and definitely one to mark, I think! So, things to do with 500. Five centuries. Half way to a thousand…hmmm.

The number 500 is a harshad number (and if you think I’m describing what that means, having read the Wikipedia entry, you’re sadly mistaken and have come to the wrong place and should follow the link to Wikipedia right away!).

The 500th greatest movie of all time, as voted for by Empire Magazine, was the 2001 version of ‘Ocean’s Eleven‘, starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts amongst others. Personally I’d rate it higher than that, given the eye candy which I enjoy every time I watch, but as I don’t read Empire Magazine I don’t get a vote!

The US and Russian satellites which collided not so long ago were 500 miles above the earth when they crashed.

Today (21st April) marks the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s ascendancy to the throne of Great Britain and it’s assorted territories at the time.

Last December, scientists watched 500 baby crocodiles hatch simultaneously in India.

Fiat have recently remodeled the Fiat 500 and I had lots of fun configuring an imaginary one for myself on their website!

Anyway, my time for educating you is over, so you can start reading again now! As a celebration of my 500th post, I am having a giveaway! Yay! My very first giveaway, so be kind (please enter!).

I will be sending an eclectic assortment of goodies to the lucky winner, and am happy to ship overseas. So, if you are interested to see (and win!) what will be in my prize box, come back later in the week when I have time to put together a proper post on the topic. There will definitely be chocolate included, and that’s all I’m saying for now!