Hello friends :)Well, what a week it has been in the UK for weather!! I look out of the window and what do I see? Snow. I turn on my TV and what do I see? A special program entitled the BIG FREEZE dedicated to this icy cold spell!! People are a bit obsessed aren't they, so today, instead of giving you heaps of snowy photographs to look at, Im going to show you what we made when it snowed hard for 14 hours here the other day.
And it involves the Queen of strawberry jams, Little Scarlet.
Me and the Little One got busy making scones, because I had a yearning for Cream Teas and summer, I was totally brassed off with all things white and cold.
And we decided to use different cutters to make our plain scones, ending up with hearts and rabbits...and a couple of unidentifiable ones that a Small Person was tremendously proud of!
If you've ever been lucky enough to get a jar of Little Scarlet jam, you will know where Im coming from with my rapturous description of it. Once the lid is off, tiny wild strawberries of the most sweetest kind practically burst out of the jar - indeed this is not jam, it is a jar packed with strawberries for there is hardly any room for the jammy bit.Its not cheap, but sometimes its good to indulge isn't it, and on that snowy day we buttered fresh warm scones, and piled oodles of tiny strawberries on top and watched the whirling white snow fall out of a heavy grey sky, although our thoughts were perhaps far away right then, in a tea garden far south of this Yorkshire border.
Anyway, I lied - I said I wasn't going to show you any snow pictures but I couldn't resist a few - its so very, very pretty when the sun is shining on a fresh downpour of the stuff!
This is across the road from our house, the tremendous trees are weighed down. Its bitterly cold standing on the doorstep so I hurry indoors....
...but not for long - the Little One wants to go and make a snowman, so we navigate the back garden and are both rather surprised how deep it is, she in particular as its well over her knees and she's never seen anything quite like it!
The sunlight glows through the snow that has fallen between the boughs of our little flowering cherry tree...hard to imagine that in only a matter of weeks this will be frothing over with pink blossom.
The river looks very pretty, peaty black and icy cold against the bright white snow. To add to the theme of black and white was a little dipper who was out braving the weather, he was standing on a stone watching us before he took off under the bridge, his little white bib a blurry flash as he flew by.
Well, following my last post there have been a couple of my readers interested in the books I mentioned, and silly me, I should really have put the titles in that post for you! Never the less, here they are now for those of you who are interested in following the creative business dream:
The Creative Entrepreneur
by Lisa Sonora Beam
Creating a Life Worth Living
Carol Lloyd
Make Your Creative Dreams Real
Sark
The Small Business Start Up Workbook
Cheryl D Rickman.
If you click the links it will take you to the amazon page so you can read up on them a bit more and see if they are what you are after.
The top three books are written with a real focus on creativity, and include some great tools and exercises which teach you how to become a businesswoman (or man), and make your business real, one which makes money and brings customers...sound good?? It is.
These books also suggest keeping a journal/art journal to encourage your creativity. If you can, take the time to really work through the exercises. The good thing is that you can do this in your own time, and when you do sit down and answer the questions and think about what you're reading, you begin to learn things (which sounds obvious, but Im the best in the world for skipping the practical exercise bit, I always want to be at the finish post first, but Im realising that these people can teach me things I don't know and through making an effort Ive learnt more in the last week than I did in a whole year of going round doing the same stuff yet expecting different results!!)
The last book I mentioned is more practical nuts and bolts, crammed full of information about marketing and promoting yourself and starting a biz from scratch. Very good.
So there we are. Id love to hear from any of you who decide to work through one of the books Ive mentioned here. It can be quite a challenge starting off in business, but its not impossible and perhaps the ones of you who have decided to grow a business properly this year might like to share experiences here? Sometimes its nice to have someplace to chat about our journeys and what we've learned, and it can also be really helpful for others who are doing the same thing!
Let me know what you think - you know where to find me!! :D
So here's to the creative journey, wherever it may take you (be it kitchen to bake cake, or reaching for the stars and becoming the next Deborah Meaden :)
Big love to you,
Keep warm,
Eat nice stuff :)
Julia xxx
