Wow, did we have a nice Valentine's? We did indeed. I spent the morning planning at home and updated displays at school. Then I spent the afternoon baking, icing and scrubbing the house so it was spick and span for our evening.
Lookit what I made!!

I made the most gorgeous icing - white and dark chocolate buttercream icing. Boy oh boy it is gooooooooood!! Hmmm... I'm struggling to know how to punctuation "Boy oh boy". Would you say "Boy, oh boy!" or " Boy! Oh boy!" Tricky...

Anyhoo - they are DELICIOUS and I'm quite proud of how attractively they came out. After my epic baking session, I made the table look lovely:

It looked even lovelier with the lights out:

We had a delicious meal from the Red Lion. We didn't go there - oh no. We went for a meal on Friday (which was amazing, by the way). And while we were there, we bought a Reddimeal which you can take home and bung in the microwave later! We got a sicilian stew, so we cooked it up with some roast potatoes. Perfect. We were even brave and ate green olives.
For Valentine's, I crotched Rachel a little heart. I used Lucy from Attic24's pattern for "Teeny Tiny Hearts", made two of them, stuffed them (with the ends of the wool!) and sewed them up. Then I embellished (loving that word) with some beads that I bought on Saturday at The Cheap Shop (literally one of the most exciting shops in Britain - I have to go to pay homage and buy some treats at least once a term!) in Tiptree and a button which I already had in my button box.

The beadwork was seriously fiddly, especially since I selected (from my Mum's sewing box - that's why I was near Tiptree - day at Mum's) the most inappropriate thread which just kept fraying and refusing to get in the needle. It was something of a palava, to be honest. But then, the simple act of walking across a room or putting a box on a table can be a palava for me and end in serious injury or liberal decoration of the carpet with icing sugar.
Rachel bought me a pair of glass beaded earrings from one of the little shops we found in Lavenham:

We polished off our day with some bags of chocolates and the DVD "Mr & Mrs Smith", which we hadn't watched for YEARS. Love it.
Today I've been doing lots of work - planned literacy, French, PSHE, planted our apple tree into it's pot and mulched it with some not-so-leaf-mouldy-leafmould. It's just leaves, basically. Not sure what's gone wrong there. I'm slightly concerned they're going to blow right out of the pot and land all over the lawn. Where I carefully raked them from in the autumn. Hmmmm...
I've also been busy in the last couple of days crafting tiny flowers (Little Picot Flowers, to be exact) from old bits of wool, for the school's sensory garden. I'm doing quite well, in that I'm managing to use the tiniest, teeniest little bits of old wool. I think these ones are so little that I'll string them up and dangle them from the willow fence and the trees.

Now I'm having a go at an Auricula flower, from my "100 flowers to knit & crotchet" book. Bit fiddly, so I'd better concentrate.
Quite enjoying these holidays!