A Midwinter Moon and a wish to all who pass by this blog for health and happiness as the days lengthen and sun starts back on its northern road.

I, alas, have been far from merry these last couple of days having installed (and I think permanently destroyed) a new office printer. We have had a huge volume of work all requiring next day posting recently and the set up on the new printer led me through installing the HP Smart App, which gave us restricted scanning functions. After being driven to despair by the ‘virtual assistant’, I did a restore to factory default (expecting this would bring it back to how it came in the box) but, instead, it destroyed its wifi connectability and wiped out all the set up options. Worse than this, the App has stopped us scanning or printing except in black and white 300dpi on the old printer. Only an old laptop now works properly with the old printer so we’ve been having to do bizarrely convoluted and time consuming work arounds to get legal documents sent out and endless hours trying to find help from the seller, HP, the internet in general…

But I like to have a Midwinter post and I wanted to show this wonderful advent ginger that my dear blogging friend Benta from Slik Stitches kindly made for Freya. It is beautifully made and a very clever idea. The numbers are printed on a ribbon, which you pull through a little every day. Freya is a bit small to understand Christmas but she hugged it and danced with it and I know she will love it for years to come :)

I did manage to make a quick bauble wreath, which is far from perfect but can easily be undone and re-done another year when I have more time. I didn’t have enough baubles for the back so I used a coat hanger wrapped in brown packaging paper and threaded the baubles onto bias binding. This gave it some grip and helped to stop them sliding about too much. The photos (sorry all taken indoors at night) show the steps in case anyone wants to do something similar.

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I also made two coordinating cakes – one for our house in general and one for one of my daughters. These actually look very much better in daylight so I’ll try to remember to take new photos and switch these ones out before we eat them.

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I hope I can get a printer of a completely different make sorted out tomorrow, when I’ll be at home, and then perhaps I can do some blog visiting and sort out the house a bit better for Christmas…

If I’m not here again before, I wish you a very merry Christmas and the happiest of New Years :)

Janine @ Rainbow Hare