November has not been a good month, for crafting, reading, or life, what with one illness or another, so the joy this week is, quite frankly, seeing the end of it. Roll on December, and Christmas, I say!

However ill-prepared I feel for the festive season.

To be fair, we did spend last Sunday making the Christmas cake. Well, the ten or twenty minutes it took to mix it up and stick it in the slow-cooker for basically all day. Think it took twice as long as the recipe said it would, but I’m fairly sure it did last year too. We made it gluten-free this year, swapping the flour for ground almonds. And the brandy for amaretto, because Aldi didn’t have small enough bottles of brandy (I know, I could have saved it for next year, but I’d probably forget I have it, and where I’d put it. Also, so expensive!). Besides, the cake smells wonderfully of marzipan.

On the other hand, I have now started setting up my new crafting space, having decided that keeping it all hidden away in the office really wasn’t conducive to actually being able to use it. So now I have a corner of downstairs, next to the dining table. Yes, I’ll have to be tidier with my projects, but hopefully not starting with a table of mess from last time will help me come up with new ideas or designs for cards and scrapbooks.

In the oh-so-many spare minutes I have between Tiny and MA research and Heyer reading. Even if the MA research and Heyer reading have some overlap.

But, hopefully, having it all to hand downstairs will aid with that. And also mean that Tiny and I can do some crafting together. Start ’em young, and all that. Or that I can craft while Tiny plays, which I couldn’t really do when it was all in the office.

I guess we’ll find out how good the theory is.