Sport for charity challenge

My husband is doing a 3000 mile cycle in 33 days this summer - his longest ever cycle. To put this into perspective, for the famous Land's End to John o' Groats route, the traditional distance by road is 874 miles (1,407 km) and takes most cyclists ten to fourteen days. Dougall will be cycling about 3.5 times the distance in only about double the time.

You can sponsor him in this mad endeavour if you wish! Or you can read about it when it starts on 4th of June on this blog - http://dougal3000miles.blogspot.co.uk/ which I will be updating with notes on his progress. All the sponsorship will go directly to charity! Here he is on a previous cycle:

just randomly...

Just thought I'd point out these posts in case someone else finds these interesting. They are about the work life of one person in London in the 1940s over on Mary Portas' (of Mary Queen of Shops fame) blog: http://tiny.cc/3lhiu

blogsville

Yay - I'm on a blog post over on the Handm@de blog - check it out: http://handmadeoxford.blogspot.com
In the post, I mention my mom a little bit - that she's an artist. She's also very good at interior design. At the moment, my mom is in Japan and one of her Japanese friends also writes an interior design blog. I think she also works freelance as an interior design writer, but I'm not sure because the site is all in kanji (Japanese) so I can't read it - too bad! But anyway, so Yuri has written a post about my mom's latest wall decoration - which is folded cranes out of washi paper and other types of paper like newspaper. Washi paper is Japanese handmade paper, which I also use in some of my jewellery. You can see a photo of the cranes on the wall over on Yuri's blog, even if you can't read it: http://artsliving.exblog.jp
Interestingly enough, a couple of weeks ago the Guardian came with a fashion magazine supplement and in one of the photos they used the same sort of idea - they had folded butterflies across a wall!!

blogs and walking like an Egyptian

Freezing fog this morning. How.........lovely. not. What is lovely is that two charming blogs have chosen to show a bit of my jewellery this week. One is Hannah Mary Pinnock (silver bud ring). The other is a bunch of artists (feltgiraffe wrote the post) with a blog called Autonomous Artists (one of the Japanese paper pendants). So a big thanks to them!! :-)
In other news, I finally got a bangle mandrel. That's a bit of steel for forming bangles around. (did anyone get that Bangles reference in the title of this post??? ha ha I'm so funny...or something.) So today I can finish a bunch of bangles I'm working on. That's including the bangle to go with this collection, which is silver with an 18k ball. This is the first time this photo is public!! Ooo er!! Oh yes, world premier of this collection, soon to include a bangle which I shall photograph once it's ready. Anyway...here's the photo with ring, pendant and earrings: