House for Sale in New Mills, Derbyshire!!

Yes, our house is up for sale, and George and I are now moving to the Isle of Wight.

We have just reduced the price for a quick sale, so if you have any way of sharing this post, on Facebook, blog or any other way, just in case anyone, anywhere is looking in this area, we'd be very grateful.

Please have a look at the lifestyle our lovely home can offer and if you would like to view it, please contact  Edward Mellor Ltd, Marple on 0161 449 5589.

We have loved living in the semi-rural Hague Bar area of New Mills, set in the High Peak, in north west Derbyshire. The house has been perfect for us and we have enjoyed fun family Christmases with the inter-connecting living rooms, perfect for entertaining. There is room for a good-sized table in the dining room and and space for little ones to play and run around in the living room. The front of the house has lovely views over the Goyt valley, and outside there is parking for two cars, bordered by raised beds and a beautiful flowering plum tree. There is also a garage with extra parking spaces for visitors.

The garden - well, all I can say is it has easily surpassed anything we ever dreamed of. George and I have so enjoyed filling it with flowers, fruit and veg, and loved having the separate areas.

Close to the house is a super patio, perfect for sizzling barbecues and soaking up the sun. The patio is bordered by raised flower beds, filled with attractive plants that mainly look after themselves and come up every year. Up a couple of steps is the lawned area, with shrub and flower borders. 

At the top of the lawn is a summerhouse, or it could be a children's play house, fenced and with its own patio area. The perfect place to sit in the evening with a glass or two of chilled wine, looking across to the Goyt valley.

The next section is a good-sized vegetable plot, which has been very productive and is presently growing beans, courgettes, onions, garlic, beetroot, broccoli, cauliflowers, straberries and rhubarb! If someone buys the house soon, they will be harvesting their own veg before long!

At the very top of the garden, through the lovely forsythia arch, is an area with soft fruit bushes, sheds and a small meadow area, plus a very private area, to sit and contemplate the peace at the end of the day.

As most of the plants are shrubs, bulbs and perennials, there is not a lot of work needed to keep the garden looking nice now. I love watching the new shoots appearing as if by magic each spring. There are more flower pictures on the 'My Flowers' page, if you want to look.



New Mills - Market Street

Our house is situated on Lower Hague, close to Hague Bar Primary School and about a mile and a half from New Mills village centre with a Co-op, shops and the usual amenities. Marple is about a ten minute drive in the opposite direction, with a bigger selection of shops and a larger Co-op.

Five minutes away are lovely walks by the River Goyt, great for dog walkers and lovers of the countryside. You can walk into New Mills this way and see the ruined mills from the Millenium Walkway, or take the children to search for nature around the reedbeds in Hague Bar Meadows.

As George and I have said, if we could move the house and garden 200 miles, we definitely would!

   Edward Mellor Ltd, Marple



W is for Wool, X is for.....

Since I started knitting again, I seem to have amassed loads of wool, and spent the autumn knitting lots of tiny things for our new grandson, Otto. It was very enjoyable and now they are being used. I especially loved making a little green set in Rowan Baby Alpaca Dk from Black Sheep Wools, which is gorgeous to knit with and feels so soft - perfect for such delicate skin.

When we were in France in September, I spent the evenings knitting this Apple Tree Blanket from Rowan Yarns. It definitely stretched my knitting skills, which I like doing, and I think (and hope) my daughter Claire was really pleased with it. It was such fun to do, though I must have made it about six times over, with the amount of times I pulled rows out and re-did them!!

Not a good picture above, and the colour looks really horrid, but below is how it really looks...

X is for...  X-emplary? No!  X-pert? No!  In January, what else could it be but XS - I mean EXCESS!!

We are still eating Christmas cake, and have both XL'd ourselves at eating too many bad things once again!

Weightwatchers looms on the horizon, (well, on my links bar, actually!) and we have to start being good soon. I have to say, I love the Weightwatchers Online site, as we make a lot of different dishes and I can copy recipes into the database, so it works out the points per portion. I have a list of my recipes and there are tons more on the website too. Once we can get ourselves into planning a week at a time, because that's the only way we personally can do it, we don't feel too badly done to, as there are lots of treaty things. 



Me and George :o))

U is for Unicorn!

I never finished my 'Alphabet for August' challenge, and it went on most of the year, so now I'm going to finish it, continuing with.... 

U is for Unicorns! Why, you ask? Well, I was struggling with U and thought unicorns were definitely the nicest things I could think of. They are magical, mythical beasts, and wouldn't we all like to find one in a forest clearing somewhere? Plus it came to me on the spur of the moment, it is probably not the most likely thing for me to say, and occasionally I like to surprise myself!

V is for Vet - who we and the well-known pet insurers we shall not name have spent a disgusting amount on over the last few years. We have felt in the past that Ruby was getting treatment she didn't really need (as well as being overpriced) and it was actually making her ill! This was all done because she was going to have a dental, and had nothing else wrong with her. They did a blood test and found that her platelet count was low - very low - 32, I think. They said something like 250 was normal! Obviously we were scared. Now greyhounds have completely different blood compositions, heart and lung sizes etc, but this isn't always taken into account. They put her on steroids for months, which had little effect on her count, but changed her beyond belief,. She went off her food, did puddles all over the house, didn't want to go for walks and was literally hangdog all the time! Now they were earmarking her for leukemia treatment, when she had been a happy normal dog before the drugs kicked in. We were due to go on holiday with her, so we told the vet we had decided to stop the steroids and see what difference it made. In the first week she perked up and stopped having 'accidents' in the house, and she just went back to being our sweet Ruby. We aren't in any way saying dogs shouldn't be given steroids, or advising anyone to go against their vet's advice, but remember, Ruby wasn't ill to start with. Some months later, she had a blood test again and it was 500, and the next time, just before the dental she never had was re-planned it was about 55. They had once said that some dogs have counts that go up and down all the time, but I'm so glad we took her off the treatment when we did.

We changed vets when when they told us how much it would be to extract one tooth and clean the rest, and I thought it was a stupid amount, so checked locally and on the internet. Everyone was charging half the price or less than our vet. So we upped sticks and left. You can always change your vet, so shop around. The one we took her to in the end deals with greyhounds and lurchers all the time, so we know she's got the best one now.

If you want to see the earlier alphabet entries, please browse my earlier posts.

My poor blog ...

... has been neglected for the best part of a year, so I thought I should jump back in the saddle, so to speak!

I have been in a state of confusion and indecision for most of that time, as has George, trying to decide whether to move to France or the south of England. We had a very wet and gloomy holiday in Normandy and Brittany in June, made worse by the fact that my elder daughter Emma was rushed to hospital with meningitis. By the time we got back, Emma was recovering at home. We decided we preferred Normandy and returned in September for a drier but still partly grey holiday.

Grey Day!

Autumn Sunshine and Beautiful Percherons at the National Stud 

Anyway, to cut a long story short, although we love France, we have decided to stay in England, for many, many reasons, not least our family but also my up and down health. I think we both feel better for making what we really feel is the right decision for us. We still want to head for drier and warmer climes, so we plan to head south, top listers being the South Hams in Devon and the Isle of Wight, though nothing is set in stone.

To this end, well partly, as we wanted to go there anyway, we've booked a fortnight in Kingswear, Devon in this lovely place called QuerQuay Bolthole (how could you not love that name!) Perfect for a bit of romance!


QuerQuay Bolthole Garden View

What we've been up to....

Since I sadly had to close my grooming salon because of my health, I thought I'd try and sell some knitted items, as I have recently taken up knitting again. I was thrilled the other day, when I made my first sale on Folksy, from my shop, Dancing with Wools. It was a cuddly heart design hottie cover, in a lush and lovely 50% alpaca and 50% merino wool and it's so soft. I made one for my daughter as a Christmas present too and she says she uses it every night. There's only one item on there now, a make-up bag, but there are a few things in my Etsy shop too. I must get clicking those needles!

George has been busy in the kitchen while I've been ill. He has made two large pans of curry to freeze - Lemon and Coriander Chicken and Mughlai Lamb with Turnips, both from 'Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery', except we swapped the turnips for butternut squash and I think the turnips would have been better. Her recipes are all fab, and he made naan breads too this weekend from the same book. It's become our curry bible. I think I'll start a favourite recipes page, with links to the sources of course, but it may just fill up with Madhur's yummy curries!

Next, George made two batches of Seville orange marmalade - yes, he bravely soldiered on, cutting the rind into nice little - fairies! Yes, I  know, you're saying 'WHAT!!!' I was brought up by a mother who strangely called the shredded peel in marmalade fairies and so I do and I think my children may still! Just a little quirky, maybe! Anyway, Here's his fabulous marmalade - it's a tastebud sensation!

I had decided to make a load of sausage rolls for the freezer, as we love them for lunch, and homemade are much nicer and cheaper to make. I'm very fussy about sausage and sausagemeat, and buy mine from an award winning butcher, as everything can be trusted to be top notch, yet not overly expensive. I thought they would be lovely with a bit of orange marmalade added on top of the sausagemeat and George agreed, so I made them and they taste fab! I always use homemade shortcrust pastry, as I don't like flaky and hate the way flakes constantly fall off. These came out of the oven with sticky jamminess oozing out of the edges and we had to be very good to put any in the freezer. Now I want one!!

George's most recent make was a spelt loaf he kneaded in the breadmaker, but shaped and baked in the oven for a change. The reason is that the top is always left pale and soft in the breadmaker, and though we now put it in the oven for a few minutes, it's not as good as the 'real' stuff. Also, we sometimes have a failure as spelt is not as easy to rise and prove as wheat flour. Anyway, he made it and it looked fab. It was much more risen than we often get in the machine, but ended up a bit doughy and with a huge hole in the middle and a small lump of dough inside! Shame, but I think it probably needed longer in a cooler oven. Looking at it, you would guess it was perfect.

George is so good doing stuff around the house and fortunately enjoys cooking, mostly savoury dishes. As I prefer baking pastry, cakes and puddings, it works out really well, though not too healthy! However, I think it's back to the breadmaker for a while now.

Witchblood!

My daughter, Emma is an author! Yesterday she published Witchblood, her first novel, on Kindle. It's aimed at teens and young adults, however if you're long past your twenties, but love vampires and the supernatural, you can still read it, or buy a copy for your friends and relatives. At just 77p, it's a bargain and the next in the series is already in the pipeline. If you don't own a Kindle, you can read it on an iPad, iPhone, Smartphone or on your PC.

Emma has always loved reading, from being very small, and her interest in the supernatural began when we used to read Enid Blyton's 'Faraway Tree' books together, and later moved on to the likes of 'Twilight', but you can read all about that on her blog, www.witchbloodthenovel.com. I hope it is a sellout success, as she has always struggled to find a career she would love, and I know writing is that one, so fingers crossed, and please take a peep at "Witchblood".

My New Hobby or should I say Obsession is....

Knitting!

It must be nearly thirty years since I did any knitting worth speaking of, but I started knitting some party collars for my Doggy Dazzler customers to wear at Christmas and now I can't stop! The collars are on my website and my new Etsy shop, Lyncrafts.

So then I started to knit miniature clothes for the woolly celebrity Lurcher SOS dogs - yes, I lost the plot long ago! Myrtle and her brother, Merlin go on holiday with loopy people like me, to raise awareness and funds for Lurcher SOS.

After that, I thought it would be nice to make some human winter warmers, as it's turned rather chilly lately. My first need was for legwarmers, and I found luxurious, soft Alpaca wool in these heavenly colours. I love random wool.

I'm now hurrying to make presents for certain family members, which I can't put on here till after Christmas, for obvious reasons. Then, after Christmas, I want to start making nice things for my Etsy shop (see above).