As we approach the end of the year, it’s often a time to look back and reflect on the highs of the previous twelve months – and perhaps also the lows – but I’m not going to do that this year. Instead, I’m going to look back over a handful of things I’d planned to blog about but time wasn’t my friend and I never quite managed to cover them.

LEEDS BEAR HUNT

First up is my bear hunt. I’m not sure when it started but there have been art trails all over the country which are a really great way of drawing in visitors and raising money for charity. The ‘Leeds We’re Going on a Bear Hunt 2023’ art trail featured giant bears at various locations in and around Leeds City Centre, inspired by Michael Rosen’s beloved children’s book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. The charity the bears hunt was fundraising for was Leeds Hospitals Charity, a charity which supports various teaching hospitals around the city including Leeds Children’s Hospital.

My daughter and I had planned a trip to Leeds in July to celebrate the end of her GCSE exams. Timed during the couple of weeks before school term finished, we’d booked tickets for Strictly Ballroom The Musical starring Kevin Clifton, and were staying for two nights, planning to do some shopping and have a cinema trip too. On arrival, we spotted a bear. I had no idea there was a bear hunt going on so it couldn’t have been more perfect for me, being a huge bear fan.

There were 35 giant bear sculptured and nearly 50 bear cubs and hunting for them kept us occupied for quite a bit of the time away which was just as well because we didn’t get to visit the cinema. My daughter was sixteen and we wanted to see a fifteen film and the rather unpleasant person serving wouldn’t let us in without ID. I get that cinemas have policy but logic would have said a student out in the day during term time, clearly with her mum, was likely to have just finished GCSEs or A Levels and therefore be at least 15, but there you go. He’d already ordered me to move away from the desk and stand in a certain place (despite no signage saying to stay there) so I suspect he was a little bit power hungry!

Anyway, we didn’t get to any of the outlying bears and we struggled to find some of them but I hope you enjoy the pictures I’ve included. I have over 300 so I had to be selective! I also spotted a fabulous teddy bear in John Lewis which was nothing to do with the trail but I had to include him.

CASTLE HOWARD AT CHRISTMAS

The next event I missed was going to Castle Howard in early November to see their Christmas installation. This is the fourth time I’ve visited. Previous themes have been Masquerade, Narnia and Into the Woods. This year’s was Christmas in Neverland.

I went with my bestie, fellow author Sharon Booth. The creativity and planning that goes into these installations is quite astonishing. There was a note in the visitor guide saying that they’d ‘prioritised sustainable materials’ and ‘recycled and reused where possible’. I’m fully in support of that but it did mean that, as a regular visitor, I recognised certain aspects. Not saying that’s a bad thing; just that it therefore wasn’t quite as fresh for me.

Although extremely impressive, this was probably my least favourite of the four Christmas installations I’ve visited. Sharon and I went to the Masquerade one together (I took the hubby and daughter to the other two) and she preferred that one. I don’t know whether it was more impressive or whether there’s an enormous ‘wow!’ element of seeing a Christmas installation for the first time when there are no expectations and being blown away by how amazing it is.

The bedrooms which you visit first were as impressive as ever but the Antique Passage didn’t have much in it which was a shame (the Narnia version was very impressive) and the Long Gallery with the deck of the Jolly Roger! was more sparse than previous installations although there was a fabulous shadow film playing which I loved.

I think Narnia remains my favourite, then Masquerade, then last year’s Into the Woods, with this one being in last place. Again, I emphasise it was still extremely impressive and I take nothing away from the imagination, time and effort that has gone into it. I’m sure other visitors will have loved it the most. Just like reading a book, everyone has different tastes.

I look forward to seeing what theme they have next year. The current installation is still on until 7^th January so you might still be able to get tickets and see it.

OCTOBER IN THE LAKES

We were meant to be going to Florida for a fortnight in November and, for reasons I won’t bore you with, we had to cancel it and push it back to next year. Although not quite the same, we managed to book a Monday-Friday in our favourite holiday cottage in Keswick.

I’ve never been away for a Monday-Friday and it was surprisingly disorientating, being away for longer than a weekend but not quite a week, and not having a weekend as part of it. I’m not sure I’d do it again.

There were lots of knitted poppies in the grounds of a St John’s Church in Keswick ready for the approaching Remembrance Day. The weather wasn’t kind to us and it rained at some point every day. As you can see, the photos are pretty dull!

This sign made me laugh outside one of the pubs:

We didn’t want to go up on the fells as there’s no point when you don’t get the reward of a stunning view due to the rain or low cloud, but we did go on a low-level walk in Borrowdale. This is an area south of Derwent Water which we’ve never explored before. The walk was lovely but we decided to go off-plan and see if we could bag the smallest Wainwright – Castle Crag – instead of just passing round the bottom of it. Bad decision. We weren’t sure which footpath to take and came off the route too early, arrived at a dead end and had to retrace our steps. It took us an hour to get to the bottom of Castle Crag and, at that point, we discovered that the footpath up looked like shale. There was no way we could do that with an excitable sprocker spaniel who bounces all over so we had to skip it.

By the time we’d added nearly 90 minutes getting back on track, I was a bit fed up. I don’t cope well with being lost and having to do more than expected. I was also really hungry as it was way past lunchtime and we had no food with us. The route thankfully took us near a village and we strayed off the path in search of food. It was cold but the rain had let up and we parked ourselves at some tables outside a café and chose our lunch. I went in to order. It was 2.55pm and I heard the woman serving tell the customer in front that they stopped taking orders at 3pm so I was just in time. I have my order and she said there was a half hour wait on food as they were stacked up. Fair enough. I said I’d go ahead thinking we could have our drinks in the meantime. She gave me a stony look and said, ‘And it’s a half hour wait on drinks.’ Wow! Talk about not being welcome. She didn’t even know what drinks I wanted. For all she knew, it could have been a couple of soft drinks out the fridge which take no preparation on her part as we would happily have had them straight from the bottle. Feeling very unwanted, I told her we’d leave it. I do completely understand how frustrating it will be when someone orders food five minutes before the kitchen closes. Having had a shop, I hated it when customers came in two minutes before closing time and took ages browsing but at least the café would have had money coming in rather than my scenario where the customer 99 times out of 100 left without buying anything! Oh well!

There was no way I could finish the circular route without food so we walked to the main road and caught the bus back to the car park and returned to the holiday cottage.

One thing I did manage to do between downpours was take some photos of The Start of Something Wonderful by Derwent Water. The colours might not be the brightest in the background but it was nice to have the book in its setting.

CHRISTMAS MARKETS 

I visited York Christmas markets with my good friend and former work colleague, Carol. She lives near Newcastle and York is a central point for us both to get too by train so we meet up a few times a year. We usually do this on a Friday but diary commitments meant we had to do a Saturday and never again! The market is just too busy for me (too short to feel comfortable in moving hoards!) and The Shambles was the same.

I returned to York shortly after to meet with fellow Boldwood author, Samantha Tonge, which was lovely. We’ve been Facebook friends for several years but had never met in person. We had lunch together and a good old catch-up.

I’d gone in early to meet another friend but she was unable to make it so I had some time to kill. It was a gorgeous day so I went for a wander, including a visit to Clifford’s Tower using my English Heritage membership. My goodness, it was breezy up the top. My eyes were streaming! But look at that gorgeous blue sky!

I absolutely loved the polar bear outside The Ivy. Isn’t he amazing?

After that, hubby and I went to Leeds Christmas markets. He’d read an article promising 150 stalls but there probably weren’t even a third as many as that. They were spread out at different points around the city centre in clusters of a few huts at a time and what a disappointment. The only decent part was the fairground where there were a lot of food huts together and a lovely atmosphere because of all the lights of the rides but, other than that, it was a complete let down. I’d been really looking forward to it because I do love a Christmas market. Next year, we’ll maybe try Manchester or even Birmingham were they do put on a huge market.

I did manage to grab a few pics of me out and about in Leeds.

CRAFTING

Finally, I’ve done a fair bit of crafting this year at the workshops in a village near us in Ebberston Studios. I’m not naturally talented at crafting so I’m focusing on one type of craft at the moment – needlefelting – and hope that practice will improve my abilities before I move onto something else. I’ve also tried wet felting – same materials but a completely different concept. Jury’s still out on wet felting as there are so many stages to the process and I can’t remember the order of them all, but I haven’t given up on it yet. I made a wet felting heart earlier in the year but I still haven’t finished it. It needed to spend several hours fully drying out before we stuffed it so that last part had to be done post-workshop and it’s still waiting to be stuffed. I might try to do that over Christmas. This is the equipment needed, the fluffy pic is the start of the process and the heart in the middle is the end product which I did inspired by the cover on Healing Hearts at Bumblebee Barn with a sunrise, lavender and bee.

It was back to needlefelting after that with an owl. I’m super proud of the barn owl I created.

Next was a mixed project with some wet felting and a small amount of needlefelting. I’m not going to reveal what I did as it’s connected to my next book release, A Breath of Fresh Air, so I’ll post about it around publication day. Having said that, subscribers to my newsletter have seen it and we might even have posted on Twitter (refuse to call it X!) at the time.

After that, I had a couple of workshops in quick succession with a Christmas theme. The first was to make tomte (Sweden) / tonttu (Finland) / nisse (Norway and Denmark) or gonks as we tend to know them in the UK. I use tonttu because we were in Finnish Lapland just before Christmas 2019 when I completely fell in love with them and purchased several. My tonttu collection has grown a fair bit since then although hubby always calls the ones not purchased in Lapland ‘imposters’. So I made my own little imposter and I’m delighted with him.

I want to do a slight tweak to his hat, putting a couple of stitches in about halfway down to create a kink in it – perhaps another job for over Christmas.

My final workshop of the year was to make Christmas decorations. It’s the only one Emma at Ebberston runs where it’s a bit of a free-for-all to make what you wanted but we were told that, if we went for smaller decorations, we should be able to manage three so that was my goal.

I started with the cutest penguin hanging decoration followed by a bear’s head wearing a party hat. There was time to do one more but nothing complicated so I decided to do a snowman as the shape was very simple, as was the colouring. I was going to make him into a hanging decoration too but Emma had some wooden plinths and little Christmas trees we could buy so I made him a standing decoration on a plinth instead.

I’m really pleased with how they all turned out. I wish I could say I’d made the knitted hat on the snowman and the scarves on him and the penguin but they were pre-made for purchase. Everything else is by me, though. Check out the snow! I was worried at first that I wouldn’t make it when it started coming down but, thankfully, the main roads were clear.

I’ve got some needlefelting kits and various spare materials and hope to do some crafting at home next year. I’m not intending to create anything to sell – it’s just for my own pleasure and to give me a break from writing.

That’s it! All caught up on the many posts I planned to write but didn’t get around to doing.

This is my final post before Christmas (or at least I think it is!) so I’ll finish by thanking you for all your support for my writing this year. It’s been another amazing year and none of the things that have happened this year like achieving one million sales could have happened without you. I’m so very grateful for how you’ve embraced the worlds I’ve created.

Wishing you a peaceful, relaxing, joyous Christmas and hugs to those for whom this festive period is going to be difficult.

Big festive hugs
Jessica xx