D Day.

Writer's block? me? yes. Indeed. After 15 odd years of dabbling with blogs, cooking, baking, cutting , gluing, designing and printing, cutting and gluing again ,I am finally returning to the keyboard to share it all online. Hence the D Day title. Why "a table for nine at 8"? you must wonder. This is me imagining someone might actually read this. Well , I am going to try to share the details of my yearly themed "Christmas " parties which have kept me busy day in day out, month in month out (does one say that?), exploring all sorts of crafts and skills, I could not name them all. Every year, tension is high in January till I can actually decide on the theme for the next one and I won't even mention the anticipation often demonstrated my eight friends who are my regular guests. "What have you come up with this time?" "What weird and wonderful things will you make us again?"... so that explains the 9 at table. All being well, and we have been very successful the past 4 or 5 years, there are 9 of us. Not always at 8 but I needed something a bit catchy for a title, didn't I?

To complete the explanation, yes, I did mention "Christmas" party, this is mainly because we gather during that period of the year. It all started as a real Christmas party.... but I'll explain that later on. The date has been moved back slowly towards November as I am getting older and finding it difficult to jungle THAT party and the Christmas preparations at the same time. If you hang on a minute you will see why a single party can keep me busy throughout a year. This is me again engaging with an imaginary reader but heck, this is a blog...somebody will read it at some time. I'm sure.

I don't seem to have writer's block but I feel the fear of not really knowing where to start because there is so much... so i'm going to steal Maria' s intro and start at the beginning because it is a very good place to start. Here goes... or I should say Allons-y!