The Promise of More

And so I promised more, so that promise I shall fulfil!  From Paris, Deb and I took the 2.5 hour trip on the TGV train to Angouleme, down in the the south west of France, the Dordogne region. We walked Angouleme for a few hours, beautiful town it was, and were picked up a few short hours later.  A car drive through the idealic countryside and we arrived at Les Soeurs Anglaises and were greeted warmly by "The Sisters" - Katie and Susu, the wonderful girls who help Les Soeurs Anglaises  run seamlessly and by Julie Arkell herself. Yes, do have a good look at their website - its gobsmackingly wonderful!  But come back!!  Oh, the magic, it had just begun.  Actually, it began over a week beforehand, it just had stepped up a few notches!

This is Julie.  And quite often was in various states of laughter (thanks Clare)! Often these fits of laughter where when she had one of her puppets in hand.  Julie gave us a few great instalments of her puppet show, but I'm not sure we saw the end of it?  These puppets of Julie's were the inspiration behind the papier mache puppets that we would make in the days to follow.

 On our first day, we made these flowers.  All hand stitched with little scraps of fabric.  Living in this frenetic world, hand stitching flowers can seem like a slow task, but, with a little perseverance we settled into this task and quite enjoyed the process, often whilst drifting off into a daydream - our surroundings were stunning - beautiful gardens immediately around us and then countryside beyond that.

The pics below are from a little secret brocante that we visited.  We all came up with a bundle of goodies each and some.  Here is Deb, picking off the fleas that came with us!

Our evenings were fun.  This evening we were entertained by a great little band - The Soggy Dog Ends.  Here, Clare and Katie are stripping the willow or something similar!

I will return again soon with photos of our "Summer Fetes and Puppet Shows". x