Happy New Year Craft!

Ahh, Christmas.  Done and dusted for another year.  Our tree came down yesterday along with all the other house decorations.  New Years Eve saw me watching The Sound of Music on tv, barely awake myself, listening to the snores from a certain family member at the other end of the house.

 

We spent today having a wee Sunday drive on a Wednesday down to Flinders for a looksy and a picnic.  Where we got rained on.  And it was freezing cold.  Seriously, summer, wherefore art thou'?

 

I have an amazingly generous friend who gave me this beautiful felt ball wreath for Christmas.  I have hung it on my craft room door and it is never coming down!

 

 

This afternoon, post Sunday driving on a Wednesday, I managed to finish off this wee little number too... a mini granny square wreath!

 



 

I had a little foam one in my craft cupboard and this pin keeps popping up in my feed so I felt all inspired to make my own!  Six three round grannies joined together as I went.  I sewed the two ends together and then made three rounds of granny trebles on one side of six squares so it looked a bit like a cowl.  Then all you need to do is wrap it around the wreath and join the edges up.  If you look carefully in the centre of my wreath you can see the ridge from the join.

 

Happy New Year Everyone!

December 1st 2013

I know today is traditionally putting the Christmas tree up day, but I was feeling a little stressed during the week and popped it up a few days ago!  The smalls did help with the decorating with most of their 'kinder craft' taking pride of place at the rear of the tree!!! And exactly how does one manage to choose the child that gets to put the star on top of the tree when all three where throwing epic tantrums regarding who deserved the honour?  Send them all to bed then sneak a child number 1 out, whisper to them not to tell their siblings and let child number 1 do the star.  Return them to their bed, remove the star, go to child number 2 and repeat the above process.  Rinse and repeat for child number 3.

 

Score 1 for the parents.

 



 

We haven't had Christmas stockings in the past but I found this wonderful pattern in Granny Square Love by Sarah London and before I knew it I'd whipped three up from some leftover yarn (hence the non traditional Christmas colour mix)!

I spent last night and today filling our advent bunting I made.  I have tried to fill it with little Christmas notes, a few chocolatey treats and some small trinkety bits.  The notes say things like, "Let's all watch a Christmas movie together!", "Let's go for a Christmas House Lights search tonight".  There are loads of lovely non-chocolatey advent ideas on the interwebs! 

 

We also nipped down to the local shopping centre today for our photo with Santa. 

$42 later....

 



 

How's your Christmas decorating coming along?  Please tell me no-one has finished their shopping yet because I have not even started!!!

It's beginning to look a wee bit like Christmas...

 

I spied some beautiful cards the other day that had doilies sewn into them and felt all inspired to do my own. With Christmas fast approaching and this simple and easy pattern from The Royal Sisters I've ended up with these...

                  

   I've made them in the past as bunting too which I will be doing again this year!

Is anyone else freaking out about Christmas Day being one month from today!!!???

 

I am literally about to go and get the tree out of the garage so I can do a decoration sort before the tree goes up on December 1st.  Really, it was such poor planning on my part to birth a child in early December as I always feel like my head can't cope with birthday parties and Christmas prep all at once!

Christmas Pudding Day

 

I declared today Christmas Pudding Day. 

 

Normally Christmas Pudding Day occurs when my lovely sister is in town since it really is a two person job to hold the calico full of yummy puddingy mix whilst tying it up with string!  Since she couldn't just flit over on a whim from Tassie, I had to do it myself!

 

 

Really, why bother cleaning up the breakfast dishes before you start!  Just dive right in and make some more mess. 

 

My fruit has been soaking in kahlua for about a week or so already.  I dumped all my dry ingredients into the soaked fruity mixture... which of course included a healthy bag or so of choc chips, mixed it all up and came up with this mess....

 

 

...dollop it all out on to a pudding cloth...

 

 

...mine has a Christmas pud recipe on it but I follow a different recipe.  I purchased a few of these a couple of years ago from Spotlight but this is the lucky last one.  I soaked this in my big pot of boiling water before I put the pudding into the centre of it so it was sanitized before use.  I also dust the cloth lightly with plain flour so the pudding won't stick to it.

 

Tie your string around the the calico nice and tight, getting rid of us much air as possible.  This is where a second set of hands comes in useful as one person can hold up the pud, pulling the cloth nice and tight and the second person can tie the string around and around!

 

Whack a saucer into the bottom of your saucepan of boiling water.  You will hear the constant tingle of that plate and know that you are not burning the bottom of your pudding and that the water is happily boiling away constantly cooking your lovely pud.

 



 

Make sure you tie the excess fabric and string around the handle of your pot so you don't set your kitchen alight with the gas flame from your cooktop!

 

I boiled that pudding for three hours and will then hang it out on a hook to dry till Christmas Day.  I'll boil it up again on the day for an hour or so and then probably eat too much of it with raspberries, custard, ice-cream and icing sugar!

 

Don't forget to make your son take ridiculous photos of you holding up your heavy pudding to share with the world!

 

 

 

What can you do for the three hours your pudding is boiling away?!  Certainly not housework!  I used that time to play around with new headers for the blog, mucked around with the widths and basically stuffed things up, then spent about the same amount of time googling ways to fix it!  Whoops!

Merry Christmas



Source: themeadowbrookblog.blogspot.com via [maisontwenty3} on Pinterest

Working in retail at Christmas time is such a treat.  I did the midnight shift last night, finished at 9 tonight and will work till 5 on Christmas eve!  Lucky I am all prepped and prepared and just get to giggle (and get paid for it!) at all those poor souls who are doing the last minute rush.

I just wanted to pop in quickly to say Merry Christmas to you all.  I hope Santa brings you exactly what you want because you totally deserve it!

Eat, drink and be Merry!

We survived our Santa Photo!

I totally want to get that printed on a t-shrit to wear proudly for the rest of the festive season, because 'survive' we did!

It took numerous bribes of chocolate, money to waste in the Timezone located nearby and in the end, me pretending to 'steal' Santa's bell for Matilda to even look in the direction of the camera!  I honestly wish there were secret camera's set up behind Santa's chair catching the perfomance us mum's put on to get our children on Santa's knee and smiling.  They are Oscar worthy!

And looky what I found yesterday in Sportsgirl of all places and on sale...

A Beci Orpin embroider your own cushion!  Love it!  She must have done a collaboration with Sportsgirl or something.  They had some other cute things in there too that I could have gone troppo on but I find that store to bright and cheery and youthful for my liking these days.  All those bouncy, smiley, half naked sales assistants can be very intimidating!

Hope you are having a happy Sunday!

Weekends

Baked these 'reindeer' cupcakes lastnight for my son's cupcake day at school.  When he saw them this morning he laughed... and not in a good way!

Took my baby girl to the doctor after she had been bitten 32 times by mosquitos, 12 of which are on her poor little face.  Gave her a non-drwosy antihistamene.  She slept for 14 hours straight.

Packed up our beach house which finally sold. 

Got exposed to far too much flesh whilst assisting a lady in the changerooms at my newish job.  And when I say far too much flesh I mean, just her in her knickers and bra... and she need a bikini wax... from her knees up!  I am not sure I get paid enough to look at that.

Finished all my Christmas shopping.  Now I just have to post most of it back to Tasmania.

Got addicted to Handmade Ryan Gosling.

How was your weekend?

It's beginning to look a lot like (a babushka) Christmas!

The tree has gone up a few days early.  Our tree tends to be a mixture of cute ornaments I have come across over the years, things the kids make at school and sweet christmassy babushka's people have given me!

The Christmas Advent bunting has been hung and is waiting to be filled with goodies.  This is the second one of these I made I loved them sooo much!  One was sent off to the Haby Goddess' Handmade Kris Kringle and then of course I needed one for our house.  I saved time on mine though by just hot glue gunning those numbers onto the pockets rather than sewing them (the hot glue gun and I are friends again!).

This babushka advent box is sitting next to the tv.  How cute is she?!  Her drawers are sooo tiny though I am not sure what to put in them.  Suggestions???

Presents have begun appearing under the tree (babushka wrapping paper and stickers from David Jones).

And the Little People nativity scene has been dusted off!

Are you ready for Christmas?

Christmas advent bunting...Yes please!

After some fairly intense nights of sewing, I have finally finished my gift for The Haby Goddess' Handmade Kris Kringle!  The theme was red and white and while I was originally thinking I'd go down the crochet pathway, once I'd seen the link for this Christmas Advent Bunting I changed my mind.  While it was fairly straightforward, there was lots of cutting, pinning and sewing which took me ages but I am sooooo impressed with how good it looks I have started making one up for myself to keep!  The pockets are the perfect size for advent treats although I can imagine it might get a little heavy when full!  I really hope my 'Kris Kringler' loves it... and has room to hang it!  It's pretty long!!!

Click here if you are interested in the tutorial for this or if you would like to get your hands on some of those fabulous fabric advent numbers!

Christmas Countdown...

Do you know that there are only 62 days till Christmas???

Does this send you into wild panic or is that just me???

I really wanted to try for some handmade goodness this Christmas but am not sure how much I will manage with so few days to go!  Last year I crocheted a bunch of Pip's Christmas baubles to attach to each person's pressie... they may just get a repeat!

And I also joined up for this today....

... make something predominantly red and white and Christmassy, send to a mystery recipient and receive something in return!

Fabulous.

Scary Santa

Every year I attempt to dress my children nicely and choof off to a shopping centre for the obligatory Santa Meet and Greet Photo. I dont know why I still insist on it as they all kinda freak out about it and in reality he is quite scary up close and personal. One year I convinced Darren to dress up as Santa to see if we could get any joy. What do you think? Who looks the most unimpressed here?

The only time I have ever had any success is when they where all wee babies and didn't know what was going on. But, since I like to use the shot as our Christmas card cover I have spent the last week convincing them of the joy they should be getting out of sitting on a strange mans knee and telling him about all their Christmas wishes! Its has not been going well! Then I spied these awesome printables and decided I might cut the kids some slack this year and use these instead. How cute are they???!!!