A virtual thank you!

For those of you coming here from 'Twelve Crafts' for stocking stuffer ideas, please make your way through the waffle to the ideas...

It's time for me to say a great big thank you to all of those people (and you know who you are) who have made me feel so welcome to Blogland with your very kind messages or silent visits.

When I started this blogging lark, I loved having my own private piece of cyberspace, but back in February I decided it was time to go public. I got myself one of those free little hit counters and never thought it would go beyond 20 hits. Well, today it got to 500!!!

I wanted to give all my visitors a special gift each, but sadly the budget won't stretch to that. Then I thought I could do a giveaway, but only one person would get the prize. Eventually, I hit on the idea of a virtual giveaway.

This is how it works: I've put together a list of some of my favourite crochet patterns, sewing patterns and printables from all over the internet and one of my favorite recipes. These make up your virtual gift hamper from me to you. Thank you so much for your visits and support they are so appreciated! I should clarify that everything is free and I have credited the creative people who have made these lovely things available!

Now the fun starts! Get ready to print, sew, crochet, cook, craft and enjoy:

Gift #1
First up is a gift for all those 20 Minuters and crafty crafters out there:


I love the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster, but I think this is more cheery. Moleitau designed this, and he's made it available to anyone who wants it. You'll need to click this link and print it out. Some people print it onto transfer paper and put it on t-shirts, I'm going to make a small poster, I might even frame it... What will you do?

Gift #2
Right, on with the unwrapping! My next gift to you is courtesy of Nigella and Jane Grigson, it's the easiest and best recipe for Yorkshire Pudding ever! I swear, you can't go wrong with this one, it is absolutely fool proof and produces a billowing pudding that always impresses. OK, enough with the sales pitch, here it is:

Yorkshire Pudding (serves 6 at least!)

You'll need:
300 ml milk
4 eggs
250g flour (sifted)

Heat your oven to 220C. Put a small roasting tin in the oven with a tablespoon or two of oil, dripping or goose fat. Beat the eggs and the milk together with a pinch of salt. Then let it stand for 15 minutes, now whisk in the flour. Pour the mixture into the scorching roasting tin, and put it back in the oven for 20 to 25 minutes. I usually check it and leave it in a bit longer if it isn't golden enough for my liking. Enjoy!
P.S. This was particularly for Alison! Alison - I did remember, hope this one works for you. I used to be useless at Yorkshire Pudding too, but now I rock (Little Man is a very bad influence)!

Gift #3
I'm always short of note cards for thank you notes, but I found these recently, and they've solved my problems! I thought you might like them too:



The lady over at Creature Comforts has loads of free printables, but I really like the apples! Here's the link, get printing next time you need to say thank you via snail mail!

Gift #4
Next up is something for anyone with little girls out there. I used to love dressing paper dolls when I was little, so have fun:


These (and more) are from rustyvalley.com via Moms and Kids Couch. I think they would make perfect party bag gifts! Here's the link, just scroll down and print them out. I love the vintage feel of these, have fun!

Gift #5
I fell in love with this little chap the very first time I saw him.



There's a fantastic tutorial here, if you want your very own bunny. I keep meaning to make him, but you might just beat me to it!

Gift #6
I've started to make these, and thought you might like a pretty pair of slippers too. Look aren't they beautiful?


The (very easy) tutorial/free pattern is here. You may need to subscribe to Ravelry, if you haven't already, but it's free and gives you access to more free crocheting and knitting patterns than you could shake a stick at!
I made these for my daughter using this pattern.

Gift #7
Finally for all of the sewing fans out there, I found this
huge list of sewing patterns for every eventuality. Happy sewing!

Well, that's it for the BIG THANK YOU! I hope you enjoyed the unwrapping, and you found something you liked!

Easter Eggs in full Technicolour

If you have had the misfortune to trawl this blog for tutorials, you will have noticed that I am useless at writing them! However, I am of the opinion that if I keep trying, I might produce something that will be of use to someone one day!

Here goes, this is a tutorial for making coloured eggs for Easter (I should know how this one goes, the Little People and I do it every year!):

You'll need:

Eggs (yes really!)
Water
A pan with a tight fitting lid
Food colouring (as many as you like
Vinegar
Kitchen roll
An egg box

Step 1
Take your eggs out of the fridge and let them warm up to room temperature. Place them in an empty pan. Fill the pan with water to about 3-4cm above the eggs. Bring to the boil and then boil for ten minutes. Now at this point, if you're just boiling eggs, plunge them into cold water and peel. However, if you're after eggs of the dayglo variety, keep reading.

Step 2


While the eggs are boiling away, decide how many colours you want to use. You'll need a non porous bowl per colour. Filled each of the bowls with a mug and a half of water, 2 tablespoons of vinegar (I used some old cider vinegar made from apples in my aunt's orchard) and quite a few drops of food colouring.

Step 3

Once the eggs have had their ten minutes, plunge them into the coloured water and swirl them around a bit.

Step 4


Take each of the eggs out of their colour baths and dry them off with a bit of kitchen roll. Then place them in the egg box to dry.
That's it! Little Miss loves doing this!


If you're wondering why it there are three types of colour in the 'finished' picture, it's because something went wrong... I was looking for different things to do with eggs and Martha Stuart suggests mixing food colouring with olive oil and rolling the eggs into it to get a marbled effect. Well it might have worked for Martha, but it didn't work for me...

Happy Easter to everyone!

One Swimming Pool Party Cake Coming Up!

Before you start reading, I've labelled this a tutorial, mainly because I love reading tutorials on other people's blogs and never put any on mine! I do miss out steps, so if you need more information about anything leave me a message!

Little Man is going to be 7 soon. My baby is disappearing all the time, and I can't believe where the time has gone. I should add that the baby is being replaced by one gorgeous cheeky monkey who I am beyond proud of. I'll stop there, there's nothing worse than a gushing mother!

Anyway, Little Man decided that he wanted a pool party this year, and since it was cheaper than anything else I could come up with, who was I to argue?! The only problem was he added that he wanted a pool cake and NOT from a shop. My hopes of a quick run to the supermarket returning triumphantly with a Ben 10 cake were dashed, and I had to get my thinking cap on.

He stipulated a chocolate cake, which isn't a problem, but I was stuck with the icing. The chocolate icing recipes I've used before (trust me, I've tried a few) are all too sweet. I love this stuff, I grew up eating it in my French great grandmother's kitchen:


So I searched the Internet for Nutella icing, and I found something similar to this:

Nutella Icing
3 to 4 tablespoons of Nutella
About 150ml double cream
A few drops of vanilla extract to taste

I put the Nutella, double cream and vanilla extract in a bowl and beat the mixture with an electric beater. That's it! I may have added a bit more cream to loosen the mixture a bit though. I did think I could have added a bit of icing sugar, but I was planning to put a layer of fondant icing on top of it, so I didn't. The cake then looked like this:



Right, now came the next problem, how was I going to turn a chocolate cake into a sparkling swimming pool? I went to Flickr and looked at all the pool cakes there, truely inspiring!

I visited a cake shop and bought:
White icing
Paprika colouring
Edible Lustre in a sparkling blue
Piping gel
Coloured fondant icing
A pack of writing icing in assorted colours.

I kneaded a tiny bit of paprika colouring with a lot of white icing, and got a pinky fleshy colour. Then I got to shaping and rolling bits of icing to make little people. I used to writing icing to pipe on the hair and Little Lady's swimming costume, and I used some green fondant to make the swimming trunks that have the legs sticking out of them. I ended up with these:


Then I rolled out more white fondant icing and laid it on the cake. I got a bit excited at this point, because I broke open the edible lustre, it's amazing stuff! It's powder, you brush it on with a paint brush and it colours the icing like paint! Then my cake looked like this:


You can probably see where I got over enthusiastic with my dusting, there was a bit of a blue haze around the edges of the pool. I decided to make the edges of the pool with more icing (it disguised my mess!). I rolled it out and scored it so it looked like it was covered in tiles.
After that I put lots of piping gel on the blue lustre which turned the icing into a proper watery pool - amazing!(Thanks should go to who ever it was on Flickr who came up with this!)
Finally I played with more icing, writing icing, half a small milky bar and some Smarties, and the finished product looked like this:


I think I've done my 20 Minutes today!
PS Since posting this entry, lots of very lovely people have left very nice comments about this post. Thank you to everyone! I'm so chuffed, it's made my day! I thought I'd post a few more pictures which show the 'water' a bit better than those in the original post (they were taken by Big Man, Little Man was too high by this point!):


Stephanie Lynn very kindly invited me to join this, and I promised I'd link to it, so:

A birthday cake for Little Miss

Little Miss was born on New Year's day four years ago. This year she wanted a princess cake, which is no mean feat for someone who isn't skilled at cake decoration (I'm not enough of a perfectionist!). I leafed through a few cake decorating books and pooled some ideas to do this:

I was in too much of a rush to make one of those gorgeous step by step tutorials (as usual!). But if you're interested, this is what I did:

1. I made a cake in a ring mould. It didn't come out as tall as I needed it ( I thought it would come up to Barbie's waist but it reached her knees!), but that didn't stop me.

2. Once the cake had cooled completely, I wrapped Barbie's legs in greaseproof paper and shove them into the hole in the middle of the ring cake. I stuffed more greaseproof in the hole to secure her. You could use foil or baking parchment instead, I just had greaseproof.

3. I folded another piece of greaseproof paper and then wrapped it round Barbie's waist and secured it with sellotape. It then looked like she had a greaseproof skirt for the ball, which wasn't quite glamorous enough for my 4 year old, so I kept going...

4. There's a fantastic haberdasher's in town, so I bought some pink sparkly netting folded it in two and wrapped in round Barbie's greaseproof skirt. At this point I thought of getting the needle and thread out but I only hade half an hour before the guests were to arrive, so out came the sellotape again. I taped the back of the skirt up and tied it to Barbie's waist with a bit of wired gold ribbon I had in my stash.

5. I found some ver regal looking candles and stuck them in some sweets that i put in front of the cake. That was it. Easy and quick and it drew some oohs and ahhs from all the little girls who saw it. Perfect!

Granny Squares in the snow...

We woke up to this on Wednesday morning:

Little Man's school was shut and the roads were impassable. So while the grown ups tried to get some work done from home, the Little People got more and more excited. Eventually I gave up and we went out for snow fun.

It wasn't any better on Thursday, but Little Man has gone back to school today, I'm dreading having to go and pick him up this afternoon. Little Miss and I will have to walk in...

With all this time trying to work from home and looking after Little People at the same time, my evenings have been spent finishing things off for work (great!). This means I'm falling behind with my latest project - Granny Squares!!!! Yes I have mastered the art (much thanks goes to Lucy at Attic 24 for this tutorial). I made a summer garden square and then added three more rounds. You just keep going in the same way as you do the last circle of Lucy's square. These are the results so far:

I love them!!!

Homemade Secret Santa

I had a rare two seconds to think at work about two weeks ago, and I put it to great use. We do Secret Santa every year, but it's got a bit tired, so I took the initiative and sent an email. It read 'This year, in honor of the credit crunch, it's homemade Secret Santa, the budget is limited to £5.' A frisson of excitement went through the office and then everything went quiet.

Once I'd set the ball in motion, I had creators' block, great! So I did some blog stalking (I will leave a comment one of these days!), and then typed crochet into You Tube. I love seeing what people make films about, and I can't believe how much you can learn about crafting from the tutorials people make and upload. Anyway, I found these two VERY easy tutorials:
Simple hat
Threadbanger hat
I sort of combined the two, got some wool that's been hanging around for ages and made a hat. When it was finished, it looked a bit dull, so I went back to You Tube for a flower tutorial. This one was great:
Crochet flower
The end result is my first ever crochet hat:



The crochet bug had me in its grip, so I bought some cotton yarn and followed no particular pattern to make up this hat. It looked a bit plain, so I went back to You Tube and found out how to crochet a heart and some leaves, and voila - a strawberry hat:


I loved it so much I sent it to a friend's two year old daughter for Christmas. Now I have to make a pink one for Little Lady, I'll keep you posted!

Cosy for Christmas

I have a great friend who forces me out most evenings for power walks, gym sessions, aerobics classes and we never stop talking! I'm fitter than I've ever been and I've got to know a really lovely person. Now Christmas is round the corner, I've been trying to think of something to give her.
Earlier in the year, (or was it last year?)I crocheted a blanket in a little over a week. Every time my friend babysits for us, we find her snuggled under the blanket at the end of the evening. She's also mentioned the blanket several times, so it occured to me that she might like one of her own.
I've labelled this post as a tutorial, but I feel like a bit of a fraud! I'm sorry if you were expecting more detail, I'm not proficient enough with crochet (yet!) to do any better than this! Anyway, it was really easy, I just bought two types of wool, got out two sizes of crochet hook(8mm and 5mm)and started making a chain, then I just double crocheted(I think it's triple crochet in the UK, but I'm no expert)for four nights and Voila:

I got carried away with the camera, so I took a few arty shots, as you can see I'm no professional!

Crimean Soldier costume tutorial (sort of)

Little man came home one day announcing that, as he was doing Florence Nightingale at school, he had to go in dressed as an injured Crimean soldier on his class's Florence Nightingale day. My mind immediately sprang (hopefully) to an easy trip to a fancy dress shop, or maybe we could make do with something simple, ha, ha, ha! I made the mistake of looking up the costume,on the internet, only to discover that my task (should I choose to accept it) was to make a proper, traditional red soldier's uniform...
I searched fancy dress shops, scoured the internet for a toy soldier costume or even a useful tutorial, but I drew a blank. Nothing, zip, nada. Is little man's school the only one which puts mothers through this trauma?

I couldn't let little man down so I came up with this:

Before I begin, this is for any poor unfortunate mother who is faced with the same dilema as me.

You will need:

1 red jacket
1 length gold braid
1 length thick white ribbon
6-8 large gold buttons
velcro
large poppers (snap buttons)

First of all little man and I set off to our closest charity shop (thrift store) to find a ladies' (they're smallest I could think of)deep red jacket. Miraculously I found a single breasted one (UK size 10, US size 8)on the sale rail for £2.50! I bought the rest of the 'equipment' at the haberdashers in our town. Then I got to work. This is the Jacket before the transformation:



I cut part of the arms off the jacket(and hemmed them roughly), so that they were the right length for little man. I also cut the buttons off. Then I put the jacket on little man, turned the collar up and wrapped one side of the jacket over the other, turning it from a single breasted jacket to a double breasted one. I stitched the popper buttons on so that the jacket could be buttoned up. Then I stitched the gold buttons on the front of the jacket, and the braid on the collar. Finally, I drapped the white ribbon over little man's shoulder and stitched it to a length I had velcroed round his waist. Little man was so impressed he said 'Mummy I didn't know you were THIS good!' which really made my day! Here's the finished article (we used red food colouring (for blood)on the bandage, which was amazing except for the fact that it dyed a patch of little man's hair red for a few days.):



The moral of the story is, make friends with a mother of older children, who have a whole wardrobe of relevant costumes you can borrow!