Wreath

Fabric scraps, old wire coathanger, cloth tape, ribbon, felt, embroidery floss. Just like in the old days when you made a wreath at school with recycled plastic bags!

Hots and Not

I'm playing Loobylu's game again.

What's Hot?

Christmas is hot! This year is the first year The Smurf really gets Christmas and we've been having great fun around here teaching him all about Christmas.


Christmas Tree Ice cream Sandwiches for dessert and my first go at royal icing! Success.



Wonky homemade Christmas Advent




The Smurf getting up every morning to check the advent calendar. Every morning he squeals with delight "Christmas time Christmas time!" "I have a lolly?". Then he gets his advent card out for the day and when asked what it says, he tells us "Christmas Card".


First ever homemade mince tarts. First time ever baking, first time ever eating. I leaned on some locals for their input. Approved, apparently!


Christmas Parties in the backyard (and see first photo, which was some time after the photo above!). Good friends, good food, fun times. The most amazing Christmas Ham, 3 kinds of salad, mango salsa (which I forgot to put on the table!), prawns wrapped with pesto and proscuitto. Double chocolate tart and icecream for dessert with fruit mince tart chasers! And a jar of homemade chilli tomato jam for everyone to take home.


Decorating the Christmas Tree.


Enjoying the aroma of the fresh Christmas Tree and lights and decorations.

Backyard cricket in your undies (The Smurf) with the main blokes in your life.


That's all, no nots this week.

Production Line Baking

Like Fran, I'm not one for production line sewing. But, production line baking, well I quite enjoy that.

All the rolling and cutting


The endless trays in and out of the oven to bake and cool.


The packaging, ooo the packaging that was actually quite fun.


And the end result, to make my little sister and her husband's 30th bday party that little bit more memorable.

Spy Bear!

Meet Spy Bear, a little character a friend of mine designed a long time ago (possibly in a land far, far way). He spent hours turning Spy Bear into an animation. We had some sort of exchange where by he painted us a yeti (I think) and I brought Spy Bear to softie life. It was many years ago and the details are a little fuzzy. I have been thinking about Spy Bear a lot lately so I dug out the pattern I made.

The details were important. Hat, eye patch, and


y-fronts.


The face details are taken from the sketch Adam did over drinks on his balcony one summer.


And the eye patch can be removed...poor little guy has to wear an eye patch cause of his sight problems.


His hat can be taken off in hot weather...thank goodness because summer has arrived early.


Oh look, Spy Bear's a nudist!


The Smurf has claimed this Spy Bear as his own, in an hilarious discovery overheard from another room. Spy Bear lying on dining table, spotted by Smurf "I seeit"....smurf climbs on chair..."ooo pirate!"..."Smurf's pirate"..."I keep it" and it's accompanied him since. But I'll be making more of these for my Toy Society Christmas toy drops.

On knit one, knit one, knit one

In un-me like fashion I finished this little number well in advance of the arrival of my latest nephew. I even had time to make very considered choices about buttons. It was delightful to be able to prance about the button shop getting the assistant's opinion and not feeling pressured to purchase the first button that seemed suitable because they needed to be sewn on in the car on the way to meet the bundle of joy (don't ask).

I bought three different types and settled on the first choice in the end anyway. The colour's a bit weird in that photo up there, but in real life the combo works. No, really it does.

The cardy is a Debbie Bliss pattern, garter stitch and knit in one piece (the only way to go I'm convinced). The wool is divine Grignasco Bambini. Most of the knitting was completed in the car.

OK, ready to cast on the next one. I think I'm going to buy some Bendy wool this time...to match the buttons of course. I've got another nephew/neice arriving in January so I can now knit a cardy to go with the remaining buttons.

More Hats - and a better way to finish

Yes, yet another hat. Perfect for sipping (baby) cino in the window of your favourite local cafe.

As promised, an explanation of the very simple work around on the "Lazy Day Hat" pattern. The final part of the pattern asks you to unpick the seam in the band to turn the hat right way out. You then hand sew that seam back together. Of course this is perfectly fine, but personally I find the finished seam a bit messy this way - but maybe that's more to do with my hand sewing than the pattern?

Anyway, instead of unpicking the seam, just leave a gap when you attach the brim to the band and turn the hat through the gap. (look Ms Fruiti - pins!)


Then just carefully tuck the raw edges under and top stitch all the way around the seam joining the brim and band, making sure you close the gap.


Are you making hats?

Personalised Kids Bday Party - Lolly bags

A little bit more to share from the party. This time the consumables in the lolly bag, Biccie Boys and the actual lollies.

I didn't want to fill the lolly bag with rubbish, but at the same time I didn't want to deprive the kids (um parents?) of their fill of yum. So, I figured the Smurf's favs would be easy and a few lollies for the kids old enough to eat them.



I thought that having the consumables in little bags would help the kids feel like there was more to the lolly bag experience.



The bags were bought many moons ago probably from Spotlight or Lincraft. The stickers were a cinch. Just print your sticker onto label paper, cut, peel and stick. Download my templates here or use your software program of choice to lay your stickers out.



Next up, homemade colouring books.

Personalised Kids Bday Party - Homemade Stickers!

Thanks for all the party love on the Happy Smurfday post. As promised I wanted to share some of the easy ways I personalised the party. Don't freak out, I'm by no means recommending some crazy arse approach to hosting your next kiddie bday bash, oh no. I'm more of a half-arse approach lady so never fear this will be easy peasy.

So, the stickers. These went into the "lolly" bags and as labels on the pencil packs.

There are two ways you can do these at home, with a Xyron Sticker Machine or label paper. I used my handy dandy little Xyron machine, which I bought years ago and have never really used for anything other than playing around. You can pick them up at Lincraft for $12.99 (complete with sticker paper cartridge).

You also need:


- Images for your stickers. You can download my sticker templates here.
- paper to print your stickers on, high gloss photo paper if using the sticker machine, or label paper.
- scissors - or a circle cutter - to cut your stickers out
- baking paper if you're not using a sticker machine

1. Layout and print your Stickers
Use whichever software you are comfortable with to layout the graphics you want to make into stickers. I'm a simpleton and use word. Gasp!

I used the same vintage embroidery pattern I used for the invites and coloured the image in using the "paint" program on my laptop. I then resized the image and imported it into word along with some free icons. I also added a sticker with the name of each kid.

Or, to save time, just download my template here.

If you're using the sticker machine, print onto the high gloss photo paper - I find this gives a more durable and shiney finished sticker that looks "more like a sticker", but feel free to use paper of your choice.

If you're going with the label paper, print your stickers on there.

2. Cutting
Cut the stickers out taking care to be neat. Check the width of your sticker to make sure it will feed through the machine without touching the edges of the channel you feed the stickers through.




3. Get some sticky on your sticker.
For the sticker machine, feed your sticker in the gap on the top of the machine. This puts the sticker between the backing paper and the sticky layer.



At this point you don't need to be too careful about lining things up as you can peel the stickers and reapply them evenly along the backing paper once you've finished each batch.

Gently pull the sticker through the bottom end while you continue to carefully push the sticker through the top.



Tear off your sticker and rub, rub, rub.


This makes sure the sticky sticks to the back of the sticker.

For label paper, carefully peel the backing paper off your sticker and arrange on a strip of baking paper.

Da dah, homemade stickers!


Now, don't wait for the next birthday party, go make stickers! (Look out for the Lolly bag and Biccie Boy stickers next post)

The Not So Ridiculous Hat

Remember the ridiculous fabric top hat? Well I remembered that the wheel - or fabric hat pattern - had already been invented and that I best just refer to that, so I had a go at the Lazy Day Hat pattern.



Turns out the wheel was a pretty good invention.


There is however a small part of the pattern I'm not so taken with, but I've worked around it nicely with the fourth hat (not pictured). I'll share the work around next week.

Happy Smurfday!

September is party season round here, remember this time last year? Having done the invite all and sundry approach we did things on a smaller, more personal scale this year. It was fun and the Smurf was delighted to have so much cake in his life.



The intention was to loosely theme the party around colouring in. The invites* were sent with 2 coloured pencils.



It was great to receive rsvp text messages with pictures of the invite covered in scribbles.

The banner went up again, it's served well, and was perfect hanging in the frangipani tree in the backyard.




It was very windy, so we couldn't bring all the colouring activities outside but we dragged a whole bunch of the Smurf's toys into the backyard along with the cricket set, playdough, watering cans and assorted toys. Over time this turned out to be just about every toy we own as each toddler decided the lure of a different toy inside was too much.

We did set up the Smurf's play tent, only if you look here at this photo we suspect that it may now live somewhere off past the horizon after a wind gust stole it from our backyard. Lucky no skinny toddlers were sitting inside at the time.



The kids loved drawing on the paving with chalk.


I loved making the AWW Train cake. Toot Toot!


That AWW cake book was a well read book in our household when I was growing up. The Smurf has started reading it now too and he loved the train cake. The kids each chose what colour they wanted to eat. Generally I'm not really into all that food colouring, but this was fun!



I kept the food simple, but enough that people could feel like they'd eaten lunch if they weren't staying on for the BBQ/beer component covering Mr Sadieandlance's bday celebrations.

There were some Nigella cupcakes, this recipe is the best.


My favs were, as always, the lolly bags! I decided to go with reusable bags this year and hope they would later be used to carry food to kindy, keep precious car collections, colouring in supplies etc.



The bag was filled with the Smurf's favourite things


Homemade stickers


Homemade colouring books (inspired by LovelyDesign and Hey Bubbles)






Biccie boys (you already know they're the Smurf's favourite) and a small lolly bag.


It was a great day and I hear the kids loved the lolly bags. I had a blast putting it all together, and while it looks like it was a lot of work, each piece was very simple and I really enjoyed it. I'll post the templates for the stickers later this week.

*Images for invites from here