More Christmas Creations .......

Apologies if all this belated Christmas blogging bores you but I want to document it for the children when they grow up :-)  I had wanted to blog sooner but as all of you lovely bloggers keep adding wonderful new blog posts I get carried away reading and then run out of time to write one myself.

The Christmas trees went up in our house a little sooner than I wanted this Christmas as the girls really wanted to put them up (eldest Sweetpea wasn't really interested this year :-().  I usually put off putting up the trees for some reason but then hate taking them down - I miss all those twinkly fairy lights :-(.  I put the lights on and then let the girls freestyle it :-)

They really enjoyed themselves ...... of course there was a breakage or two but that is all part of it isn't it :-)

They did a really good job and I did my best not to re-arrange anything.

Mr Sweetpea had a real urge to buy a real tree that he can plant out in the garden and then bring in again each year so we also had this tree:

Now I must confess to finding it hard not to re-arrange this one but I kept my hands to myself :-)

We lent our coloured lights to the cubs tree in the Church's festival of light this year so these came back to us after the trees were put up.  Middle Sweetpea asked if we could have them over the fireplace and they looked lovely, in fact so lovely I have only just taken them down.

One thing I haven't taken down is the pom pom garland I made, ooohh I love it :-)

On the run up to Christmas I did quite a few creative things with the children to keep them entertained.  Last year I bought a gingerbread house kit for us all to make.  Before the children devoured the gingerbread I drew around the shapes so we could make a gingerbread house this year from scratch.  I found a wonderful recipe here and it worked really well. 

 

We added a stained glass window by cutting a hole in the gingerbread and putting a boiled sweet in it.  I also had to add a little birdie sitting on the roof :-)

Carrying on our creative week we made my Grandad Pete (the sweetpeas Great Grandad) some gnomes out of Fimo.  Grandad loves gnomes and still has some of my old fimo creations from when I was a child so I thought he may like some of the children's fimo creations :-)

Here they are:

these two are middle Sweetpeas creations - love the one holding the flowers.  Eldest Sweetpea made the toadstool and axe and wood block to go with his gnome below:

Eldest Sweetpeas in on the left and little Sweetpeas on the right (loving the extra long arms, she went a bit white spot crazy too, oh and that pink on the front is his beard :-)).

Of course then I had to make one too :-)

Here they are in their new home.  I popped them into one of my trustee coffee jars and needle felted them some grass to sit on.  Little Sweetpeas had to sit on top as the gnomes long arms would't fit into the jar :-)

For the great Nannies little Sweetpea got to work and planted some hyacinths for them.  We are very very lucky that the Sweetpeas have 4 great grandparents living locally.  It is always hard to know what to buy them but I know the Nans all love flowers - here is my lovely Nan gardening with the Sweetpeas earlier in the year (I hope you don't mind me popping this on here Nan but I did love this photo of you gardening with the Sweetpeas xxx - Nan is high tech you know and reads by blog and e-mails me :-)).

Here is little Sweetpea hard at work, she loved planting these up :-) 

Whilst creating and looking for gifts I got a little side-tracked and bought myself something.  I just had to share these with you as they are so gorgeous!   I had been wanting some of these little birdies for ages and talked myself out of them until I could resist no longer. They came beautifully packaged in a little box.

Just look what was hiding in the green tissue paper......

Such cute birdies which I can hang around the house ....

With gorgeous ribbon tails .....

They came from the lovely Linen Cat, do pop over and see her shop - she makes the most amazing things, not only birds but other wonderful things like a Fox in a Dandy Green Suit - just stunning.  See that extra little pink bird, that little birdie was a lovely surprise which now lives with my Mum.  I showed my Mum these lovely birds when they arrived and she ooohhed and aahhhed over them as much as I did so I gave her one to have in her home as she loved it so much.

Sorry for such a long post, I have got a bit carried away as I had to stop and start it a few times today and then added more.  I will show you what happened to those pieces of linen hidden in my bedside drawer a few posts back in my next blog post :-)

Christmas Pressies ....

Thank you for all your lovely comments on  my last blog post and apologies for scaring some of you with Sid's photo :-)  I will warn you in future if Sid is going to star in a blog post.

I thought I would share with you some of the things I made by hand or thrifted for Christmas pressies this year.  I have already blogged about my chocolate covered ginger and vanilla sugar, these went down very well.

I also made some rum truffles with cranberries this year too.  I got dragged into a Secret Santa which, to be honest, I didn't really want to take part in as I already have a big family to buy for - bah humbug me :-)  Now, I didn't want to go and buy something that would just be chucked away so thought I would make something instead.  Luckily I picked out of the hat a close work mates name and I knew she would love something made of chocolate or handmade (she wanted one my little ladybird clips for her birthday :-)).

I made her these rum truffles with some cranberries in them.  They were yummy - of course I had to do some controlled taste testing for safety reasons ;-)

Here is the recipe if you want to give them a go, they are really easy to make:

Ingredients
200g plain chocolate
75g butter
1 tsp vanilla essence (or rum if you want rum truffles - I put 2 tsp rum in mine :-))
225 icing sugar - sifted
2 tbsp double cream
Handful of dried cranberries or whatever other fruit or nuts you think would suit the recipe.

Break the chocolate up into a bowl, add the tsp of vanilla essence (or the substitute).

Melt down in a microwave or in a pyrex bowl over hot water.

Gradually sift in icing sugar and add cream in intervals.

Stir in any fruit or nuts you would like to add.

When completely mixed together pop the mixture into the fridge to firm up a bit.

Take it out of the fridge and scoop out some with a spoon.  If it has become too firm then pop it in the microwave for around 20 seconds to soften again.  Roll into a ball, when all the truffles are made roll into icing sugar (or nuts or chocolate sprinkles) to cover them .

It was really nice making these for my friend as middle Sweetpea helped.  As I was working Boxing Day we spent Christmas afternoon making them together to take to work on Boxing Day.

I found this fab book for my Granddad Pete who has a garden full of gnomes.  In fact it was rather hard to part with this book and some of the photos were so funny :-)

I really need to find my Granddad one of those big toadstools!  I think I want a gnome for my garden now as they always make me smile :-)

This last present went down really well with the my parents and my in-laws.  We got them an A4 calendar made up with photos of the children and us through the year.  Here are some of the photos I picked for it.

At our fav location, the Marina in the village.

My hubby and little sweetpea at the seaside in Mallorca at our fav bar.

At Angelsey Abbey, when you gotta go you gotta go :-)

The older Sweetpeas at Waterside Antiques trying on the gas masks, this photo really makes me giggle :-)

Little Sweetpea looking cool at a wedding we went to in June.

In a war bunker in Mallorca, I was trying to take a landscape shot when middle Sweetpea popped up.

Me and Sweetpea at a wedding in June (excuse my crappy hairstyle but somehow the kiddies and Mr Sweetpea looked fab but I forgot myself - typical :-)).

The calendar was fantastic quality and we will be doing this again next year I think.  I got them from Boots who use Photobox to produce them.   It took a while going through my hundreds of photos but was well worth it as the parents were so chuffed with them.

Hope you are all having a great week.
x

Christmas and New Year Fun

I hope you all had a fantastic New Years Eve, we were all in bed by 10.30 pm but did have some fireworks left over from November earlier on in the evening.  Little Sweetpea wasn't sure about them again and said that Nanny had to come round and look after her whilst they were going off as Nanny looked after her on November 5th - how sweet :-)

We have had a lovely Christmas holiday after the initial problems with little Sweetpea's emotional outbursts.  There were games of Twister which I got for them before Christmas.  I love the way little sweetpea tried to play whilst learning colours at the same time, who would ever think Twister was such an educational game :-)  I found it easier to play after a vino or two lol.  My Mother-in-Law kindly took over the arrow spinning in the photo above :-)

Christmas Day itself was a bit of a blow out after a terrible nights sleep on Christmas Eve.  The adult Sweetpeas stayed up as we were excited about Father Christmas arriving, by the time we went to bed it was about midnight.  Off we pottered to bed to find little sweetpea had wet the bed (my fault as I missed her 10.30 pm toilet run :-(), whilst changing the bed clothes middle Sweetpea woke up.  Middle Sweetpea then couldn't get to sleep as she was so excited and got a tummy ache.  She then ended up in our bed at about 1.30 am only to keep fidgeting for the next couple of hours.  Little sweetpea then coughed in the night and I heard middle Sweetpea saying something about going to help her, I then heard the words 'oh look, Father Christmas has been' aaaaaarrrrggghh it was 3.40 am!  So then little Sweetpea was in our bed and middle Sweetpea banished back to hers.  Little Sweetpea was allowed to open one stocking pressie to get her to go to sleep again.  Eldest Sweetpea then woke us with a nose bleed at goodness knows what time!  Fun times :-)

We had a quiet day with a visit to the Grandparents in the morning where the Great Grandparents and Aunty were visiting and then we came home for lunch and chilled out all afternoon.

The Sweetpeas seemed very happy with their pressies.  Amongst other things middle Sweetpea got her first sewing kit with a needle book that I made for her with a monkey on it (she loves monkeys for some reason).  I got her a lovely batch of felt from The Felt Fairy for her kit - thank you to the lovely Annie who added a few extra bits in there too :-)   She also got to go to build-a-bear with me yesterday to make a monkey teddy too.

Little Sweetpea got her long awaited for dolly house - I just love this photo of her looking at the box with her little hand on it.

She loved it, in fact all the Sweetpeas loved it and haven't stopped playing with it since Christmas Day.  See that little Sylvanian Family cat in the house?  That is what I hid in the Sweetpeas crackers this year.  Many years ago my Dad hid some Sylvanian Owls in our crackers, I was so happy and excited when that little Owl popped out, in fact I still have it to this day.  I wanted to re-create that lovely moment for my kiddies so I did it for them this year.  Not sure they were as excited as I was as they started to argue over who had what cat later in the day but I think they enjoyed it - kids eh :-)

Now what did Eldest Sweetpea get, yes I am completely bonkers and did say no to this idea but somehow my voice isn't heard in this house sometimes.  Meet Sid the Corn Snake!  I must admit he is very lovely and is now used to us all but I am still feeling guilty about the dead mice he eats :-(  The family promised to have 2 vegetarian days a week to make up for their lost lives but we will see if that will happen.

The dogs got a new present each too, oh how I love watching them open pressies - so funny!  They get sooo excited!

Other lovely moments included little Sweetpea painting middle Sweetpeas toe nails - not sure she will go into beauty as an occupation ....

Making snow globes out of old jars , little Sweetpea loved hers a lot :-)

Well, now we are in 2011 - where did that year go!?  2010's New years resolution was to do more arts and crafts, I had so much fun finding the real me again :-)  I think it is the first resolution I have never broken!

So what are my resolutions for 2011?  I have decided that making ones with things that need to be changed about yourself e.g. getting fit, losing weight etc just don't work and you end up punishing yourself.  I think that if I focus on things I love or really want to do then the things that I would prefer to change about myself will happen as I will be a happier person through to my soul.  This year my resolutions are to get the sewing machine down from the loft when we put our Christmas trees up there and to learn how to use it (or even thread it up lol).  Also I want to learn to crochet, my friend at work can do this so I am going to ask her to teach me :-)  It is rather strange actually as I just read a mates blog with her resolutions on there and they are nearly all the same - spooky :-) Would love to know what your resolutions are ...

Oohh before I go, do pop over to the lovely Jenny's blog where she is having a fab giveaway.  Also keep an eye out here for another of her giveaway's here soon :-)