Starting to get Christmassy

This weekend has been a long one for us here as I had Friday off to try and do some work towards the exam I am sitting next week. I have done my best with the revision but have managed to also find a little time in the afternoons for opening our advent prezzies and starting to fell slightly Christmassy.

On Friday lunchtime I had a little break from my revision and we both opened our advent prezzies for the day. I got socks from my present stack which I do love - everyone has to love Christmas socks! Then, later on in the afternoon (after doing some more work) I had a knock on the door and a lady turned up with these lovely flowers and a box of chocolates for me. Adam said that he thought he was running out of prezzies for all of the days of advent and he knew I would be home so it was a good excuse. They look absolutely gorgeous and go really well in the corner of the room. I love the little bag that they have come in too. I almost don't want to have to move them to make way for the Christmas tree but we will still have the coffee table in the middle of the room so they can stay on there and add a little more decoration to the room.

Yesterday I also had a day off work which I had booked to revise as it's so rare at this time of the year to get a day off on a weekend. Again, I did my best to do some more revision throughout the day but there was still time in the afternoon for present opening and also a little bit of making.

My gift for the day was a soap making kit. Something that I have never tried before but Adam thought would be fun for us both to give a go. This came with everything needed (pretty much) to colour and shape your own bar of soap: instructions, moulds, dyes for colouring and a wooden stick for mixing the colour in.

We started off by cutting a piece of the soap the size that we thought would be about right for the mould that we had chosen and then chopping this into small pieces so that this would melt down evenly and without taking too long.

We heated these in a jug rested into a pan of boiling water

Until it all melted. I didn't manage to get a photo right at the very end as the next part had to be done very quickly.

Once all of the soap had melted together you had to take this off the heat and add the colouring very quickly. Once the dye had been added you couldn't reheat the soap and as soon as the soap was taken off the heat it started to solidify again very very quickly.

We stirred in the colouring as quickly as we could and then transferred the soap to the mould. It had already started to solidify ever so slightly when we poured this into the mould, hence the funny looking blob in the middle of the below photo but we did get it all in there and spread as evenly as we could.

 This then had to go into the fridge for a couple of hours (according to the instructions) to fully solidify. To be honest I can't imagine that it would take this long to set, given how quickly it started to solidify when we were trying to pour it into the mould but we did as we were told.

After a couple of hours we popped the soap out of the mould and it looked like this.

We were very impressed with our efforts! Not bad for a first attempt at making soap. We have said that we both enjoyed doing this and it was a lot less difficult than we thought it could be and it smells really nice too! I think that we will try doing this again shortly and see if we can make a layered soap with different colours to go in the kitchen and match all of the bright colours in there.

While we were making this I also remembered that I had a kit a while ago from one of the Crafty Creatives boxes to make something similar. I couldn't fully remember what this was as I had never tried the kit out. When I went up to look I found that it was actually a kit to make bath bombs and not soap. As I had found the kit we thought we may as well give this a go as well.

With this one you didn't need to heat anything up, just mix the powders together, add some orange flavoured essential oil to make it smell nice and then spray the mixture with a small amount of water, just enough to make the powder stick together to form it into the mould.

We started to use the mixture to fill this mould but when we first made it, it looked like there was nowhere near enough mixture to fill both sides. It was just about the right amount to fill one half of the mould.

As we had never made these before, we weren't really sure what would happen so we thought that the mixture we had made was just for one half. It was fun to make and very easy so we went through the process again. We thought this was very clever and would make the right amount then to fill both halves of the mould and allow us to stick them together to make the traditional bath bomb shape. When we had made the second mixture it looked a little bit like this...

However what we hadn't realised was that the mixture would continue to expand...in hindsight I think that the 1 mixture would have expanded to fill this mould and would probably have become just the right size to fill both halves. Instead, it kept growing and growing to the point when we thought it might be worth separating the mixture and making two bath bombs. There was only one mould that came with the kit so we weren't sure what to use. We found this little washing liquid pot that we thought could be used. We split the mixture in half, replaced enough in the proper mould to create a proper bath bomb shaped one and put a little sphere in here. We weren't sure what would happen with this one or if it would come back out of the pot again once it had expanded in there but decided that the worst case scenario was that the whole of would have to go in the bath with the bath bomb.

This one did expand a fair amount but Adam tried this out in the evening. He took the whole thing into the bath with him and it did fizz well. They both have orange essential oil in and this didn't smell too strong when it was used. We were pleased with the fizz of this one as we were worried that they had expanded too much before they were used and therefore wouldn't fizz when they were in the bath. We will definitely try these again and make sure we use the one mixture to fill the blue mould. Hopefully this would make it look more like a traditional bath bomb next time. It would also be interesting to see if we could put some of the dye into these from the soaps to make them look a little bit nicer next time.

On Saturday evening we had a little bit of time left so I suggested that we start to wrap some of our Xmas prezzies. It's good to have got some wrapped already. No tree yet but these are all ready to go under it when we put it up.

We also treated ourselves to one of our little cupcakes made from the Christmas cake mixture that wouldn't quite fit in the loaf tin. They are coming along very nicely. These ones are being fed with the booze at the same rate at the main cake so they are definitely coming along nicely. We have only shared one so far so there are still 3 left. This. If he have to be a one a weekend treat for the next few weeks.

The very very last thing to tell you is that I have finally finished sewing in all of the ends on my table runner up to the end of November. This is it, the very last month to work on the runner. It has still been fairly warm on the mid temperatures for November so I am hoping that the end will be pretty and show some of the colder colours as I will be back to low temperatures for the very last bit of the runner.

I have so enjoyed doing this and it is just the right amount of work for me to keep going with it. One row a day is just enough to keep it going but not too much that you can get behind so far that it just seems impossible to catch up again.

Have a good December everyone. My Christmas will be officially starting on Wednesday afternoon when I will have finished my exam so I will keep you updated after then of all that we have been up to. I have a few nice crafty days planned later in the month so I will be excited to share these with you and of course we have the tree and other decorations to put up.

Oooh, I almost forgot! Today's gift from my advent tree was a gingerbread house kit too so I will be making gingerbread, using the cutters that come with this kit and turning it into a house too. I'm soo excited. I have wanted to make a gingerbread house for years. I remember building a pre-made one once a long time ago with some girlfriends and it was really good fun. Excited to do this with Adam this year and we should then have plenty of gingerbread to share around too.

Advent calendars

This year is definitely the year of the advent calendar in our house. Last year I bought Adam a couple of Lego sets, split them up into 24 parcels and gave him a few blocks each day. This was slightly frustrating for him I think so I wanted to do something similar but slightly less mean this year.

I have wrapped up a number of small prezzies for him again this year but there is more variety this time around.

A while ago I told you about the bag that I had starting to make to contain these parcels. Since then I have managed to attach the pockets to the side panels. I firstly sewed each of the pockets along the bottom to ensure that they would be strong enough to contain a small something.

I tried to line these up with each other to make them as straight as possible before sewing them on. This was really tricky to do as I had to line them up the right way around but then flip them upside down and inside out to get them to be able to attach them.

I folded each of the sides in for each pocket and sewed around the remaining 3 sides in a contrasting colour. I sewed in grey thread on the red panels and red thread on th grey panels. This does slightly highlight the wonky-ness of some of the panels but I can put that down to the bag being homemade!

Once these were all on all of the sides (including the edges), I added a red band to the top edge of each of the panels.

Originally I thought I might be able to use one long piece of canvas for the whole of the bottom and two ends of the bag, however I decided that this would be too difficult to work around the corners. I knew that I could attach these if I had them as separate pieces. The way that I would attach them was in the same way as I would attach the sides of the name cubes that I have made in the past.

Once the red band was attached to each of the panels, I needed to add the handles to the sides. I measured these to be in the middle and matched them up on both sides before sewing these back and forth a few times to endure that they would be secure. They don't need to be too strong as they wont be used too much but might need to be fairly strong as the bag will contain all of the prezzies.

The sides of the bag ended up as below.

I did use these panels then to measure out a lining, this is in the red fabric. All pieces are made and ready to go but I ran out of time before the 1st December to attach this.

All I had time to do from here was to fill the bag and give it to Adam to start opening! I think I am now more excited about his bag of parcels than he is!

The bag was perhaps slightly over-estimated in size for the parcels that I have got. Next year I will have to find things with bigger boxes! I padded it out a little with some tissue paper to make it look slightly fuller! I even hid some of his prezzies in the outside pockets.

I will have to line the bag before next year!

Adam has also wrapped me some advent presents this year. He wasn't sure how to present these and has been nagging me for ages that he wants to have more Xmas decs around the house, especially in other rooms. With this as his excuse, we have bought a small tree for the kitchen. This has gone on the worktop in the corner and looks amazing with all of my prezzies underneath. It almost feels like Christmas already!

So exciting! Happy advent everyone!

I do have just one more thing to tell you about. This year we did make one more calendar between us. This one was done for my mum and dad.

We have wrapped up 25 prezzies for them. Most are bottles of beer but on 1 December we also included two "half pint" glasses. They look like a pint glas but actually cut in half down the middle. Well we wanted to make sure that they will share!

They both seem pretty pleased with it and they are opening the parcels each evening when they get home from work. They are taking it in turns and playing fair which is good!

We had great fun making this one and are really pleased that it is being enjoyed.

For this one we made the tags to hang around the edges. We punched out large circles and then used my festive hole punches to make the gaps to attach the ribbons. These were either small Xmas trees or stockings

I'm really pleased that they seem to be enjoying it. This is definitely my favourite month of the year. A present every day for myself and my loved ones. What can be better!

We both wait until the evening to open our prezzies to each other so we've not opened anything for the 3rd yet but here is what we have so far from stash

I got socks on day 1 and a small jar of sweets yesterday and I gave Adam a little Lego man on day 1 and a new battery for his camera yesterday. I also have my normal advent calendar that I made with my mum some years ago. This one has small chocolates in and fabric decorations to stick on a tree every day. I also got thie one below from one of my bosses at work.

It's lovely. I feel so lucky.

I'm looking forward to getting home and seeing what today brings! So exciting! I hope that you are all enjoying your advent.

Scrap books and wedding album

A few weeks ago we started to sort through some of our photos and managed to get our wedding pictures down from about 1200 to about 400 that we got printed.

Since then we have gone through these again and discarded a number more of the photos. We have managed to reduce this by at least half that are that little bit closer to making e final cut.

We haven't narrowed this again yet as, after a while, we found that we started to go a little crazy and unable to decide any more. All of the pictures sort of blur into one and you're not sure if you've already seen some before or not. This is another job to carry on with at a later date when we get a bit more time to go through them again.

When we felt like we needed a break from photos, we started to look through our memory box of things that we have been collecting from day trips out, tickets to shows that we have seen and anything else we have collected on our holidays and travels around too.

We decided to start with making a book of our day trips and tickets to shows that we have seen as this seemed like one of the easier books to organise.

We started to go through sticking everything down to sheets of card and then we would be able to organise the sheets into the order that we went on the trips or to the shows that we have seen. We decided to keep the tickets separate from day trips meaning that we can keep adding to these as we go to see more.

We were quite amazed at all of the things that we have seen when we started to go through them all. This one is Starlight that we saw with my in-laws

Miranda and Elbow...

We had a few days out for my birthdays. We try to go out and do something each year. Crazy golf and cinema last year.

A trip to the Deep in Hull

And to the zoo another

We made the cover for this book from the page of the map that is from close to home. This page includes our home city of Nottingam as the nature of this book, day trips, is that we haven't gone too far on these.

A couple of years ago we made a similar photo book for my parents containing photos from one of our trips to Yorkshire. In fact, I think it was from the first time my parents introduced us to our favourite place. For the cover of this book we had then used the map book pages from the Yorkshire moors. We thought that this was a good idea and would also work from a number of different places, for our memory books.

We will be working on more books of other places that we have been. I think that our map book might be slightly depleted by the end of this and I am not sure how thick our Yorkshire trips book will end up being. A lovely way for us to keep our memories though. It has also been really lovely and good fun to look through our memory box and remember our trips. Although we haven't been on any big abroad holidays in the last few years, we have had some really good times away and done a lot more than we really thought that we had.

Lye in, pumpkin, weather runner and the start of Christmas

This morning was the first day that I have actually managed to have a good sleep and not wake up until I wanted to wake up. It's been a really lovely day as well. I have been really really tired recently from working as much as I have been. I have been doing 6 days a week for a long while now. I haven't even had many Saturday's off recently and no Friday's for a while either. I slept until 11 am today so all hopes of possibly going to any rememberance service were out of the window straight away. I woke up to the sound of e church bells. It was a fantastic 6 and a half hours longer than any normal day.

It has been a really lovely day today as well as I have started some of my Christmas crafting. Unfortunately I haven't been able to keep this one a secret but at least the contents will be. Last weekend we went to the Fabric Guild and I got some Christmas-y fabric so that I can start to make some things for Christmas. My plans are to make some cushion covers for the living room, a Christmas tree wall hanger made from triangles sewn together, and firstly I wanted to make a bit more of a special bag this year to make Adam's advent bag in.

I have therefore started to cut out some of the pieces ready for the bag and also to sew some small parts of it today as well.

I have cut my pieces of canvas into 2 squares, one each for the front and back and a long piece to wrap around the edge making the sides and bottom of the bag. It will be a bit like one of the bags for life that you can get once it's done. I am also planning on using patches to make pockets on the outside of the bag. I had to buy some new needles for my machine so that I had ones that would be good enough to sew through the canvas.

Today I started to iron the tops and bottoms of the patches, with a little help I will admit, and to sew the tops of the pockets to make the neat edges that I need. I have done this with contrasting thread so I started to sew the tops of the red patch pockets with grey thread and I plan to sew the grey patches on with red thread.

I chose the thread colour to most match the opposite colour material that I had.

I am not sure yet how I will add the handles or lining to the bag but I will cross that bridge when I get to it!

Now I plan to get all of the pockets ready to go onto the bag and then I will work on how it is all going to sew together as I go along.

I have also recently managed to catch up with my weather runner (I did get a few weeks behind recently) but am now up to date. Here is the progress to the end of October.

October has started to cool down slightly with the average temperatures dropping more into the purple 6-10 degrees category but it has still been really really warm with the average staying in the 11-15s a lot. There is more green in there that I would have expected. This seems to still be the case with the start of November too. Maybe we will get some more wintery temperatures into November. 

I almost forgot! Pumpikin! Please meet Jeff the pumpkin - this year's new addition to the family.

We bought him in Yorkshire a few weeks ago when we went up to Yorkshire for a night's escape so he is fairly well travelled.

During his carving I was at work so he was left to Adam for design and creation. I think he did a pretty good job though. And he definitely persuaded a good number of trick or treaters to visit us. We almost ran out of chocolate again!

For me, Halloween and more than anything, bonfire night, definitely marks the start of the holiday season and of my favourite time of year. I can't wait to finish studying for my exam and have some proper dedicated time for crafting again. Roll on 9 December (but not too quickly as I have a lot of work to do before then!)

A bit of a catch up

I haven't blogged for a couple of weeks now as its been a busy time really. Lots of work to do and a couple of nice evenings out with friends has meant that I have been pretty tired and not had too much time. I have also had a lot of college to do recently too so have been pretty busy with that work.

A couple of weeks ago my lovely evening out was to the WI meeting again. This was my first official meeting with them so I was a little nervous about it as I wasn't sure what a normal meeting would be like. One of my friends said that she was quite interested in coming with me and seeing what it was like too so that made it a lot easier. At least I knew I would know one friendly face to talk to even if I didn't fancy chatting with some of the women that were already members. As it turned out it was lovely to have her there but straight away I bumped into someone that I knew as I used to work with her and the other new ladies from the walk last month were there again so at least we all recognised and vaguely knew each other.

This months theme was vintage craft and upcycling so there was a lady there who did a talk in front of the group about her business in which she makes things out of recycled fabrics mostly. I personally don't think I'll bother with the make again but it was really quite a nice evening. It was lovely to catch up with my friend and nice to chat to the people that I met last month as well.

We made this broach. Like I said, not really my thing but ok to make with people while I was there.

I was a little disappointed that it was a rose as they're really not my favourite flower, almost especially if they are red but when I got home Adam pointed out that it does match the England rugby rose pretty well. That made me like it a little more!

Also last week we went to a pub quiz with some friends which was good fun. I think we did worst out of all of the teams that were there but we were sat next to a table of very smelly old men who had bought their dictionaries with them! We didn't care as we all still had a good laugh. It was fun and made a nice change for a night out.

Last weekend really was one of catch ups as I managed to just about get up to date with my table runner. Back to mid temperatures this month, hence there are copious amounts of green coming though at the minute.

We ordered our wedding photos at last - it's only taken 4 & a half years! They're not quite sorted out yet but we have found the book that we bought before the wedding that they will go in but we plan to go through these and sort out the best ones for the album next week when we have a week off. We managed to narrow down our photos from about 1200 to 406 that we printed. There are still a number of duplicates within these but we got to the point where we couldn't tell the difference on the screen any more. We needed to get them printed and see them for real I think to weed out the ones where people have their eyes shut or that are too dark, at the wrong angle etc. I'm really looking forward to spreading these all out on the floor and looking through them all again.

Finally, the last exciting thing that has happened this week is that...we have a BBQ! The builder that we employed to make it has finally managed to borrow a saw to chop the bricks in half and here we have it - our new brick BBQ!

Please excuse the rubbish photo - it was taken v quickly when I ran round the back of the house as soon as I got home. He is coming back v soon to fit the patio slabs back down as well. He just needs to borrow the saw again to do it!

Now all we need is some nice weather and some time at home to try it out. Fingers crossed for a bit of sunshine during our time off next week.

I climbed a tree! And a few other updates...

A couple of other updates from the weekend to show you...

I climbed a tree!

At the BBQ on Sunday there became a challenge to get the apples out of the tree in the garden. John had already climbed it and shaken most of them down but it looked great fun so I thought I would give it a shot at getting a few more down from the last few branches. I wasn't the best at getting the apples down but I have to admit I had a great time trying. I don't remember the last time I did something like that. I felt like a big kid again!

Sunday evening I also got my table runner up to date with the weather stripes. I have even sewn in the ends up until yesterday.

August was still looking fairly warm with the red stripes still being in there. I was using high temperatures still for August. At the end of the runner now there is also the start of my September stripes. There is a lot of green coming through now but this is because I have switched back to using the mid range temperature for each day again. This in theory, should be a lot like May really as these are both months each side of the summer ones where I went to high temperatures. May so far seems to be showing a lot more purple than this month is and I don't think I ever got as far as a average being yellow in May. This month has got to a mid temperature being yellow as it was so warm last Friday. 

It has been a little bit strange the weather at the minute I think, it's been really quite cold in a morning when I have been going out to work in a morning but then turning out to be quite warm still during the days. One of my biggest pleasures with going out at that time each morning is watching the sunrise. Some days there can be so many glorious colours within it.

This weeks hiding place for Henlow was in a bag, hiding behind the shoes in the hallway. He does sometimes make you feel so guilty for going and leaving him. He was here looking out at us the other morning when we were on our way out.

The rest of the time he can be dead grumpy and we won't see him all evening as he'll just hide away in his house.

Finally the pretty nails for this week are purple.

Have a good one everyone.

Good luck at university Eleanor

Today we went to a BBQ party to celebrate our cousin Eleanor going off to uni. When her brother went last year, we made him a box of goodies to take with him. A kind of a Red Cross parcel of things he might need and also a fair few embarrassing things in there too. I'm sure he really appreciated opening them in front of his whole family!

This year we were slightly nicer to his sister and packed her up with some hopefully quite useful things as well as only a couple of embarrassing things.

Duvet cover - for John (her brother) we got a periodic table set as he was doing Chemistry. Eleanor is going to do environmental studies so this one was the most educational set we could find. Hopefully she will never be stuck with this definition in an exam.

The tratditional giant bottle of vodka of course had to be included. We also packed some chocolates for sharing with her friends when she arrives, shot glasses and mugs (she needs something to drink the vodka out of!) and of course the traditional student medication-flu relief to combat freshers flu, pro plus to stay up all night studying and painkillers for when the night before might have got a little bit too messy. There needed to be a little soap etc thrown in there as well.

A decent start with some packet food, soup, pasta etc and of course the plastic cultery. Always usefull when you can't be bothered to wash up!

She has decided that she will mostly be eating vegetarian food while she's away so we were slightly limited on what we could pack for her. I did however notice the other day however that a bag of smoky bacon flavoured Frazzles that I was eating happen to be vegetarian. A bag of these had to go in on top of a load of stationary for her just in case she is missing that bacon-y taste and smell.

Once it was all packed into the box we thought we should really try to make it look like a proper Red Cross parcel. We printed out some signs to put on the outside of the box

As well as a full contents list of the box

All were stuck to the outside of the box and it was all taped up ready for to go this morning.

I think Eleanor seemed to like the box and its contents. We really did go light on her and managed to not really embarrass her at all. I think one of her favourites was definitely the hat

The big bottle of vodka didn't go down too badly either.

The duvet cover is looking like it will be educational already. I think her bother was pointing out how useful the plastic cutlery would be in this photo too.

Really good luck at uni Eleanor. We hope you have a great time and do plenty of studying too.