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.