Blog Break - BGT is to blame!

Sorry for the unexpected blog break last week - I'm afraid my only excuse is that I was sat watching Britains Got Talent - I know it's fun to have a whole week of semi-finals, but I'd really rather it was only on once a week so I can do something else instead of watch it! (The dog was impressive though!)

So... seeing as that's all I've been doing, I don't have anything fun to blog about. Except my wonderful husband bought me a present, and I'm finally jumping on the Nigella bandwagon (my blog friend Lisa raves about Nigella all the time so I'm hoping she's right about her! Talking of Lisa, she's also gone AWOL from the blogisphere so hopefully this mention here might bring her back because I miss her comments!).

This is apparently Nigella's third book - Ian selected it because it had several chapters with recipes to make on lazy weekends - which sounds like the perfect use of weekend to me.

I like order - so if this book works out, I'll probably buy her first and second books so I have the starters of a set, instead of one randomly from the middle - although if any of you think I should shun the order and go for your Nigella favourite, let me know which it is and  I'll consider a departure from my world of OCD.
 

Craft? Or Crazy?

I'm not sure if this counts as craft. It definitely counts as crazy. For my niece's birthday back in october, I decided to have a bit of fun with the wrapping paper. I carefully cut out the head of one of the birds, and joined it onto one of the other birds to make a two headed bird.

Can you find it?

I thought it would be fun to turn the present itself into a game. I told her she wasn't allowed to open the present until she could find the two headed bird. She's 9. She looked at me like I was a crazy person. Then she found the bird in two seconds. Then she looked at me again as if I was crazy.

I don't care - I thought it was fun!

Here's the two headed bird just in case you couldn't find it.

Christmas Revisited

Now that the blogs are joined, I'm going to try and do a few more posts about crafty things from the gap on my other blog (the too guilty to post phase).

This is technically Ian's crafting that I'm about to show you. Every year (apart from Christmas 2010 for some reason) he makes me a christmas card. This year he stole his idea from an owl christmas tree ornament that a friend bought me. It's small enough that it can find a home, unlike some of the previous ones, which have been massive and are now collecting dust whilst waiting to be homed. It actually found a home on our christmas tree and so will be a nice reminder every year when I reuse it.

As well as the card, I also got the gift of extra stash goodies, as he ordered the cardboard from the internet and therefore couldn't tell how much he was ordering and we now have tonnes!

At Christmas, I decided to make my own wrapping paper. I went for simple brown paper stamped with some russian doll santas but it took quite a lot of time and we had quite a few presents to wrap. The parcels did look pretty when all tied up together with silver string, but I'm not sure it was worth the effort. 

I also had some fun wrapping escapades at Ian's parents. They were up to their eyeballs in tiling, carpeting and plumbing so the wrapping of the presents had fallen by the wayside. I'm no good at any of those things, so I took on the wrapping. Ian's mum didn't make it easy for me though, with a snow shovel for Ian's sister. I'm pretty proud of it though and it was a good challenge!

Whilst writing this post I've realised there was a lot of Christmas food related things that I've yet to post about too, so look out for Christmas Revisited part two!

Hamper Goodness

I went to a friend (PG) from works wedding back in May.  I wrote about the wonderful food he had here.  Now I'm going to write about the wonderful gift we made him.  We spend a lot of time with PG at work and he sometimes tells us too much about himself.  So far we know that he has a love of hampers (which we think is a bit girly) and he knows more about sewing than he should.  He also is very good at ranting, and we love listening to the things that annoy him (sometimes I think they'd annoy everyone, other times it's just something really funny that only he can find annoying!).

With all of this knowledge we'd been gathering over the last three years, my friend and I decided to make him a hamper.  He supports Pompey FC, and they were playing in the FA Cup Final on his wedding day (they lost) so we managed to get a magnet with the date on.  He's a big James Bond fan, so we stuck some top trumps in too.  He's also a bit of a Eurovision geek, so we added some Eurovision DVD's and badges that we got from ebay.  When they changed the logo of sprite recently, he'd complain every time he saw it (which was quite often as that's all Ian drinks and we have breakfast together every day), so we got a couple of cans of that to add.  At breakfast, PG also has a habit of destroying the stirrer he gets with his tea, so I got a small picture frame, and put one in, with 'In case of emergency break glass' written on it.  He's also very interested in bridges, so we bought a book with lots of bridge pictures in (bridge porn I guess!) but it turns out he already had that one. 

One of the biggest rants PG has ever had was about this other wedding he'd attended where the bride had a brown sash on her wedding dress.  He could not understand it, he complained how horrible it was (I've since seen the photos and I agree, it's really not a good look).  At this same wedding, the napkins that were supplied for the wedding breakfast were paper.  PG seemed outraged that someone would have paper napkins at a wedding.  I agree that it's not very classy, but I don't think I'd be as offended by them if I was in a similar situation.  So, to remind him of these two things, we managed to find some paper napkins with brown stripes! (We didn't want to just put nice things in this hamper after all!).

Now, generally, at a wedding, there is more than one person getting married so we had to put some things in that weren't for PG.  PG's now wife (DL) is also crafty so I chose the most fashionable sewing magazine I could find in WHSmith.  The eurovision gifts were also suitable for DL as she's just as geeky and she also supports pompey.  

As well as all the funny things, we put in several packets of biscuits, some dark chocolate heart lollipops from Hotel Chocolat, some bubbly and glasses.  I spent the day before their wedding making some small hearts out of felt, two of which were embroidered with their initials. 

The hamper all came together nicely, it had a red gingham lining, the hearts were red and white, we'd managed to get some cellophane with red hearts on it, and we had red ribbon round it.  It looked beautiful, and it got a big smile from PG when we arrived at the wedding. 

Work In Progress - Octopus

This is a picture of one of the octopuses I started making last year - I've got two on the go, one pink, one purple.  I was making them to give to my nieces for Christmas, but didn't finish them on time. I really should finish these off as they're so close to being done, all they need doing is their eyes, adding sequins and beads to their legs and then sewing all the legs on.  Hopefully this will shame me into doing it and I can give them as this years Christmas presents!

Apologetic Kitten

I didn't forget that it was my Aunts birthday, I knew it was coming... but then I totally lost track of what day it was, and completely missed it.  Bum.  So, to make up for it, I made up a birthday parcel for her.  I included a card, some marzipan bars, an apologetic letter, a gift card, and then something homemade.  My Aunt is a fan of cats (although she doesn't have any these days), so I decided to try my hand at a stuffed cat. I began making something far too big, and considering I was hoping to post this parcel off pretty quickly so as not to get into too much more trouble, I decided to scale it back a bit and started again.  The result is about three inches high, and the lessons learned were to think more about how it will stand up from the start (as the poor thing just topples over).  I think the package made up for the lateness, so all is good for another year.