This time last year....

I'd been up for hours making food ready for our Royal Wedding tea party.  I'd been struggling to make trays of uniform looking sandwiches (the bread wasn't square!).  I'd made shortbread myself for the first time, but I'd cheated and bought the scones. I'd made two types of sausage rolls (one with onion, one without).

I'd spent the evening before making last minute bunting as all our local shops were out - it was simple but effective and added a nice splash of colour to the room. 

I'd also made little union flags to adorn the cupcakes to make up for not piping the icing in a pretty manner (time was too short and I'd run out of disposal icing bags).

I'd not made enough flags so used skittles to decorate the remaining cupcakes. I'd also realised that my cupcake holder was too big, as there was only 6 people coming to the tea party yet we had 23 cupcakes!

I'd roped Ian in to help chop fruit for the Pimm's.

We had a nice afternoon in front of the telly watching it all, and even though my friends aren't really very royalist, we enjoyed the day because it was an excuse to get together and drink Pimms!

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!

Decorating

On a lot of blogs that I read, people make more of an effort to decorate the house for the smaller holidays. I think this is quite normal in America and most of the blogs I read are written by people over there so I guess it makes sense. But I like it. I don't want to just have Christmas decorations, I want to have Easter ones too, and so this year I did. 

It probably started last year with the giant eastery mug that I bought (matches our Christmas mug too), but that's all I had back then. I regretted filling it with chocolate eggs, 1) because it's pretty big so I had to buy lots, and 2) because I ate them all, by myself, in a big chocolate binge! So this year I bought some polystyrene eggs with a plan to paint them all prettily. Stupidly, I bought these at the end of Easter, so didn't finish it. Story of my life really!  At the moment all the eggs are one solid colour, but I'm planning on adding detail before I use them next year. 

The decorations I did have this year were squidgy gel type things that stick to glass, so the random window between my dining room and library turned into my Easter display. The best thing about these is that they came from the pound shop, so it was nice and cheap.  Please ignore the mess in the background (and the terrible quality - I took this on my phone).

I also put my two lindt bunnies on my mantel along with the nesting owls I got for my birthday and my purple flowers Ian got me at christmas.  You'll notice that I forgot to take the photo until after I'd eaten the right ones ears! Oops!

Over the easter weekend I also found these cute chickens at a local craft show, so have added them to my easter decorations for this year.  

I think halloween is the next one for decorating (unless I celebrate Elephant Appreciation Day!)