Out with the Old Year.......

Whilst chatting with Sy on our regular Tuesday night meet up on MSN, I realised I was only 3 pages away from my scrapbooking target for the year - 10 pages a month = 120 pages. I was at work on Wednesday and our visitors for New Year were arriving that day too, so what to do?

Simple solution - I explained the world shaking importance of my completing 3 pages over two evenings and disappeared into my craft room :-) Anti-social I know, if I had been ten pages away I wouldn't have bothered. But to be so close! I couldn't not try to achieve my goal :-)

So, here I am, 3 pages later, sitting in a smug glow of self satisfaction. The page shown here is for Little Girl's second album (due in February, I only have 5 pages done.....eek!). It features a couple of things I am not usually known for, the most obvious being the F-word...... *flowers* that is :-( Also there is some white space, a scary thing, I had to resist the urge to fill it with something, anything! I am quite pleased with it overall though, a nice page to finish the year on!

Dancing Trees

So here it is, the finished cross stitch. I am really pleased with it, though it came with some sad news - the lady who does the stretching of the fabric before sending it to be framed is very ill. I got a phone call from her daughter saying that although she was in hospital, she was still worrying about all her customers' pictures - bless her. So we arranged that it could be brought over to my workplace as I couldn't get over to the shop. I sent my best wishes to her - it seemed inappropriate to say "Merry Christmas".

She has done so many of my stitched pictures over the last 15 years and from what little her daughter said, it seems likely that this will be the last. She is a lovely lady, who treated each customer's piece with as much care as if it were her own work, and I will miss discussing all things embroidery related while we tried out various combinations of frames and mounts.

Christmas Decorations

A while ago I bought some blank chipboard tags with the intention of making some sort of decoration with them. In the end, I decided to keep it very simple (something to do with running out of time...........!)

I painted each tag with two coats of acrylic craft paint on each side, 5 tags in burgundy, 5 in green. Then I stamped and embossed using a Hero Arts cling background stamp and a gold embossing powder. Next a protective coat of acrylic varnish, again on each side. The letters are Basic Grey monograms, I coloured them gold with a Krylon leafing pen, then stuck on jewels in wine or green. To fix the letters, I used strong double sided tape.

They are now hanging above the bay window in my living room and I am really pleased with them :-)

Some Christmas cards!

How on earth did it get to be this far into December without me noticing???? Despite my resolution to have all cards made and posted out by the 1st, somehow here I am still with half a dozen left to make......

I don't do complicated cards! A stamp, a mat and a greeting, that'll do me - oh sometimes I add a background LOL. I bought this gorgeous Elusive Images holly stamp, it stamps really well with a lovely clear impression. It takes yours truly to mess up such a nice image.... on both of these, the mistakes are covered up; one with ribbon over the offending area, the other by the tiny red dots pretending to be holly berries :-)




The next one also is also a cover up job - I seriously mis-stamped the background and had to be a bit creative with silver squares, nailheads and peel off borders. I gave it to a lady at work who admired it greatly, saying she didn't know how I had the patience to put it together! Needless to say, I didn't enlighten her :-)


Finally a medallion - I tried using 1mm foam squares instead of my normal 2mm as it has to be posted - but I am not sure it has turned out quite dimensional enough, so I won't do it that way again. The intended recipient (who does not make cards LOL) will be quite happy with it, though, so that's ok.

Apologies for the not-so-great photos - I am finding it hard to get a decent picture of cards, either the flash bounces off all the shiny bits, of which there are many on Christmas cards LOL, or they come out too dark. Still, hopefully you can see the ideas............ :-) Oh and both the snowflake and swirl backgrounds are Hero Arts, again very good stamps in anyone's hands but mine!

Extreme Baking Week - Thursday

Thursday, according to the plan, was supposed to be continuing with cakes and bars. However, the freezer space issues (and the fact that I am a little "baked out") meant it didn't quite go like that :-)

I had to put my car in for its MOT, so decided not to start baking, as the phone call from the garage was bound to come at exactly the wrong time, I didn't want to be caught in the middle of anything! Instead, I did some cross stitch. Four hours later...... the garage phoned, apologising for having forgotten to phone earlier! So I got a lot of stitching done, a rare luxury for me to sit and spend so much time on it. Then I picked up the car and went shopping, as I hadn't been out of the house since last Saturday!

When I got back, I made the pizza bases for tea. These were not just our ordinary pizzas though - these were highly experimental ones! A while ago I bought some baking tins from Lidl, which I thought would be ideal for party pizzas, and now was my opportunity to try them out.

Well. Ahem. I will not be doing these for the party, in fact I think my obsession with mini food has finally met its match :-) They are very fiddly to make, difficult to put toppings on as they are so narrow, half of the stuff goes over the tin! I do not want to be making 20 of these as part of my party prep! However...... they tasted wonderful, the crust turned out really well. So I think that I will (when I eventually have freezer space!) make a batch as "snack pizzas", to be pulled out for a weekend lunch or something.

I got on with some more stitching during the evening and am really pleased with my progress, though I don't think I will finish in time to get it framed for Christmas. The photos are of the piece at end of Wednesday and then Thursday.

Extreme Baking Week - Wednesday

Wednesday was cakes & bars day. First I made the remaining stuff from Tuesday's plan, the surprise pies in chocolate and jam - which I have cut in half for the photo so you can see - then the mini apple crumble pies, these last being a bit of an experiment - they came out wonderfully, really yummy.

Then on with the day's list. Chocolate chip mini muffins, tropical fruit cake, flapjacks and rice krispie bars - not very Christmassy I know, but I had re-found an old recipe I used when the kids were younger .... and they are good things to take into work, everybody loves them!

At this point there were still of couple of things on the list, but I had to have a bit of a re-evaluation, as I am running out of freezer space! There are two enormous turkeys in there, after all....... I still haven't made any of my special breads, never mind the spring rolls and more mini quiches for the big party. So Thursday will have to be spent doing just enough to fill the freezer, then I will work on making more space :-)

Extreme Baking Week - Tuesday

Tuesday was pastry day, according to my plan. But first I made the two batches of shortbread, one batch of ginger nuts and the triple choc chip biscuits from Monday's list :-) These last are supposed to have one pack each of plain, milk and white choc chips, but I couldn't find the white packs I *knew* were there somewhere.... so this batch has two plain packs instead. And yes, I found the white ones as soon as the biscuits were in the oven :-)

Then I got on with the pastry! A dozen mini cheese and onion quiches, a new recipe for me and so yummy that not all of them made it to the freezer - I will be doing another batch of those on Thursday, along with a batch with a different filling. Then came an experiment with some frozen sausagemeat stuffing (from last Christmas!) and some frozen puff pastry (also from last year!) - can you tell I don't do pastry stuff very often??? I thawed both ingredients and cut the block of stuffing in half horizontally to make two thin pieces, then cut the pastry sheet in half, laid the sausagemeat on top of one pastry half and covered with the other, sealed the edges. As usual with my puff pastry experiments the base didn't cook well and I had to turn it upside down and return to the oven for 15 minutes or so...... Well it tasted OK, but doesn't look too appealing, so no photo of that one!

Another new recipe to finish with - mini lemon surprise pies. These are made using a mini muffin tray - a pastry shell , with lemon curd in the bottom, then a sponge mix on top. Absolutely scrummy - had to prise them out of DH's hands in order to freeze them :-) I made two more lots of the sweet pastry, to make jam surprise and chocolate surprise versions, and cooked up some diced apples for mini apple pies. By then it was time to grab one of my previously frozen meals (bolognese sauce) - you don't think I am doing any actual meal cooking this week do you.......??? So the surprise and the apple pies will be baked on Wednesday.

Not a bad day, and I think I have ended it with less catch-up to do tomorrow than I did on Monday, so hey, I must be making progress!

Oh and I have been asked what on earth I am going to do with all this stuff...... We have a Christmas party every year, and the guests get a basket of biscuits to take home with them. This contain a dozen pieces each of shortbread, choc biscuits, gingernuts, vanilla fudge, choc fudge and a small Christmas cake. Four families at the party this year - so four baskets - therefore I need at least four dozen of all the above items before I even start to think about our own stuff! Oh and I have promised to bring cakes to work for Christmas ........... :-)