PomPom decorations!

I hope everyone had a very Merry little Christmas! We had a lovely day with just the 5 of us at home with a traditional turkey and all the trimmings! Yum! 

I made a lot of white and red pom poms last year , for absolutely no apparent reason other than that I had red and white wool that I wanted to use up! So I put them to use this year and used them to decorate the hallway....they are very proudly hung by the door to the lavatory!

A bit of tinsel and some red bells and hey ho they look quite jolly! Things to do if you have too much red and white wool!

Usbourne Christmas Book!

I am not sure what made me buy this...it retails at £14.99 but on the Book People website I found it for £4.99 and so bit the bullet and got it.

And what a surprise I got, it is wonderful! It has page after page of wonderful papers that have pre-marked designs for snow flakes, angels, stars and paper chains! This would be a fab buy if you make cards as you would be able to use quite a few of the pages. However, I brought it to make things with the Princess/Diva.

She quickly got the hang of cutting out the snowflakes and managed all these in an hour by herself!

We then moved onto the angels which are wonderful....so easy to do, so many different paper designs and simple! Sorry but I cannot stop raving about this book, I have even taken it when we go out on playdates so that if they get bored our it comes and let the cutting begin.

The kids Christmas Trees

As I said in an earlier post, when we went to have a look for a tall fake tree, the kids all came away with a little tree each....so cute! The Diva of course chose a bright neon pink one!!!!

She chose the decorations out of our big box too and did it all herself...so this is the tree that is proudly displayed in her bedroom!

A, chose a black tree, much to my surprise...I was sure he would choose the orange or the dark gold one. (orange is his ultimate fav colour!) He also chose some decorations out of the massive box we have and took them up to his room to decorate his tree....

O, went for the dark gold tree instead! So he also decorated it himself and chose what went on it too...

They have all really enjoyed doing this and are very proud of their trees...they always take their friends up to see them!  They also brought them out of their own pocket money too. Christmas Day tomorrow! It has certainly crept up on me....you may find a few more Christmassy posts yet to come!

More elf antics

Evie obviously thinks that the children need watching, she spent last night taping googly eyes to the fruit in the fruit bowl! How great they look!

Minecraft birthday cake

I realise that this is a little out of season and late! However a while ago (november) it was A's birthday and he was 6, he is well into Minecraft, the computer game that the kids all go mad for at the moment. Very blocky. He declared a while ago that he wanted a Minecraft party and cake so, snotty nosed I took on the challenge....

I admit that I am not the best cakemaker in the world but the kids seem to like what I do for them each birthday. It is supposed to be the grass blocks that you have on the game (brownies) with a waterfall running over them and a Creeper, a Ghast and a Pig. 

Sorry for the blurred picture....I really should not get other half to take the pics as he really is not used to our camera at all! As always you can see that our A surrounds himself with the girls...the two boys that he invited were given end of table seats with 4 girls and his sister around A

A good time was had by all. I shall have to do a Minecraft Party Post with the games and other bits and pieces for those seeking ideas (note I am not saying inspiration!!!!)

A snowman in the bathroom?

We love Evie! This morning A got up to go to the bathroom and discovered what she had got up to last night....

Obviously she was showing off her creativity to all the little smurfs that we keep around the bath tub...just for the extra cleaning!! A was absolutely astounded by it....he still really believes in all the magic that is Christmas.No idea how he will react when we eventually tell him the truth....eekk.

Elf antics!

Last night Evie managed to get her hands on the water spray bottle that we use to scare the cat off clawing the sofa. You can see the cat does not seem scared when Evie has the bottle! A thought it was great when he came down in the morning though and saw what she was up to. The box is one that we are going to be attempting to make a gingerbread house out of. I got it from my friend who has all the mobility shops locally, she gets huge boxes that the wheelchairs come in!?!

Face Painting

This is a very short post, but I simply had to show you a picture of the wonderful job done by the totally inexperienced face painters at the school fair a week ago.

The Diva got her face painted...as always it was the first thing on her list that she wanted to do at the fair! I think the painters did a fab job of it! Very Frozen inspired! You cannot see but there was glitter over it too...very lovely....must invest in some face paints and practice.

Evie rides away!

I know I do not normally post on a Thursday but our little elf is getting up to lots of things so thought I would do the odd unusual post!....

Evie, our elf on a shelf, decided to try riding away on a reindeer last night! A came down and was just staring at her...so cute...and he's now 6! 

She is getting upto quite a few things, although none so far are very mischievous! I will have to come up with some new ideas for her! 

A is always the one that rushes downstairs to see what Evie has been up to in the night....I am going to hate it when he no longer believes in the magic. 

O, my eldest knows but I have not verbally agreed with him that FC does not exist...all I have said when he questions me alone is...FC is the spirit of Christmas, it makes everything magical and special. He seems to know what this means and is keeping schtum at the minute. 

O Christmas Tree...

Yes! Our tree is finally up and decorated! And what a palavar it was .... Hubbie decided that he did not want a real tree this year as they never smell so strongly as they used to anymore...so we went very briefly to the local garden center. At the garden center they did not have hugs amounts of fake trees to choose from and giving that we wanted a big one ie 7-8ft, there was a choice of 3. However we did not land up getting one this time as the bigger ones seemed to be quite slim...not at all like a real tree. The children decided that they wanted to spend some of their money and buy their won trees for their rooms though!

So, back home I went into the attic and got out a tree that is about 5 ft that I brought of a Facebook buying and selling page about 3 years ago for £10. (we have had it up before in the front room) I put it up and we decided that it would do for the minute but in a weeks time we are going to have a further look for our ideal tree....not giving up! Meanwhile, the kids and I  have decorated the little tree! I think it looks quite good...we kept the hanging baubles and bits a little further up the tree so the kitten is hopefully not to tempted! So far so good.

Decorations Day!

At my kids school they have a Decorations Day (really only a morning). It is fantastic! Basically the parents get to sign up for a session: before or after first break or both, then they go in and are allocated a table of pure heaven! Glue, glitter and paint abound! Scary for some but its in school time and the kids are all great with it. This year I signed up for the first session in reception class (age 4-5) and after break for year 1 (age 5-6). I duly went along and was put on the pot table. The children had all painted a papier mache pot earlier in the week in gold or silver, all I had to do was find their pots,tick their names off and get them to sit down and choose 10 gems and stick them onto their pots with PVA glue.

As you can see the table was laid with a vinyl cloth and glue pots were there so I simply sprinkled the jewels around so they could choose when they sat down without taking the whole pot!

The finished pots were then left to dry off...some were very precise in where they put the jewels, others jst clumped them all together. Overall they were great though! I loved going in to help, the little Diva loved me going in too!

After break in A's class I helped again on a rather messy table, painting a branch with some robins on! Using their fingers!!!!!! This I thought would be a little more tricky but we had it going really well and got through quite a few of the children. I did not take any photos of this as the children were all in the class and you are not allowed to photograph them nowadays. 

Here are some more pictures of the reception class though....I snuck in at break time to take pics of what they had been doing!

Christmas Tree cards for their parents.

Stockings that they are going to write christmas lists on the other side of..

Curly wurly pipe cleaner decorations....think I may get her to make some more of these to go on Christmas presents!

and you can just about see the reindeers that were made by drawing around their hands and feet and sticking it all together!

I had a great morning there and all the kids loved having their parents in for the morning! Some of the girls were even crying after break time when their mums had to go!!!

Evie the Elf arrives!

We have taken the idea of the Elf on a Shelf and got our own elf called Evie. Evie has now been visiting us for 3 years and the kids look forward to her arriving on the 1st December. This year she was obviously thrown down the chimney by Father Christmas with a letter.

I am hopefully going to remember to take pictures of all the things that she gets up to in the run upto Christmas day when she is taken back to the North Pole by Father Christmas. 

The elf was a little girl elf that I found about 4 years ago in Tesco, she was only £4!! Bargain. 

When A said that he wanted a Minecraft party my first place to look for inspiration was Pinterest! I love that site it has ideas for everything imaginable. For party drinks I brought some Tesco own brand Fruit Shoot type drinks in the red bottles so that I could make TNT labels for them....there is no download for this unless you can find one but I simply cut the paper about 2 " wide then wrote TNT on it in black pen and stuck them on the bottles with a bit of sticky tape. Job done!

For one of the games we decided to do a kind of throw the balls in the Creeper. I saved a large cardboard box from a friends shop and painted it green. It did take several days to dry off in the damp weather we are currently having and being in the garage did not help speed it up at all! When it was dry I brought it in and cut out the Creeper face. You can just about see where I wrote 100 above each of the eyes and 50 in the mouth. This was the number of points that you scored if you got a ball in the eyes or the mouth. I still have a bag of those ball pit balls you get when the kids are babies so these were soft enough to use inside. The kids seemed to really enjoy the game.

I had some black and green balloons for decorations and used one of the black ones to make a giant spider that you get on the game.I don't think you can quite see the red eyes that I stuck onto it and I used black crepe ribbon for the legs. Even the Tesco delivery man liked it!

I used masking tape to turn the glass windows, in the door into the kitchen, into glass sheets that you use to make windows in Minecraft. Again this effect worked really well....so well that I did the same to some of the bigger windows in the room too.

The party table was covered with some green holographic wrapping paper I found in the 99p shop in town. Very appropriate. Layed with green and black sqaure plates and the TNT drink bottles it looked ace.

Another game we had was Pin the Tail on the Pig. It was a simple and quick job to make a minecraft pig out of pink sugar paper (99P shop again) and stick it on the wall with some tails with the kids names on ready for playing.

Oh yes, as well as the TNT drinks, I made a game called Pass the TNT...very similar to Pass the Parcel. I wrapped a box in red holographic paper and then put the final gift, also wrapped in the holographic paper, and some sweets into it. I grabbed a handful of party poppers and stuck the music on. The music played the whole way through but when I popped a party popper they had to open the box and take a sweetie out....when there were no more sweeties the next person was the winner.

I found some fantastic printables on Pinterest for name places and banners etc as well as invitations and certificates. If you follow this link you should find them...or look me up on Pinterest and follow me! http://www.pinterest.com/pin/203928689351816967/

And the banners...I used the crepe ribbons to make a type of Nether Portal into the kitchen where a lot of the games were played.

After they had eaten they were given 3 marshmallows each and some icing pens and were asked to make their own Minecraft monsters up.....and then ate them!

And another picture of my cake.

A really enjoyed his party this year, which was a relief as in previous years he has got so over excited that he has had a melt down during the party.

What a weekend!

The school Christmas Fair is now over. We had a huge success on the Chocolate Fountain selling all 270 fruit cups and our skewered marshmallows.

As usual I forgot to take my camera which is really very annoying as I was going to post some pictures of the fair in full swing.

Today I have the Diva home from school as she was coughing all night and looked sooooo tired this morning. She is being a pickle though and not going to her room so I think she will be going back to school tomorrow, after our dental appointment.

Next thing is decorations day at school, which is where the parents can go into the school and help in the classroom to make lots and lots of decorations. They get a good 2 days out of this and the kids love having their parents in the school with them for a day. I will take photos of what the children make to post!!! I will I will I will.

Garden Center Reindeer

The Christmas fair is driving me mad....soooooo much to do for it! Still got the plates of cakes and flowerpots filled with goodies handed in this morning....just the pineapples to cut up a swimming lesson to attend, get back to the school to set up and somewhere in there feed the kids! Yikes. I got asked to do reindeer food as well for the fair, I think I did it last year for them too.

I seem to have developed a 'thing' for Reindeer this year! Yesterday, despite being busy,I went to the local garden center in Ditchling as they have all their Christmas bits and pieces out and I absolutely fell in love with this wonderful reindeer,

It is silver metal (again my love of silver with everythings turning silver!) and stands about 30cm high. He sits wonderfully on the kitchen window sill at the minute....may have to move him to the hearth when it gets colder and I am in the front room more. I think he will look splendid with all the flames dancing off his mirrored skin!

The children love him too, hubbie just looked at it and said it's another girl thing.

Chocolate covered Marshmallows!

I had 4 of the reception mums around this morning as our class has the Chocolate fountain stall at the fair! We thought we would get together and make up some marshmallow sticks pre-coated with chocolate and sprinkles...apparently they sold really well last year. It was a sticky business putting the marshmallows onto the sticks, then came the fun of covering them in chocolate and sprinkles. We used all the sprinkles that I had brought plus most of my at home sprinkles....think I need to get some more in!

We made up just under 100 once we had taken some of the sticks out that were starting to come apart! So at 75p each on Saturday hopefully they will turn us a pretty penny. 

The school have a chocolate fountain that we are able to use and we are going to be putting fruit into a cupa and drizzling with the chocolate. I just hope we sell out and have enough to keep us going from 12 till at least 2 on the day!!!!! Will post more pics next week to show you what happened.

I am also class rep for one of the year 4 classes and we have the Grotto....no pressure then!

Jolly Juice

I cannot believe that I have missed 2 posts.....my excuse is how rubbish I was feeling. We are not used to any type of weather in England so when it gets a bit chilly my nose knows it and has a full blown horrid cold and sore throat. Not fair. However, despite the ice on the car this am it is warming up nicely now and I am even comtemplating getting in the garden and putting the garlic and onion sets in for the winter! Go me!!! However, I did do this a couple of weeks ago before my Open House....

 I found some inspiration on Pinterest for these wonderfully jolly Jolly Juice glasses! They were very simple to paint. I use Pebeo 360 Vitrail paints so that they can be cooked in the oven and made dishwasher safe. I painted the stems one evening, then the following day when the stems had dried, I wrote with an outliner and did the wires of the lights too, and after about half an hour this had dried and I was able to use a cotton wool bud dipped in the paint to create the lightbulbs! 

I can think of a few people that this might bring a smile to at Christmas! At my Open House Day I sold 3 of these so will have to get some more wine glasses to make for gifts too! 

Holly Sweetie Bowls

I am really doing this Holly theme to death! I have done the same pattern on wine glasses, these cute bowls, some other square shaped bowls and tealight holders too! It is really simple to do and I do it all by hand and I love it!

I managed to sell half of my stock of them at my Open House the other week, and they are incrediably cheap at only £3.50 per bowl. I find that pricing my bowls and wine glasses individually like that more people consider the purchase, rather than having to buy the whole collection, when they might not have space for the whole lot! I figure if I love them then there are bound to be lots of people that will also love them!

More reindeer pictures

Am still so tired from all the makes and cooking I have been doing this last week, but as always I managed to find a bit of time to do some quick crafting!

As the other half really liked my reindeer pictures I decided to go all out and make some more with the rest of the frames that I got cheaply. It took about 15 minutes to cut each reindeer out with an Exacto knife, then it was simply choosing a paper to put behind and gluing the reindeer in place.

Not entirely sure why all my pictures have a slightly yellow tinge but that is my camera for you! Not the best and 9 years old at that!

I like these bottom ones best I think..especially the squares in red and white, very nordic! That I think is all my cheap frames used up! One more fair to go, so lets hope that they sell out!

Open House Day!

Oh my gosh...it has finally arrived....we are on a break at the moment, but this morning was really busy.After the initial 45 minutes with me and my helper sitting doing our shopping lists and wondering if anyone will come at all, suddenly the doorbell rang, and again, and again and again.... at least we did not run out of tea cups this time as I managed to borrow a further 20 from a friend!

All my bits and bobs laid out and ready for the stampede!

And my glassware....and reindeer pictures!

And all the scrummy yummies:

I am shattered and we still have this evening to go! Hopefully there will be a few people popping in who could not make it during the day.... 

Have done a count up and we have already raised a fair amount for the chosen charity, St Peter and St James Hospice! I must say that I am not sure that I would have coped very well this morning if my helper/coffee and tea maker had not been able to help out!

Decorating update

You may remember a while ago the state of my hallway was a lot worse for wear, mainly due to little fingers all the way along at about waist height and below, but also due to a bit of a leak we had from the upstairs bathroom. Now though as yo can see, I managed to make it look a whole lot better! The big grey marks are finally gone and I can relax! Just as well really as I have my Open House on Wednesday this week!

It took an undercoat of Stain Away and then a couple of coats of the Ivory Lace colour coat. 

Even where the paint had come away totally with the old kids stairgate I managed to make it look nicer. Admittedly, I only did a quick coat of emulsion over most of it, but with a fractured wrist that was all I could actually do. As I had said to husband, you have to look a whole lot closer now to see the imperfections, but I will redo it properly after Christmas now.

Everything is going to turn silver!!!!

 I have seen a few pictures of things that have been spray painted, toys etc and think they look quite effective. so I decided to go out and buy myself a can of spray paint. I landed up simply going to B&Q and getting their Valspar silver metallic paint...yippee..I love silver.

I laid out a lot of newspaper on top of the freezer in the garage and found some lids that I had off old gerkin glass jars. The lids were gold and had patterns all over them so if I wanted to use them for anything the lids needed to be changed. SILVER! 

It was quite simple to spray them, but I did go and check to see if they were set a little too quickly and ruined one of them with a lovely finger print. However the rest I left overnight and redid them with a second coat just to make sure and left for the day again. 

 I am absolutely sold with the idea.....if I had the money I would go and buy every colour they had! However, I have got to be restrained and use this up first and hopefully use the jars for something....maybe paint them then put the silver lid on to sell them!!!

Nappy cakes .... a day late...sorry!

I had an order a week ago for 2 pink Baby Cakes, one 3 tier one and a single tier one too...Now you can see the true mess I work in when I make things on the kitchen table... 

Peppa Pig always goes down well on Baby Cakes as I think most people have heard of it as a product. So a Peppa fairy went on top and a couple of fleece blankets, one expensive one and a cheaper one to the second tier. Lots included eg. bottle,soap, talc, washcloths, bodysuits, weaning spoons etc and obviously all the nappies!

And the single tier one as well..... 

All I then do is wrap in cellophane and there they are.....very nice lady even came to my house to collect them! I always buy the plush toys when I see them on offer and the lovely giraffe was from WHSmiths of all places! It was reduced from £9.99 to £2.50 so I duly purchased 5 of them and this is my last one!