Christmas cookies in a jar

I love to give handmade gifts at Christmas but sometimes time runs short. This year I saw the idea of making cookies in a jar and thought it would work well - and it did. I made 6 homemade gifts in half an hour! I found this page, which includes recipes and printable tags. I did have to remake the instructions for the jars though as it talked about cup measurements instead of grams or ounces .

We tried a couple of the recipes out first, just to make sure they were nice and these cranberry cookies were our favourite ( we found the Santa cookies a little too sweet).

And for my friend who has a wheat and dairy free diet, I found this recipe here, for chocolate oat cookies, which works perfectly in a jar. She has a wheat free diet, not a gluten free diet, but I think you can get gluten free oats for a gluten free version.

Felt pebble brooches

Continuing on a sheep theme, I wanted to make some sheep brooches to sell at our Christmas Tree festival (if you are curious why there are so many sheep on here check out this post!). I made the brooches using a white felt pebble as a base (like this). I have some tiny cookie cutters that I use for Fimo and this time I used them as a felting shape. I placed the cookie cutter onto the pebble and used the felting needle to to felt the coloured  shape. I used a heart for the heart brooches and I used a shape a little like a club from a pack of cards upside down as the sheep face.

I embellished the sheep brooches with pompom legs and bead eyes before stitching on a badge back. I finished the heart brooches with seed beads around the edge. I particularly like how the hearts turned out. 

These all sold well at the craft table for £3 each and I think the background cards make them look even better.

A Christmas sheep bauble, or should that be Baaaaable!

Things gave been a little quiet on here as we have been besieged with winter illnesses, but when I wasn't nursing a poorly child, I did manage to get a little crafting done. We had a Christmas tree festival last weekend at church and it included a craft stall selling things for our chosen charity (UWCM). I decided to try to make some Christmas baubles to sell and came up with these sheep. I love them and I'm a bit sad they all sold - but I can always make some more!

They are a no-knit woolly decoration. I started with a polystyrene ball and wound some white wool around it. I think I actually used a cotton yarn, but it was just whatever I had left in my wool box. I wrapped the yarn around the ball until it was completely covered and then tied it off and used the same yarn to make a hanging loop. I made the hanging loop now so that I could hold it up and work out where to stick the face.

The head is made from a ball of black wool just wrapped around itself until it got to the size I liked. I sewed on two tiny white beads for eyes. I could have used small wobbly eyes, but I didn't have any. I cut out a strip of black felt with rounded ends to make the ears and glued the ears to the body with the head stuck on top. I pushed a pin through the head while the glue was drying.

I used 31/4 needles and knitted a scarf which was 3 stitches wide so didn't take long to knit and stitch around the sheep's neck. The sheep was finished by gluing 4 tiny black pompoms onto the base of the sheep for legs.

I love how these turned out and I would love to make more. And speaking of the Christmas tree festival, there was a vote to choose the favourite tree and our Brownies tree won - Hurray!

Around the base of our tree were pinecone hedgehogs in willow baskets that the Brownies made themselves, as well as pompom caterpillars, bead dragonflies and foam owls. I'm so pleased that everyone liked it so much as we had a lot of fun making it.

A Christmas church Banner

I have started a new craft group at church and together we are working on banners to be hung in the church. This is our first banner from our new group and it has worked so well. We had lots of lovely comments from members of the church on Sunday.

We used lots of 2" squares of fabric with Bondaweb on the back of each one to create the background, which were all ironed in place. We used a LOT of Bondaweb!

The star is made from gold fabric which was also used to bind the edges of the banner and looks very festive. As we are beginners to making banners there are lessons learned from every one we make. This time I could have used much thicker gold cord as the star's rays.

And , of course, we had to have sheep on the banner this year. Why sheep? Our church have a knitted sheep trail around our town to encourage people to come to a Christmas church service. Some of the kids in our church have made a fantastic video to promote the sheep trail. I'm not technically minded and can't get the video to appear on here , but you can see it on Youtube HERE.

Wednesday Love: Nativity plays

We've loved watching the kids in the school nativity plays over the years. This year we have two in the nativity, one "Child" and one "King". We had fun making a sparkly crown with card, tin foil and some sticky jewels - along with a tunic made from curtain lining and decorated with ribbons.

My favourite costume seen in the school nativity was in last year's play and it wasn't one of our kids - it was the dancing Etch-A-Sketch! The girl's family made a fantastic job of her costume and it looked exactly like a giant version of the toy. We have to hope that there won't be so much illness going around the school this year. Last year Mary was missing in the stable as she was poorly.

We are definitely getting into the Christmas Spirit in our house now.

Christmas gallery

I have completed my Christmas scrapbooking marathon. My desk has returned to a tidy (ish) state and the festive sparkles have been filed away for another year. Here's a little gallery of my last few pages. The page above is a scraplift from Louise Nelson's fantastic article about using twine in issue 2 of Scrap365.

This layout about the gingerbread house features papers and die cuts from the "Colorful Christmas" collection from My Minds Eye.

The angel page used up some of the pieces from the latest Quirky Kit, along with some papers from the "Mitten Weather" collection by Cosmo Cricket.

Christmas Scrapbooking -Part 3

Hurray, I've started scrapping this year's Christmas photos now. All this Christmas scrapbooking has been great, but I wanted all the pages to feel individual and not like they had been rushed all together. I took some time out and I had a hunt around for ideas. I didn't have to look far. I love, love, love the page above. It's a scraplift of Mahlin Wiggur's fantastic layout that featured on the cover of the first issue of Scrap 365.

I used some foam Thickers for the title , but they looked a bit neat compared to the paintyness of the rest of the page. A little white paint put on with a dry brush soon sorted it out.

Another great place for inspiration is Shimelle's blog, with her Starting Points series and regular sketches and tutorials. I started with her current starting point and this is what I came up with.

I used Cosmo Cricket papers, some fab snowman tape, bought in the sale at Cox and Cox, and some felt Christmas trees from Paperchase.

Christmas scrapbooking - Part 2

My task of completing my Christmas scrapbooking from 2010 continues. My desk looks like an explosion of Christmas, with papers, snowflakes, stars and tinsel all over the place (I still haven't found the right layout for that tinsel though).

I received my Nov/Dec Quirky Kit at the end of November and I've been waiting until I can properly have a play with it. It was perfect to scrap the photo of my daughter as a Christmas fairy in the school play. I added in this pearly earring, which I bought for £1 for the pair at a flea market last year.

I love the photo on the page below as it is a great reminder that we actually had snow at Christmas last year! I hope the page does it justice.

I used my favourite Christmas stamp from Crafty Individuals again - although I stamped it onto textured Bazzill cardstock and so had to colour it in with a black pen - whoops.

Back to scrapbooking

Hurray, I've finally got back to my scrapbooking. I have missed it while I've been sewing and crocheting over the past couple of months.

Just like this time last year, I am scrapbooking christmas photos that are a year old, because I don't feel in the mood to scrapbook festive pages when it's hot and sunny outside.

I love this page as I think it feels very christmassy without using traditional colours. I used distress inks and a piece of die cut cardstock as my stencil. The felt snowflakes come from Paperchase, along with a Jenni Bowlin bingo card and some Maya Road trinket pins.

I found the photos on the next page quite tricky to scrap. Opening stockings is such a great part of Christmas Day, but the photos are never brilliant. Making the photos quite small has worked OK on here.

I had to make the page a bit messy with some inky splodges.

More Christmas pages to follow soon - I'm on a roll now and I may even scrap some of this year's photos.

Making Christmas sweets with the kids

I have been attempting to continue Christmas crafting with the kids and today we made a few sweet treats for friends and family. We had a go at marzipan fruits, but I think I had the wrong type of food colouring and it wasn't going very well. We decided to make most of the marzipan into snowmen instead and they turned out much better than the fruit.

We had much more success with chocolate truffles. These were so easy and they are delicious. The ones rolled in icing sugar don't look great as the sugar has absorbed the moisture from the truffle, but the cocoa ones and the chocolate flake ones look good.

Here's the recipe...

Heat up 175ml of double cream in a saucepan until it boils and then pour it into a mixing bowl containing 225g Dark chocolate (chopped up) and stir it until all the chocolate has melted (I also added 2 tsp of Cointreau at this point, but I could have added a bit more). Leave this to cool and set. I did this the day before and left it in the fridge over night.

Use teaspoons to take a small amount of the chocolate ganache out of the bowl and roll it in some cocoa powder or some chocolate flakes.

Here are our little trays of sweets wrapped up and ready to go.

Happy Christmas!

A Father Christmas card

I've started having a a little look at Pinterest and I can see how time can slip away looking at all the great ideas that are shared on there. I saw the idea for this card on there and thought it was so great that we had to have a go. The original link is here. My girls made some for their teachers and for their grandparents. They are so effective.

An artsy ornament

I signed up a while ago to an online class called "12 Artsy Ornaments for Christmas". It's hosted by Christy Tomlinson and has a selection of artists contributing projects, including two of my favourites - Donna Downey and Alisa Burke.

This was my version of Alisa's project and I've made a few for friends. I love how they turned out. When my six year old said she wanted to give presents to some of her school friends, I showed her the tutorial video and she had a go too. She made some very pretty hearts.

A Peg Angel

I am still crafting like crazy catching up with sewing embroidered cotton shopping bags for church and a couple of commission bird bags too. Yesterday I realised I've used up a 1000m reel of thread in about three weeks - now that's a lot of sewing! I'm also trying my best to get crafty with the kids, particularly as Christmas is such a great time for making and so this weekend we made presents for the girls' teachers. This year we have made peg doll angels to hang on a Christmas tree ( I just need to tie on a ribbon loop so they can hang up).

I used some small paper doilies for the skirt and we coloured bits of another doily in silver for the wings. The bodice is made from a piece of ribbon and the arms are a pipecleaner wrapped around the neck.

The girls drew on the faces with felt tips and this is the smiliest one. My younger daughter drew on a hilarious face saying "Look Mummy , this is an angry angel!" The doll has fringed paper hair and a tinsel pipecleaner halo.

I am hoping to get most of my sewing done this week and I am glad I took the decision not to make presents for the children I knitted toys for last year. I think it would have been a step too far! This year I have bought each of them one of our favourite books. It's called "Stuck" by Oliver Jeffers ( who is my favourite kids author). We particularly like the main character who is a little boy with ginger hair - my little ginger boy is very pleased by this.

The Whiffle Tree Trading Post

I've been a bit quiet on here lately as I have been crafting flat out to get ready for the Whiffle Tree Trading Post, which was a local craft fair yesterday. I had a really good afternoon and sold lots, had lots of compliments on my work and lots of nice chats with fellow crafty people. As someone who normally sits at my desk to craft it so nice to get out and hear positive feedback on what I enjoy making.

My best sellers were my cards, which I placed in some nice little baskets from Ikea.

My crochet roses also sold really well. I have about 5 left.

I made a few of these bags. These didn't sell at all but I think they are gorgeous! They are based on a pattern from Amy Butler's book "Style Stitches", (with a few little tweaks). I don't mind that they didn't sell, as it means I have stock for a craft fair I've signed up for in January! I made a large embroidered bag, which you can see in the picture at the top. I did sell one of these bags and took commissions for two more for bags with different birds on. It was a good lesson to learn what people like, and my embroidered birds are a bit more individual than a patterned fabric bag.

Here's a closer look at some of my Christmas cards, including my favourite one made with a stamp by Crafty Individuals, which I coloured in and embellished with sequins - sometimes less is definitely more!

And a few more Christmas cards...

I'll be back soon with more photos of my other cards.

A Christmas journal

I've finally finished my Christmas journal from 2009 and it's my post for Bubbly Scrumptious today. To see more of the pages, click HERE

Our favourite recipes

This Christmas I made little recipe books for friends and family using a chipboard cake album to make the covers for each book. I included all our favourite family recipes, assigning each recipe to a family member and including their methods (licking the spoon, eating the cherries etc) and adding some photos of the children baking. To see more about this project check out my post on Bubbly Scrumptious HERE.

Happy Christmas

My favourite non-crafty blog is by Owlcity because he has a beautiful way of writing and takes great pictures. I wanted to add this link in today as this is what Christmas is all about for us (with a little of what's shown in the photo above too :) Click HERE and have a listen.

Happy Christmas