Brilliant tutorial

I don't know what it is like in your house but the older the girls get the smaller the parts of their toys seem to get. I was wrapping presents, as you do around this time of year, when I realised that more tiny parts are going to enter our house. We never keep the boxes, so these pieces end up all over the house, I keep finding single Barbie shoes or tops of LEGO flowers everywhere. At that moment the tutorial for the peek-a-boo-bag from Make it perfect popped into my mind. It came together in no time and I think it is just perfect. There will be one bag for each girl under the Christmas tree, or maybe more if I get more time.

Sewing

I have been sewing a bit, hurrah, but as always I forgot to take pictures. I made two gathered clutches as presents for my daughter's teachers, I followed the fantastic tutorial from Noodlehead. They both like purple, so I used two purple fabrics, one cord and one printed cotton and did two different colourways. It was a bit last minute and I only managed to take a picture on my phone, will see if my husband can help me to get it off the phone.
My sister in law needed to bags for a wedding, she wanted the same one that I made her for her birthday but this time it was dark blue with white dots. It is from the book Making vintage bags, the pattern is straight forward, the hardest bit was to get the people at our coop to enlarge it.

Our first gingerbread house

This year I have decided to be brave and make a gingerbread house. I followed the recipe in my fvourite baking book, Rachel Allen Bake. The project was split into three stages:baking, assembling, decorating. On Sunday we baked the gingerbread, it looked like quite a lot but we used the rest of the dough for little gingerbread men, trees and hearts. The recipe came with templates (the template for the roof was wrong, but I only noticed that in stage two), you had to cut out the pieces from paper and the from dough, bake them and then give them a trim before cooling. This left us with lovely cut of pieces of gingerbread which had to be tried, we called this quality controle. Monday morning I assembled the house. I used 250g icing sugar and 1egg white, it worked really well. Just before I picked up the big one from school, I got all the decorations out in little jars so that we could get going straight away. Oh the excitement when we got home. We spent an hour decorating, well the little one helped by quality testing the sweets. It was "such fun" (too much Miranda).
I can see that this is going to be a new Christmas tradition. Over the last two weeks, my girls have secretly removed quite a lot of the chocolate buttons and I have caught my husband as well, but I think that is part of the fun of having a gingerbread house.

Crochet is the cure

I had lost my making mojo a little after the disastrous shopping evening...lets just say, it wasn't an evening for handmade...people bought cheap tacky looking plastic jewellery, pandora style jewelery and bath stuff from Avon...it wasn't only me, there was this beautiful stall with wooden elks and bears, so cheap and so cute, hardly any sales...I had made up my mind that I was only going to buy something, if I had sold something...I just made enough to cover the costs for the table but I had to buy two wooden bear decorations for my girls, I could not leave them there for £1 each. I would have bought more if I had sold more, the next day I was really upset that I didn't get that gorgeous elk.
Anyway, I had lost my making mojo. Just felt that my stuff wasn't good enough and looked rubbish. Quite a down sort of day. I had lots of Lebkuchen and hot chocolate, used my unsold cards for my Christmas post to my family, talked to a friend and slowly felt better.
I needed a pick me up and so I got my crochet stuff out and made a hat from drops design. I crocheted (?) until midnight, I just had to finish the hat. My girls both liked it, well it is pink. The funny thing is that I made it for myself but it fits all of us, 35, 4 and almost 2 years.
My poor girl has fever and is not well but managed to smile anyway.