Christmas Eve Mincepies

It's a tradition in our house to make mince pies on Christmas Eve, often we make gingerbread too depending on time. This years design is based on Lorraine Pascale's pinwheel stars, and they came out quite well.

 

 

 

All you have to do is cut your pastry into squares, snip/cut at each corner, a spoon of mincemeat in the center, fold every second corner into the center [like this] dab a little beaten egg on the join and top with a star, glaze the rest of the showing pastry, bake, cool and then dust with icing sugar :)

Melted snowman fruit cake gift

One of the many lovely things Josh brought home from nursery this year was this melted snowman fruit cake. Technically this is a 'handmadebyjosh' and his teachers project, but it was such a good idea I thought I'd share.

 

 

 

About 3 weeks ago we were asked to send in empty clean 220g bean tins. I couldn't work out what sort of craft a nursery class could make with them - I had visions of them being used as plant pots or candle holders. And was very happily surprised to receive this cute cake. Very simple to do, you just used them instead of a baking tin. The cake is removed once cool, turned upside down, topped with a disc of icing, a ball of icing and decorations to look like a melted snowman and dressed up with corrugated card an cellophane to make a really sweet gift.

 



Happy Birthday Jason: A masculine travellers card

I need a card for the birthday of one of Mr S's best friends, and found this wonderful scrapbooking paper at my local crafting store. I couldn't resist sprucing it up with a bit of a travel theme and voila this card was born. One of the most 'me' cards for a long time, rather pleased it came out so well. I love the blue accent colours, although I wish I could have picked up on the red somewhere too.

 

 

Help! I'm drowning in Christmas Cards!!

The first batch of cards for nursery and a few friends is complete (and on going). Here are the first two designs, which I've been making in two sizes, 4x4 and 5x5. I've tried to keep the design quite simple as it had to be replicated so many times (cue: trip to my local craft shop more than once for more MME paper).:

 

 

I do have to keep asking myself why decide to make ALL of my Christmas cards this year? Especially considering Josh has 25 children in his nursery class and 5 teachers on top of the usual family, friends and neighbours ... the original reasoning behind it was that next year I want to launch packs of Christmas Cards in my Etsy online shop and take samples and pre-made/bagged tags and cards to some local craft fairs, and I figured practising making cards in quantity was good experience. What I hadn't counted on was the family having one illness after another for a month and no time to craft.

 

Right, no time to blog, back to the BigShot, guillotine and stamp pads :) Hope you are all having a lovely festive season, and good luck to those of you with projects of your own to finish! xx