Christmas Celebrations

so I'm a bit slack these days with posting on my blog but inspired by another creative friends blog and challenge I'm updating with some of my creations starting here:-

My year started with knitting and it's stuck, i love it, i love wool and get very excited when i see all the lovely colours and finishes and combination of colours so below is a selection of my hand knitted scarves and neck wraps and I'm very excited about handing these out to various friends and family this Christmas :)

Here's my first creation using some paper clay i was bought in a block. Shivery snowman, i love how he turned out :)

This medallion card was made by stamping onto an old recycled Christmas card, i do love using these they always give such majesty to card especially when glittered :)

Some ornaments also made using my paper clay, hand painted/finished and strung and ready to adorn someones tree :)

And yet more clay creations, i already have another set of holey stars drying out ready to paint. You know me fingers in pies so to speak, and yes on my future agenda, baking, the festive kind :)

Linking up to Paint and Prayer, my dear friend Jennifer's lovely blog, please stop by and see her lovely creations. Merry Christmas to all and to all...................

Christmas Cards all year round

Well it's been a while since i made this many cards but i wanted to try something different with this tree stamp using a white ink pad and this is what happened. I love how they've turned out and some recently purchased bargain papers worked so well with them. I am entering this over at Christmas Cards All Year Round under their Five Card Challenge of 'Getting ready for Christmas' this is natures preperations :)

I 'Heart' Cake

Ok so to explain myself, although the pictures pretty much speak for themselves. Recently over on Facebook i volunteered to review the I 'heart' cake mould. The kind folks over at Find Me A Gift sent me the mould just this weekend so this afternoon i set to trying it out.

I used my ever faithful Flora (on the packet) cake recipie and 'sprayed' the mould before putting the cake mix in. There are no instructions on the wrapper and my experience using Silicone moulds is extremely limited, infact i think I've only ever used one once and didn't spray it i suspect and struggled to get it out, but it's a long time ago. I put the cake in the oven and left it about 45 mins (15mins longer than when in two split tins)

I left it to cool for quite a long time hoping not to have any problems and in the main it came out fine, just the tiniest little bit on about 3 corners where the spray hadn't covered.

Now the idea of this mould is that you can make several 'heart' shaped individual cakes/slices if you so wish. Due to my son requesting chocolate cake and me wanting to do what i had in the house, jam and cream (which we did have to get in the end) i hastily cut it into almost 4 quarters before i remembered the heart shaped segments. The idea being that i could accommodate his needs when filling the cake as well as ours, so he had a slice with chocolate spread in lol. I then did the rest as explained above. The piece to the left is a heart shaped segment but the nice thing about the edging is that you can easily slice smaller individual slices too making in theory 12 small slices. Anyway we've yet to try it but i'm told by family and friends that my baking is yummy so i shall be trying it real soon and will definitely look forward to experimenting with this mould. Thanks to Find Me A Gift for letting me try it. You can find the mould  here  :)

Blame it on the Weatherman

So the great British weather was my inspiration for this drawing on Tuesday after being woken like many in the early hours of Tuesday morning by rain, thunder and lightening. I know that god was playing his drum kit and so this followed. My son drew more cartoon characters, no surprise there then lol and since then we've had a day off from drawing and today has been all about food shopping, exciting stuff but one thing i will say is that so far, so good, it's been quite pleasurable :) You?

These came about yesterday after seeing this inspiration doyoumindifiknit it's taken some doing to get to grips with crocheting but progress has been made and for that I'm grateful :) Not sure where I'm going with them yet but I'll keep going, it's all good practise and I'm using up odds and sods of wool.

Creative Time

So here we are at the start of the 'Summer' holidays. A time i dread to some extent but i have a list of 'creative' ideas of one sort or another so I'm hoping that helps. The weather has been stinking hot which is never my cup of tea so suddenly the idea of spending time at the park in this heat is pretty off putting. So far bar the weekend we have had two days spent at home. Yesterday we largely spent all day at home bar a walk into town to get some necessities.

I found a list of creative prompts on Pintrest 25 Days of Drawing and Journalling and i thought they would be a good source of ideas should we need them so yesterday i put it to my son and he was quite enthused. He went with 'Favourite Cartoon Character' and what followed was an abundance of drawings.

Here are just a few of them and not the first one he did lol

I went with 'A Colourful Bird' and of course this is what followed....

I introduced Brett to my watercolour pencils which he attempted to treat his crayons the same but as i explained water only works with my 'special' pencils and certainly not with crayons. All in all it was a most enjoyable bit of time.

Later in the afternoon he spent a short time in 'his' new paddling pool, recently acquired second hand from a friend, a good size for our 7yr old and perfect for warm days although i did peg his towel either side of the washing line in order to try and create a little shade. Sometimes the most insignificant things can be a great source of amusement if only for a short time and time spent together is of course 'priceless' :)