Ooh look what i was sent!

I just had to show you this wonderful little parcel i recently recieved. It was from the wonderful Anikó at Idle Needle. You can find her brilliant blog here.

I was one of the lucky recipients from her Craft It Forward challenge of 2013 and boy was i spoiled!

There was lots of wonderful things including: buttons, sweets, stickers, sequins, ribbon and lots lots more! 

However the most wonderful treasure contained in this lovely little package was a needle case.....for my Idle Needles! Beautifully made and so so cute. I love it!

To all those who are waiting for parcels from me for Craft It Forward- i know it is now 2014 and i have missed the deadline but you have not been forgotten. I promise!

I have just gotten a little bit behind and preoccupied. Just keep an eye out for the post as when you least expect it something might pop through your letterbox!

I just wanted to say......

I've gone a bit quiet...

.....as i had a baby!

I'm gonna have to take a step back from the blog for a little bit as my little one is taking up all my time (and i'm loving ever minute of it!).

But i will be back soon. I promise. In the meantime here's a picture of my lovely bundle of cuteness. Hooray!

The big button A!

So a while ago i was a bit of a tease. I posted a couple of photos on here but wouldn't tell you what i was up to. Naughty me.

Well, i was making something for my wonderful husband. It was a surprise so i had to keep it a secret until i had given it to him. But now i have so i can share it with you!

And here it is:

I spent a long time collecting together lots of badges that i liked as well as using lots of lovely bright buttons. I then arranged them, painstakingly, in the large A shape.

It was then just a case of gluing them all down and getting it to a framers. I am so pleased with how it turned out. It's difficult to tell from the photos but it is massive! And my husband loved it too. Hooray!

Damson vodka!

Definitely my favorite of the fruit flavoured alcohols!

Last year was a sad year for the damson, there was none to be had and i couldn't make any vodka. Darn it. This made me sad, although i did manage to get hold of some sloes (but even that was hard going) so i had something to offer at Christmas time (phew).

I had my fingers double crossed that this year would be different. And i was! With the bullace berries that my dad brought over for me he also brought two massive buckets of damsons. Thanks dad!

So i set about straight away making the vodka. Got to give it as long as possible to mature. Yummy.

Bring on Christmas time!

Bullace berry gin.

The other day my dad brought me round a big bag of bullace berries. They are a bit like damsons or sloes and somewhere between the two in size.

Now i had never heard of then before but have done and bit of research and have been told that they are wonderful if made into flavoured gin. So that's what i have done!

I have used the same basic recipe that i use for making sloe gin and damson vodka. To be honest i do it by eye and don't use exact measurements. That way if, after a couple of months, it isn't sweet enough or is too sweet i can add more sugar/alcohol as is required. It also depends on how much fruit i have. I try to put in as much as possible to flavour the alcohol.

 

I have used up all of my demijohns making other flavoured alcohols this year so i had to revert back to the trusty plastic bottle.

They will now go away until Christmas time. I can't wait to find out what it tastes like!

Wool pom poms!

The nights are getting longer and the temperature is dropping. You might be thinking about maybe wearing a hat or scarf for the first time (i cannot wait!). This means that now is the perfect time to start thinking about wooly pom poms!

As you will remember i had a go at making paper pom poms recently and this reminding me how much i like making the wool variety. In fact these were one of the first crafty projects i ever tried when i was little. I remember being in a school play aged 7 or 8 and whenever we had rehearsals my friends and i would spend the time waiting around making hundreds (ok, maybe not hundreds but it felt like it) of pom poms. I have no idea what we did with them but we were like a little sweat shop!

If you'd like to make your own pom poms it's really quite easy. First of all you need to cut two donut shapes out of card.

Then tie your chosen wool around the donuts and knot it together to secure it. You then twist the wool round and round going through the donut shape.

Once you have tied enough wool to fill the hole in the middle tie it off to secure it. Then get another length of wool and while carefully cutting between the pieces of card thread the wool between the card (see the above photo).

You then need to tie that length of wool securely together which means you can carefully remove the card and all the wool will be securely fastened in a pom pom shape. You can then trim the wool you used to tie and it will look like the rest of the pom pom.

Yay! Bright and wooly pom poms, i might be guilty of putting them on everything right now. Do you like pom poms? What would you put them on?