Mamie + Blake Made: A Heat Pack!

I have  a handmade little heat pillow that I love to heat up and pop on my feet when I am crafting or watching a little TV. Its lovely but I have a problem, my little guy Blake is a cheeky little thief and loves to take it and use it for himself!

 So yesterday on our morning walk I noticed his jeans were about two inches too short (how do they grow so fast!!?) and we were having a discussion about recycling so we put two and two together and came home, grabbed some of his too short old jeans and made a heat pack for him.

 He is absolutely dying for me to make one for Luke too. If I don't make one today I think I will be in big trouble! He cut all the letters, then I sewed them on, sewed it together,  he added rice and I sewed it shut. Simple.

It is going with him everywhere at the moment! Hes been carrying it around on his head and even taking it in the car with us!

Snail Mail Outgoing!

Don't get me  wrong I absolutely love my boys, I love that they are adventurous, funny, cheeky I love that they just wanna be like there daddy, I love that they play together and love together and I love that I am the princess of the house since I am the only girl here. But many days lately, now that my boys are getting older and are able to do more fun adventurous things (and probably because they don't need me so much now) I wish that there was another girl in the house.

 So to help myself get a little girl fix I thought it would be cool to send a little snail mail to my nieces who are four and six. You know because its always exciting to get something in the mail. My boys LOVE getting things in the mail.

 So I found some stickers and Barbie chocolate coins the other day and they became the starting point for some girly snail mail. I popped the chocolate in the coral striped bags and stapled a Kaiser Craft project Life card on the front.

 I also made a little paper book with their names on that they can write or draw in. And I made some cards with some project life cards and wrote a little note in there.

This was such fun to put together and I am hoping that they like it, if they do I think there must be more snail mail girly adventures. It makes my heart happy to make fun cute girly things!

Rainbow Pavlova

I found a recipe in the latest issue of recipes+ right before Easter for this fabulous Rainbow Pavlova Cake and even though I am not the biggest fan of pavlova I just couldn't stop thinking about this recipe and just had to make it for Easter. 

I've never made a pavlova before, yup this was my first attempt! I was pretty happy with it! I didn't have most of the extra ingredients but I just went with it and it was fine. 

 It turned out being about 20 cm in diameter or about the size of a normal cake but a bit higher.

So here is the recipe:

8 egg whites

2 cups of caster sugar

blue, green, yellow and red food colouring

600 ml of thickened cream

1 tsp of Vanilla essence

Strawberries or any fruit that you like to decorate.

Also you can add 1 tbs of cornflour and 2 tsp of white vinegar to the pavlova mixture. I didn't have it on hand so I didn't add it. i believe it helps to stabilize the mixture.

And the recipe calls for food colouring gels but I only had liquid and it was fine.

Preheat the oven to 120c/100c fan forced. 

Line four baking trays and mark  four 20cm circles with a pencil around a plate.

Using an Electric mixer beat the egg whites in a clean dry bowl adding the sugar slowly until its dissolved and the eggs have firm peaks.

Divide mixture into 4 portions and one colour to each potion, spread out onto 20cm circles.

Bake for 1 1/2 hours until dry to touch.

You may need to swap trays around during baking time to keep everything even.

Let pavlovas cool before assembling.

Beat cream with vanilla.

Assemble the pavlova by adding cream in between layers then decorate the top with strawberries and sprinkles.

Then Eat!

Snail Mail Incoming

I have had so much lovely snail mail in my post box lately that I thought I should share some of it here.

 My lovely pen friend Sara sent me the most gorgeous Easter snail mail with a beautiful cowl too!

 The Sweet Old Fat Hen, Dee (you can find her here!)has sent me two lovely packages full of lots of goodies

 The most beautiful card and I am in love with the hand made bunting, I must make some myself!

 

This pretty package was super unexpected and gave me such a smile :)

So much prettiness and happiness in my post box this month! 

Painting

Its school holiday time here and I've had a little more time to do some fun things. I was feeling like my crafty mojo had left me but it came back just in time for school holidays

 So I've been playing with paint, which is always fun! In my younger years I did an advanced diploma in Visual Arts and when I went there I had hoped to learn to paint better but I ended up doing ceramics as my major. Yes I can make you a ceramic bowl too :-) Anyway its been a really long time since I have put paintbrush to paper for anything a little more serious.

 Truthfully I stopped creating paintings because I didn't like anything that I painted and that got really frustrating. Of course I love to play with paint and colour on smaller projects but I hadn't done anything of this size for a long long time.

 It was lovely to create something in just a few hours and not take myself too seriously, just let it be what it is. Its not elegant, its not perfectly painted but it does make me happy. It does have polka dots on it so how could it not make me happy haa!

I also made two smaller paintings but I really struggled because I only had a large paintbrush here. They are cute anyway. Have you painted anything lately? It is so much fun to put paint to paper.