A Knitted Bobble Hat & Other Lovely Christmas Presents

It's the exciting time of year again for Christmas Shoeboxes and this year I've been even more excited than usual about doing them, and for 2 main reasons. The first is my discovery that the Operation Christmas Child website has knitting patterns what you can make to add to your boxes, and the second is my discovery of a fun shop called Tiger.

I was so pleased with my first hat I knitted from one of the patterns on their website that I just had to knit another one. A more girly coloured one, and with a bobble too! I love it!

Tiger is my other exciting new discovery - http://www.tigerstores.co.uk/ and I just can't believe how many cool things they have in their. I bought these awesome wild animal finger puppets for one of my girl shoeboxes, along with some skipping ropes, cats cradle, books, pens for my other boxes. 

So here are two of my almost finished boxes, I'm very excited to finish them all off and post them soon. 

Time To Wrap Up Warm

I'm sitting writing this all cosy in my little living room listening to the faint patter of raindrops overhead, waiting for this epic storm which has been promised to start blowing its way around, and thinking about all the quilts I made earlier in the year. At the time, around May or June, it felt very strange to be patching together the pieces of fabric, and stocking up on weighty wadding, but now that the catalogues have come out, seeing the quilts along side all of the padded winter jackets makes me feel very cosy indeed.

So here are some pictures. The first was actually a baby blanket I made about a year ago, which was just adapted to become a horse blanket (it's all about reusing and recycling!) and the second was a patchwork quilt but with long thin strips, and made almost in 2 halves, which is really different from any other quilts I've made before and actually refreshingly nice to sew together.

Getting Cake Creative...

When I was a child, my Mum used to be renowned for making the most amazing, creative birthday cakes. This was due in part to her brilliant cake book: The Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book, which my auntie must have sent over to her from Australia.

So as it was my nieces 4th birthday, and my nephews 1st birthday me and mum got creative to make them some pretty awesome birthday cakes. 

For my nephew, we settled on the classic number 1 shaped cake, covered in blue icing, and brightly coloured sweets (we settled on skittles in the end), and my nephew certainly seemed very happy with the result! 

Now for my niece as she's now 4, and knows what she wants, this was a lot more pressure to make a truly spectacular cake. We went for the swimming pool idea (featured in this cookbook with green jelly as the water), as she likes swimming, and you can use chocolate fingers all around the edge which are also a favourite of hers. 

Sadly, Waitrose let us down by not having any green or blue jelly, or anything similar we thought we could use. So with our basket laden full of skittles, chocolate fingers, jelly sweets for rings, and then the rest of the party food, we came up with the genius idea of whipped cream. Who doesn't love cream on a cake, and whipping it would make great waves to make it look like water. The only questions was how well would the food colouring take to it? Having never dyed cream before I was slightly worried, but thankfully adding a bit of blue and green colouring worked perfectly and the cake looked AMAZING!!

So here are the final pictures, it was not only a lot of fun but my niece and nephew were very very happy and so it was a very successful mission!

Knitting & Other Holiday Activities

I decided recently that I work far too hard, and as my lieu days earned so far this year seemed to agree with me, and I was already lacking in sunshine, me and my boyfriend decided to take a last minute holiday for a large dose of wine and sunshine!

Now I am terrible at sitting still and just sunbathing whilst on holiday, but as long as I have a variety of activities to entertain me, I am perfectly happy to spend days on end in the blistering sunshine, snorkelling, swimming, reading and of course knitting. With the odd walk or explore in between.

So I packed my entire beautiful set of bamboo knitting needles, just in case I needed all of the sizes, and had 2 main projects that I needed to complete whilst away. I wanted to make some more hexagons to contribute towards my long in the future planned blanket, and I wanted to make a hat for my Christmas Shoebox. 

My hexagons are being made out of the tail end of balls of merino wool I have lying around, and my hat is made from the ends of 3 balls of chunky wool, along with 7mm and 8mm needles  - I love chunky knitting!

So all in all a successful holiday. I also managed plenty of reading, swimming and drinking wine, sometimes combining all 3....what a multitasker!!