School holidays

Long time, no blog! 

I've been hearing the whip crack, so I thought I'd give an update on what we got up to in the school holidays.  I love school holidays!  They usually seem to go so quickly, but this time they seemed to slow down a little, so I felt like we got to enjoy it more! 

Tassy had wanted to do some crafting, so we did a bit of fimo modelling, glass painting and scrapbooking.  (I now realise that I didn't photograph Tassy's glass painting or fimo LOL.  The scrapbooking is hers tho!)

 

 I dragged Tassy along to Jazzercise each day, much to her chagrin.  So I took her to the shops after each class for a bit of a treat.  One day we went to San Churro (oh my goodness - LOVE!), then we saw Maleficent at the movies, which we also loved!  Here she has a hot chocolate we were sharing at San Churro - I won't make that mistake again.  We shared evenly, but half a hot chocolate is not enough!  By the way, she mustn't have hated coming to Jazz too much, because last weekend she ASKED if she could come with me - she wanted to do an hour of "nothing" (she drew pictures the whole time).

And we tried a few new recipes.  I'd always wanted to make honeycomb.  It was fun and easy and turned out pretty well, except next time I won't cook it as long as the recipe says...

A year or two ago mum gave my sisters and I a copy of the Women's Weekly Little Squares and Slices cookbook.  She loved it when she bought herself a copy, especially loving the styling.  She found out later that her friend's daughter was the stylist!  And she'd used a lot of her mother's and grandmother's tableware.  which made mum love the cookbook even more!  It is a beautiful book and I am working my way through the recipes.  This time we made raspberry chocolate brownies and boy they were so good.  I do love a good brownie, but with the addition of tart raspberries - wow!

Tassy also had a sleepover for a friend's birthday, which was aaaaalmost a 24 hour sleepover!  Although, of course, not a lot of sleep was had.  I think they got about 5 hours sleep and surprising Tassy wasn't obnoxious the following day.  Maybe she can handle it better as she gets older.  They went ice skating too - it was 24 hours of party!  It was really nice for Tassy's parents too, who tried a new restaurant and enjoyed some quality time.  Oh, two new restaurants actually, cos we went out for dinner then lunch the following day!

Jot Kids

Jot magazine had a kids challenge for the school holidays.  Check out the Jot blog for more info. 

I love the mood board and Tassy was happy to have a go at scrapbooking a page of her beloved, inspired by the mood board. 

Jot Magazine June Mood Board

Check out the gorgeous June Mood Board for Jot Magazine.  If you will the Mood Board challenge you'll win a $20 gift voucher to Dizzy Lizzy




The Mood Board inspired me to come up with this.  I found a scrap of paper on my desk documenting Tassy's first trip to the cinema.  I'm sure it couldn't have been floating around on my desk for nine years... but maybe!

Jot Magazine Birthday Issue

The latest issue of Jot Magazine is out now and it's our first birthday edition!  You can check it out here, with its bright giftbox cover.  There are so many beautiful inspiring things in there!


 

I have a couple of pages in there...

This one is in the Mega Photos gallery.  I took this photo with my phone and printed it on textured cardstock. This is one of my favourite colour combos - I have done quite a few pages like this!

  

 This one's in the Winter Tales gallery.  Our first family trip to the snow two years ago.  The weather was perfect and we had a fantastic day!  Tassy wanted to know why I put a photo of me at the beach with some photos of the snow LOL. 

 

And this pillow box is in the gift boxes gallery.  

Embellishing tops

Tassy lamented recently that she had no long sleeved tops.  I had a look around the shops and boy, I wasn't keen on what I found!  I ended up buying three plain tops in Kmart for $4 and $6 each, with a mind to pretty them up.

When I bought this marle grey I really wanted to add neutrals to it.  I didn't have something specific in mind but thought I'd try some doilies and vintage trims.  I love the offcut trim on the neckline.  It would have been great to have enough to go all the way around, but I think this is still OK.  I wanted the doilies to overlap and casually flow up towards the shoulder, and scattered a few buttons around.  I stuck everything down with a glue stick first, then machine stitched the trims and doilies and hand sewed the buttons.  The wooden bonjoir button came from the underground markets in Wellington when I was there with my family 18 months ago.

Twice at the op shops I have scored tins of vintage buttons.  It's so exciting to rummage through to find really special gems.  I will have to post some pics of special button finds on my blog soon.  Anyway, along with gems there's a plethora of plain buttons.  They're still pretty because they're so shiny and nice and heavy, not like cheap modern plastic buttons.  For this top I gathered all the plain buttons on the table and roughly made them into a heart shape.  I used this to gauge the right size to make my hand drawn heart, then drew the heart on the Tshirt with a water soluble pen. I cut a piece of vintage sheeting the same size and attached it to the inside of the Tshirt for some extra stability.  Then I used a glue stick to attach all the buttons to the heart.  It didn't really take much rearranging to make them fit.  Once the glue was dry I sat on the couch and hand sewed the buttons in place. 

This was actually the first one I did, and if I was going to do it again I'd make the bow smaller.  But to tell the truth, I can't bring myself to pull this apart and do it again, so it's going to stay a big bow. :)  I used leftover fabric from a dress I made Tassy last summer.  I sewed a long rectangle for the loops of the bow, a small rectangle for the centre of the bow and a long rectangle for the ties.

She's got a few new wardrobe pieces now, and all up they only cost $14.

Scrapbooking

I was super lucky recently - as a Jot Girl I received a package of Heidi Swapp and Becky Higgins Project Life products, to help promote their recent tour down under.  It's a long time since I've played with new products and I had a ball! 

I started with this old photo of my sisters and I with our cousins, who visited us about once a year in Grafton.  We lived so far from all our family and we LOVED having them come to stay with us!  We were really lucky we lived in an elevated house with the underneath all enclosed so there was plenty of room for two big families!

Mum said me this photo ages ago after she had stayed with my sister.  She was blow drying her hair and litle 2yo Xander watched her for a bit then raced off and came back with his toy drill, which he then used to blowdry his hair too.  TOO CUTE!

There were some Project Life page protectors in my package, and since I'm not doing Project Life I decided to use a page to display some of the photos from our hot air ballooning adventure from my 40th birthday last year.  I hand drew the title on one of the Project Life cards, inspired by chalkboard typography.

Jot Issue 5

Jot magazine is out now, packed full of paper crafting inspiration.  Read it for free on the Jot magazine website here. 

I have two scrapbooking layouts in there...

Scrapbooking

It's about time I shared a few scrapbooking pages I've done in the last few months.

This one is for my niece Venice's album - her smash cake.  We weren't at her party but I heard the smash cake was a big hit!

 

What I Wore Wednesday

I loved this reproduction 1960s shirt dress pattern, and bought some cute bird and leaf fabric along with some royal blue for a contrasting collar. (Butterick 5747)

I thought some matching buttons would be cute. :)  They're so easy to make. 

The dress was too small to start with but after letting out the seams it fits OK.  Not awesome, but OK.  I'm really happy I went with a contrasting colour.  I ditched the dickey (he he) cos that made the neckline too high and I already liked the shape of the neckline with the collar, so I bought a cheap singlet top to wear underneath which only shows a little. I wish the skirt wasn't so deceptively full in the drawing - otherwise I would have made it much fuller!  I didn't realise until it was too late.

 

 Dress - Made by me
Singlet - Kmart
Necklace - Diva
Crocket Bracelet -  Made by me
Shoes - Yes Style

I just googled my pattern number and found some gorgeous dresses made from this pattern.
Love this red and white one.
The close ups in this apple fabric are gorgeous.

What I Wore Wednesday

I went through mum's vintage patterns when we stayed with them at Christmas, and came away with a few to play with.  I tackled the bottom right pattern first.

I took the pattern pieces out of the packet and almost threw away the first couple of small pieces, since they had no printing on them.  I thought they were rubbish.  Then I realised ALL the pieces were like that, and they had little holes punched in them.  I did freak out a little at first, but after reading the instructions I realised it was easy to cut and mark up.

I do love this fabric, but I've decided the style doesn't really suit me.  It does look better with a belt tho.

 And a cardi breaks it up a bit too.

Here are some pics of mum in 1969 wearing a dress Grandma made her using the same pattern. She has the version with sleeves, which I actually tried with mine, but it looked too utilitarian so I removed them.

Mum's dress has the neckline according to the pattern.  I altered mine cos it was SO high and choking me!

Dress - Made by me
Belts - Unknown
Shoes - ASOS
Crochet Necklace - Made by me
Cardi - Hand me down from my sister in law