Day 99 - Thank you card

Jessica has been helping me make a thank you card for one of the elderly ladies who my mum knows from her bingo nights.  I don’t think I’ve ever met this lady, but she loves to knit and has made a few hand knitted cardigans for Jessica which is really lovely of her.  Last night my mum came home from bingo with another pretty cardigan and some books for Jessica.  As Jessica loves helping make cards and getting out the stickers and the crayons, I thought it would be nice if she helped make a card to say thank you.

Day 80 - Beading workshop

I don’t have much time for crafts these days – two small children keep me very busy!  However, they are two very placid and well-behaved small children and so I thought I’d try going along to the beading workshop at church even if it was just for a short while and see if I could do a little bit of beading.  I managed to make a pretty necklace and stayed for most of the day as the girls were both quite happy as long as they got plenty of cuddles and had some toys to play with whilst I was beading.

Day 64 - Decorating eggs

Jessica enjoyed decorating an egg for the first time at Stay and Play this morning plus we had an Easter egg hunt which she absolutely loved as it involved looking for numbered eggs and she loves being able to recognise numbers.  She’s had quite a crafty day all round today – decorating eggs this morning and then going with Mummy and Sophie to craft group at church where she helped Mummy make a card for cousin Erin and did a lovely drawing of a bear (at least that’s what she kept telling us it was whilst she was drawing it!)

Day 63 - Handmade with love

Have had a lovely afternoon catching up with my friend Denise at a local garden centre where Jessica enjoyed playing in the soft play area and Sophie enjoyed having lots of cuddles.  Denise is one of these wonderfully multi-talented people who is really good at crafts – she made Jessica a dolphin jigsaw for her birthday last year and when we met up today, she presented me with two beautiful ceramic plaques with ‘Jessica’ and ‘Sophie’ on for the girls’ bedroom.  It was such a lovely surprise – was so touched that she thought of doing something like that for my babies. 

Day 49 - Potato stamping

I love sitting down and doing things with Jessica – baking, drawing, painting, playing with toys, building Duplo towers…  Today I thought I would introduce her to the delights of potato stamping (cutting out a shape in a potato half and then dipping it in paint to make pictures).  She had a lovely time with the paint, making a colourful picture (admittedly mostly rubbing the potato across the paper rather than stamping shapes with it!) and I got to sit down and focus on spending quality time with her rather than getting distracted by the household chores needing to be done.

Day 9 - Christening cake figures

I love being creative and with Sophie's christening coming up, I knew that I wanted to make the cake myself (although a friend of ours is doing the rest of the food for the party afterwards).  I had an idea of what I wanted to do and some packs of coloured icing and various different colours of writing icing, including sparkly ones.  I'm quite pleased with how my little icing figures turned out - they look a bit like Playmobil figures of a vicar holding a baby by a font which is pretty much what I was trying to achieve.

Icing modelling

I’ve been trying my hand at sugarpaste modelling as I want to make Jessica an ‘In The Night Garden’ cake for her birthday. I’ve never tried it before but had a quick look online for some tips and gave it a go. I made Igglepiggle first which was reasonably simple and turned out quite well but the other characters were a bit more tricky and I ended up redoing a couple as I wasn’t satisfied with my first attempts. I have two cakes to make so will use the original figures anyway – hopefully the cakes will also turn out well!

A little octopus

Have been busy making Jessica an octopus costume for the Friends of PICU family fun day as there is a fancy dress competition and one of the categories is 0-2 so thought I would enter her in it. The costume consists of three pairs of coloured tights which have been cut up, stuffed and attached to a waistband (plus she is wearing another pair of co-ordinating tights, a pink top to go with the tights and a hat with eyes stuck on. She does look very sweet in it and was quite fascinated by all her extra 'legs'.