My baby's baby

I finished my first proper waldorf doll!

Not the best photo I'm afraid, but here she is-

Since she was for my youngest's first birthday, she has a lovely soft bamboo velour body, with just the head & upper torso fully formed under her 'clothes'. In the traditional waldorf style she is made from 100% natural fibres - cotton stretch skin fabric, the bamboo velour, carded wool fleece for stuffing, and a strange but very cool feeling wool/soy blend yarn for her (immense amount of) hair! 

I knit her a little dress to wear, and crocheted a blanket too, which I haven't got a photo of yet.

I'm rather pleased with how she came out, except that the velour has a tendency to 'wick' the stuffing out :(

I'm working on a second one now, for our kindergarten's gigantic Advent Fair!

Oink.

I made a pig.

When is too much...??

THIS is too much!!

 For paul's birthday, I made a two layer rich vegan chocolate cake, with this concept in mind, and as such I (rightly) thought that buttercream icing would be a bit much for the filling & icing, so just did a plain cocoa + icing sugar icing... and that is where this started to go a bit wrong.. as we allll know, that sort of icing goes hard VERY fast. Too fast to be able to glue Kit-Kats on easily... 

And speaking of Kit-Kats... I bought 3 family sized Kit-Kat blocks to hopefully have plenty to spare. Nuh uh. Turns out family sized Kit-Kat blocks reeeeeaallly don't break nicely. In fact, they don't so much break as shatter. Or rip they base off the bar next to them. So there was a fair amount of chocolate shaving & gluing going on.

And guess who forgot that their ribbon stash has been missing since moving house?

That all being said, it was rather delicious!! Though it was SO sweet and SO chocolatey that paul had no chance of finishing all his portion.. Even the kids had a bit left over!!! Even I had a couple of crumbs left!!!

mmm chocolate.

On a much easier note, but still a little chocolatey - 

Chocolate chip Anzac biscuits from this recipe. But with chocolate chips thrown in too, cos that is how we roll.

(hey did you know that you are not ALLOWED to call them Anzac cookies?! There are strict rules about these things. I'm expecting a stern letter about those chocolate chips.)

Rawrrr...

Eli's 3rd birthday cake!

We got him some wooden african animals for his birthday, so a matching cake was in order..

I must learn to keep things simple in future, cos they always come out better if i don't go overboard with lolly decoration!!

Off the needles...

I'm still playing catch-up since bub was born!

a few things from the toy department-

a pocket elephant for one of eli's playgroup friends, who just turned 3 years old-

a Spring Butterfly cardi for one of lexi's babies, for lexi's birthday-

and a green "rainbow dress" for another of lexi's babies, as a little present when maia was born!

i'm going through a really busy knitting/crochet phase at the mo, so there will be lots more over the next few days!!

it's the thought that counts.. right?

Proud mummy moment, kind of...

the kids insisted on making me a birthday cake! and not just any cake, a proper themed cake from the original Women's Weekly Birthday Cake book...

an "Old Woman who lived in a shoe" cake. y'know, the one who had so many children she didn't know what to do? yeah. hmph.

anyway, a certain father who was roped into help, on account of children being too young to bake unassisted, was quite convinced that it would be fine to leave cake baking & decorating til around 4.30pm. I can imagine what seasoned cake decorators are thinking right about now...

So they toddled off to the supermarket in search of ingredients & decorations, perhaps losing sight of their vision (goal and possibly eyesight) along the way..

it was a hot day for making buttercream icing that is supposed to function as adhesive AND cladding... and there wasn't much (any) time to let the cake cool before icing it anyway...

and the lolly selection didn't prove particularly useful when it came to authenticity...

ummm yeah-

any sensible woman with too many children is bound to have a couple of sharks guarding the perimeter right?! and a nice brown moat...??!

ah bless.. :-)

luckily i live by the mantra "if it tastes good (and doesn't involve killing anything), then who cares!!" and it did, so yay! and it's the first birthday cake they've made for me, so it's extra special... and uhhh.. memorable too ;-)

on a slightly more unadulterated note- another cakey effort recently was lexi's birthday cake for kindy... the teachers appreciate it if the cakes aren't too over-the-top and, especially, full of artificial colourings & plastered with sugar!

so i made my favourite vegan lemon & coconut cake-

i decorated it by placing some star-shaped stickers around it, sprinkling with icing sugar, then removing the stars :-) i thought it looked quite effective, and with the minimum of fuss!

whenever i make this recipe i also make a tiny star cake as a RAOK, so this one i made to match for lexi's kindy teachers as a thank you-

cute huh?

It's been a long time, been a long time....

been a long, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy time!!!

mostly because of this thing-
Her name is Maia, and she was born at home at 4.01am on Friday 8th of October!

She was born in our bath, weighing a teeny tiny 2.69kg (5lb 14oz), after a quickish & easyish labour, with no difficulties or complications then or since!!

Her timing was pretty much perfect, at 38 weeks + 3 days gestation, because we had spent the beginning of the week checking out geothermal wonders 4 hours away from home in a campervan with a broken alternator (so no battery charge, we drove the last hour to home at night with NO lights!!!!), and then after dropping the van back up north only got home at 10.30pm thursday, with me having had intermittent contractions (20-40min apart) all the way home!
But she also managed to sneak in on the last day of the school holidays, so we got an extra 3 days of daddy being at home than if she had arrived once the term had started!
So an excellent time to make her arrival, if cutting it a bit fine ;-)

but anyway, i've got plenty of things to share that i managed to get done in the lead up, that got delayed with several weeks of school production chaos, and a couple of things that i've even done since!! :-D

secret.

i have to keep a secret.

i made something last week that took an outrageous amount of time, with copious amounts of hand sewing, for a present....

the present has been handed over to it's birthday girl, BUT one of my friends is planning to make a bunch of similar style things for sale at xmas, so i'm not going to publicize the idea just in case someone else beats her to it!
but this is the little wooden finger puppet doll that went with it lol..

paul painted her face & hair, and i dressed her in a cute scrapbook paper dress, coated lovingly in layers of Mod Podge, just recently available round here!!

but it's gonna be a while before i can share pics of the background ;-)

another birthday

we have a few of them, luckily spread nicely throughout the year, apart from certain awkward people not long after xmas... (one of which would.. uhh.. be ME)

and partially because of that we like to keep them fairly simple affairs, with little touches making them special...

like a decorated chair for the birthday person, our special birthday banner, the shared birthday candle, and the presents wrapped in our gorgeous playsilks!
this year (again) was a birthday away from home, so i needed to go for something simple for the birthday cake, like icecreams!
'cept because i like CAKE, they're cupcakes decorated like icecreams, to match the ones in the book that was one of the presents-
heh heh...
and the birthday was a success!!

the Real Reason why doll play is good

because they have birthdays too.

Vegan Chocolate Banana Cupcakes

prep time: 10 minutes | cooking time: 20 minutes | makes 12 cupcakes

Ingredients
3/4 cup sugar
5 Tbsp vegan margarine, softened
1 tsp vanilla
1 banana, mushed well
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup soy milk

Directions
Preheat oven to 180°C

Combine first three ingredients in a large bowl, mix well.
Add banana, stirring well to combine.

Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cup and level with a knife. Combine flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt, stirring well with a whisk.

Add flour mixture to sugar mixture alternately with 1/2 cup soymilk, beginning and ending with flour mixture; mix after each addition.

Spoon the batter into 12 muffin cups lined with paper liners.

Bake for 20 minutes or until cupcakes spring back easily when touched lightly in the center. Allow to cool, and frost if desired.


Recipe from the awesome Post Punk Kitchen, the people behind our much loved Veganomicon, and such other fabulously titled books as Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar!

my little big boy

my little guy was about to get a whole year older (it happens overnight you know) and so i decided he needed to join in on our first proper family birthday tradition - the felted crowns.

so i started with some wool-
(yes it's pink & purple, it was left over from lexi's so-long-ago Tigger Cardi (look how little she is!), and the only feltable stuff left in my stash!)

some food colouring & vinegar,

and some of this stuff-
and.... ta da!


the butterfly theme was because we inherited a couple of monarch caterpillars a month or so ago from our playgroup, and we've had a constant stream of them to look after ever since! Eli absolutely loves them, and has been finding the process fascinating, so i thought it would be a fitting theme for his crown :-)
i think he likes it!

i was incredibly proud of lexi too, who was inspired by my efforts to make eli a present herself as well! she decided to make him a toy horse, which turned into a unicorn, so i cut the basic shape out of felt (i like minimum 70% wool felt), showed her how to do a whip stitch, and off she went! I did the eyes for her, and threaded her needle, but the rest was all her work, even choosing the colours (it's red on one side, purple on the other ;-) ).

(there was a minor controversy on eli's birthday when she decided she actually wanted it to have a short mane, so hid behind the lounge curtains to give it a haircut without asking first, but really since it was her project she had to be forgiven!)

and of course there was birthday cake... not one of my sleeker efforts to be sure *blush*
but it tasted good & the kids loved it, so i'm happy!

Lexi's 4th birthday!

within a month doesn't count as late blogging!

due to unforeseen circumstances we had to cancel lexi's party, but we still had a little get together with lexi's aunty, uncle & baby cousin, which lexi was more than happy about!

i made a few things for it, firstly a Little Rocket (designed by a very clever friend called megan!)
(auto photo rotating grumble grumble)
made out of scraps of yarn from lexi's earflap hat & felted slippers (not bad value for an $8 200g hank from the titirangi markets!)
and a special new birthday dress (two years running now!)
i'm rather happy with the detail, the buttons are the same as her Spring Butterfly
modelled with the crown & cape that were handmade for her birthday by her nursery teachers(!!!)
and a very silly alien cake-
i think she enjoyed her birthday!

Eat cake.

now let me preface this by clearly stating that i have of late become rather a fan of a little blog called Cake Wrecks. Yes, a website dedicated to when professional cakes go horribly, deliciously, hilariously wrong.

and for part two of this tale, it was the day before the m.o.t.h's birthday, and he wanted a banana cake with cream cheese icing. no problemo.
and we needed to be packed for the weekend, cake included, and out of the house by 2.15pm. i can do that at a pinch..

so lexi is helping me bake the cake & asks what kind of cake it will be, i tell her "just a plain cake". see where this is heading?

sure enough 1.45pm, cake is out of the oven & iced, and a little girl is crying because daddy's cake isn't an aeroplane. So under much duress to decorate the cake somehow, i take my inspiration a) from Cake Wrecks, and b) from some of the glorious "Descriptive Writing" efforts that he has the pleasure of translating, sorry, reading on a daily basis... thus -

Wobbly writing? Check. (had to conciously fight myself from trying to do it nicely!) Phonetic Spelling? Check. Words bending or heading off the page? Check. Overuse of the word "and"? Check. flicks on the end of hair? Check. Mysterious but ever-present comment on personal happiness? Check.

awesome.

and would you believe that it only took me 8 minutes to do, and that *includes* making a piping bag?!

ah well.. it was enough to satisfy lexi anyway ;-)

and completely at the other end of the scale, check out the cake that his mother made for the baby shower!!!!
that baby is EDIBLE!!!

what is red & black, and has webbed feet?!

Spiderman!!!!
my step-son has been requesting a chocolate spiderman cake for his birthday for months!

so (despite having a nasty cold boohoo) you gotta do what you gotta do!! :-D

lord of the skies..

my step-son's birthday crown!
when he saw lexi's birthday crown, he immediately asked if he would get one for his birthday, and sure enough he will be..

i was trying for a lunar phases sort of idea, but i'm not entirely happy with how it turned out, because i didn't have quite enough space to comfortably fit the gibbous moons (love that word), but it looks slightly empty without them too.. that & the crescents look rather weird in this photo for some reason?!

This crown is created from a piece of wet-felted.. umm.. felt, obviously ;-) (in the two swirly blue colours), which i then needle-felted decorations onto, and added hand-coloured wooden ribbons & silver ribbons for the closure.

The knitted then felted crown definitely makes a sturdier crown shape, but when the time factor is taken into account, plus the versitility of wet-felting with fibre, then i think this is a good option too!

I'm not 100% happy with it, but i'm sure the recipient will be!

shhh... don't tell!

eli's birthday pressie..
(sorry about the terrible photo!)
we've got a basic policy for birthdays of a little bought thing, a little homemade thing, a book, and a tiny thing or two.... and this is what i have made for eli's upcoming 1st birthday!

it's a little cuddly doll made from lovely bamboo velour, very lightly stuffed with wool fleece, and with a waldorf doll style head (has internal shaping created by tightly binding a ball of wool, before being tightly wrapped in flesh coloured cotton knit) i found it quite hard to keep the proportions ok, and the head is a bit Iggle Piggle for my liking ;-) but overall i think it's ok!

it's my first attempt at making a doll, just making it up as i went along, without any real idea of what i was doing at any point, so i'm pretty pleased with the result!! it's very soft & snuggly, so i hope he likes it :-)

What we did in our school holidays...

We....

Had xmas-
spent boxing day at the beach with family-
built a 'boat' (a frigate to be exact) -
had a birthday-
fed granddad's chooks-
visited this young lady-
made a snailquarium (just for a day!) -
went bushwalking-
and took the obligatory photos-
ate our first cherry tomatoes-
and our first corn-
ripped down our deck (details to come!) -
and spent a frantic week renovating paul's new classroom to make it ready for the year-
(check out the freshly painted/waxed furniture & matching boxes in the maths area!)

as for me personally, i've been slaving away on my first proper sock-yarn socks, knit on 2.5mm needles... crazy i tells ya! i've almost finished one sock & am half way with the other...