Just keeping afloat with all the Christmas craziness. Peggy also had her 8th birthday at the beginning of the month, then with all the stuff that I needed to organise for the end of school, shopping, work, well you all know the drill.

I’ve done a few crafty things but they’ve all gone off to their new owners without taking photos.

Today is the first day of the school holidays and the kids have just received a new Wii game in the mail that they bought. That’s keeping them quiet. I’ve been cuttlebugging felt to make a garland, plus catching up on washing, tying back my tomatoes (which have teeny, tiny tomatoes on them!), and unpacking stock.

Must keep plodding along….

Enjoy your Christmas!

Last week I spent three days prepping and painting our old brown, patterned kitchen tiles. First was a good scrub, then the undercoat, then three coats of tile paint. I used the White Knight Tile paint system. It says two coats, but I chose a very dark colour so it really needed three coats.

While painting I also coated three canvases with the tile paint and after a few days thinking on how to decorate them I spotted the Hambly White Doilies that are in the December A la Tarte! Perfect! This was totally inspired by a sample from the Hambly blog.

After a few placement issues and some wonderful advice from Nic and her amazing photoshop skills they rubbed on beautifully and are now up in the kitchen.

I haven’t yet got a good pic of the tiles as the crappy old brown benchtop takes away from their beautiful colour. I’m waiting on a replacement benchtop quote, so time will tell.

At our November ACTSA meeting each year we have a secret santa. This year we had to make gift bags from envelopes – we had the tutorial on how to do this at our October meeting, thanks to Keilly. Last year we made little boxes and the year before was pillow boxes. We then fill the bag or box with $10 worth of stamping goodies – pop it under the tree and grab a raffle ticket. When our number is drawn we are then given a randomly picked gift from under the tree.

This year I received some glitter glue, a pen and a cute little unmounted santa stamp. So thank you to my secret santa.

But moving on…. here is my gift bag:

The background paper is in the December Full Tart, the poinsettias were in the November Half Tart. I’ve also used red mesh ribbon, a Martha Stewart punch, and I Cuttlebugged the red cardstock. Whew – that was a bit of advertising!

I did colour in this mouse image to pop on the front of the bag, but once I tied the ribbon the mouse would have been lost. So I left the bag nice and plain and whipped up a card with my leftovers.

The mouse is a Stampavie stamp and the cute little leaves behind the poinsettia are a Martha Stewart Rose Leaf punch.

Saturday was our last ACTSA meeting for the year and this month’s theme for our Chunky-Skinny journal page was Oriental. I finally finished this page about an hour before I was to leave for the meeting!

I’ve used Darkroom Door stamps. I stamped them onto vellum using Versamark and then gold embossed. The large flower was made with a Heidi Swapp white floral, folded up and wrapped with leaves. I’ve then twisted a few other leaves to make a sort of vine. I would have like to have added some machine sewing to it all, but time was getting away!

We have done quite a bit of gardening over the past couple of weeks. We’ve planted passionfruit, snap peas, tomatoes and watermelon.

I bought a rusty old gate from the recycle centre at the dump and after months and months of it sitting near the garage I finally scrubbed it back and painted it blue. It doesn’t ‘wow’ me as much as I thought it would, but it should be suitable as a climber for the passionfruit. Unfortunately they are being eaten by bugs at the moment and I’m a little worried about their survival.

This is the tomatoes and snap peas, with a little glimpse of the watermelon patch to the right. Excuse the weeds around the garden beds! Last year we had snap peas and carrots and for weeks we were eating fresh peas with our dinner. I’d send the girls out with a bowl and they would pick them just before dinner. The carrots did not yield well, lol.

In the background you can see my beautiful dragon. I first saw this dragon in a little store on Sydney’s North Shore back in 1993. A few weeks later it appeared in our apartment as a gift from Tony. I’m not sure what the occasion was but it was an almighty effort for him to get it into our apartment with the help of our friend, Dru. We lived on the third floor with the only access being stairs and this dragon is solid concrete, and very bloody heavy! He has travelled with us to six more houses since then.

Also in our garden is a mosaic concrete tile that I made a few years ago in a craft session at the kids school. Over a couple of weeks, of course. I still love it. I want to make more. I did start on a matching one, but I think it got thrown out after 12 months of sitting untouched in the cupboard. I love mosaics – I have it in my head to do an outside table top – one day….

Again, excuse the weeds.

Lastly, a butterfly that landed on the garden patch while I was taking pics.

I made another card using the same papers and layout as this one that I blogged about here. But this time I used the Martha Stewart Royal Butterfly punch.

I’m not sure which one I like better….

This month’s ACTSA ATC swap theme is Christmas – of course! Here’s mine:

Made with papers from the December Full Tart and Noel Santa.

On the weekend we grabbed a few of my paper scrap drawers, got the old trusty Cuttlebug out, and a butterfly punch. Then we cut and punched lots of butterflies, folded up their wings, grabbed some blutac and did this:

It’s not a great photo – I’m not good at taking photos, lol. That’s Peggy’s bedhead in the bottom left corner. We love it – it looks great. Now Mary wants me to do it with turtles in her room – somehow I don’t think it will have the same effect, lol.

Peggy did all of the placement of the butterflies – see the mumma and her two baby butterflies?

I wonder how long this butterfly obsession will hang around in the crafty world?

I made this card as a sample for the latest Lime Tart Blog Challenge. Make sure you get over there to enter it as the prize is just GORGEOUS!

The butterfly diecut is a Quickutz Monarch Butterfly die that I used with my Cuttlebug.

I’ve always loved pumpkin. Roast pumpkin with gravy, and chicken of course. Mashed pumpkin is good too! But for Australians it is a little bit hard to get their head around using pumpkin in sweet things. I’m not sure why as pumpkin is naturally sweet so it’s perfect for sweets.

For Halloween I wanted to do a couple of more adult dessert dishes so that we didn’t have to eat ‘boogers on stickers’.

I made Pumpkin Tarts:

I used the sweet version of this pastry recipe, but of course I replaced the flour with gluten free flour. To make the filling I followed a Martha Stewart recipe and replaced the canned pumpkin with two cups of fresh pumpkin puree. I also replaced the honey with maple syrup. The filling was enough for 48 tarts and four ramekins full. I baked the ramekins alongside the tarts and we ate those straight away!

To make the pumpkin puree I just dry roasted off two butternut pumpkins cut into pieces with the skin and seeds left on. Once they were soft enough I let them cool and then used my hands to peel away the skin and seeds. I then madly mashed the pumpkin, although a food processor would work more efficiently.

The pumpkin puree was enough to make the tart recipe and the slice recipe below.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Squares:

Another Martha Stewart recipe – but I halved the amount of sugar. After tasting, I think they were probably still a little too sweet and I could have reduced the sugar even more. Again, I replaced the flour with gluten free flour and I followed their tip on making up your own pumpkin spice. I did reduce some of the spice levels too. As this was so sweet, I think I’d try it again next time with sultanas instead of the choc chips.