Cubby Curtains - My first sewing project!

I have had many plans to decorate the girls cubby house for quite some time. I've got lots of ideas and many things ready to go for a while. I finally made a start last week. 

I found these gorgeous tea towels at the Bed Bath & Table Clearance store and decided straight away that this was the colour scheme that was going to be perfect for the cubby house. 

I have been carrying around one of the tea towels in my handbag for months so I that if ever saw anything that might match I could whip it out and check. I'm slightly colour matchy obsessed!

Anyway getting back to my first sewing project for the cubby. Okay so I don't know how to sew (I did woodwork at school instead of home economics) but I really wanted curtains in the cubby house. I made the decision it was time to learn. However I'm not to silly and that's why I choose to use tea towels to turn into curtains.

However I did need to wait to I could borrow a sewing machine and have someone show me how to use it. Lucky for me my Mother-in-law offered to help me. She came around a week ago with her sewing machine, gave me a quick demo and lent me her machine (apparently she bought it when she pregnant with my husband!). I was very grateful.

Later that night after the kids were in bed I got the courage up to sew on my own. I folded the top of the tea towel over and did two lines of stitching across the top to put the curtain wire through. I cut another tea towel done is size to make a tea towel for the cubby while I was at it.

Easy peasy and I think they look quite cute!

The hard part was installing them. I couldn't find a small enough drill bit anywhere in my hubby's garage. He came to the rescue though and put a pop rivet in the drill like a drill bit. It worked a treat!

Next task is to make some tiebacks for them I think.

Remembering Our Wedding

Yesterday the lovely Bianca from A little delightful shared this on her facebook page

 It sent a flood of memories back to me of our wedding day over 7 years ago. I loved our wedding! Of course unfortunately friendships change and so the guest list and bridal parties would look very different today. But to be honest there's not much else it'd change.

The budget was tight as we had to payfor most of it ourselves but it was wonderful. There was alot of DIY for the invitations and reception. My dress was under $1000. Here are some pictures I thought I'd share with you. We shopped alot at Ikea and spotlight back then too.

Our reception was in a surf club. We hired tables, chairs and linen. My wonderful niece was kind enough to set all the tables up for us on the morning of the wedding. She did an amazing job. We had ikea candles, holders with rocks and floating candles from Spotlight and cute little white bowls of kool mints.

The placemats were all printed, cut and glued at home. That was a BIG job!

The cake was made by my bridemaid's sister dirt cheap.

We had a beautiful wedding book made up by a lady a found at the markets. I think the most important thing to spend your money on when you get married is on a photographer.

 

 And can you tell we liked blue and the beach back then too - some things don't change :)

A Very Cute Alphabet Print

I wanted to share with you this very cute print I found on the internet via Pinterest. 

It's one of the cutest alphabet charts I have have seen.

I printed it out on some A4 card popped it in a frame I found at Big W for $10 and have put it in Molly's room.

It's a free printable from the Mr Printables site you can find here.

There are lots of other goodies on this site too like super cute animal cards. I'm going to print out th number cards next for Molly as she is becoming obsessed with numbers.

If you're looking for some great colour cards just pop over to A Little Delightful as Bianca has some available to download here for free.

Happy Printing :)

Farm Books and Apps

For our recent farm them which we are wrapping up soon I didn't buy any new books I just gathered some of these from the huge collection of books we already have.

I also found these free apps that I popped on the iPad for Molly. 

Lego Duplo Farm Friends App

Molly loves doing puzzles on the iPad so this app was perfect for her.

Farm Jigsaws 1,2,3.
The great thing about this app is that you can change the difficulty of the puzzles from 2 to 12 pieces.

Of course the always popular Peek-a-Barn app fitted in perfect with the farm theme.

Peekaboo Barn Lite is free and the full version is a small price.

Note: I will be redoing this theme again as there were so many things I still want to do but for some Molly was too young and others Jasmin was too young and she still puts everything in her mouth.  Lucky for me she is happy to draw while we craft at the moment but anything else and she wants in on it!

For anyone interested in more farm activities I have a board on my Pinterest page that you can check out here.

Paper Plate Farm Animals

I happen to think paper plate animals are incredibly cute! 

  You may remember that we made some sheep earlier ...

You can find the link here.

We also made a pig and cow to go with our sheep.

  

I didn't use any templates I just drew the shapes need by hand. 

Note: When I first planned to do this activity I had some snack sized paper plates ready to use with regular sized ones but they were actually too big. I ended up finding some small paper plates just the right size in a Riot Art & Craft Store.

Muffins - Super Organiser Mum Style

If there is one thing I absolutely love it's these easy muffin recipe from the ever so clever Super Organiser Mum. After sharing this photo ..

.. on my Facebook page here lots of you asked for the recipes and Jade was so kind in saying she was happy for me to share them with you all. 

I re-type or cut and paste all my favourite recipes into word documents to keep in my recipe folder. I like having all recipes neatly presented in the same format. I've recently learnt how to upload pdfs to iBook to view on my iPad. I'm hoping to have a go at doing this with my recipe collection soon.

 

So here are two of my favourite Super Organiser Mum muffin recipes ..

Pear & Banana Muffins

Ingredients-

1 1/2 cups self raising flour

1/3 cup caster sugar

60g butter

1 mashed banana

1 pear (very small pieces)

1 egg

1/2 cup milk

Method-

1. In a large bowl rub together flour, sugar and butter until resembles fine breadcrumbs.

2. Stir in mashed banana, pear, egg and milk to combine.

3. Spoon mixture into prepared muffin pans.

4. Bake at 190 for 20 minutes.

 Mini Banana Muffins

Ingredients-

1/2 cup light margarine

2 eggs

2 medium bananas

1 tsp vanilla essence

1 tsp bicarb soda

50ml warm milk

1/2 cup caster sugar

1 1/2 cup self raising flour

Method-

1. Cream butter sugar and vanilla together.

2. Add eggs separately, beating well.

3. Mash bananas and add to mixture.

4. Dissolve soda in milk and add flour and milk alternatively.

5. Bake in mini muffins trays at a 180 oven for 15 mins until golden brown.

Sometimes I'm a little naughty and add white choc chips! 

Amusing kids - it doesn't take much!

We had a lovely getaway for a few days up the coast 

but why did I bother to take toys with us?

The most fun they had was playing with the washing basket trolley 

and pegs at the holiday house we rented. They were playing with it for ages!

 You can just never guess what will amuse kids but you know they'll 

always like getting an icecream.

Best thing was I got to eat most of both of them because they love 

the idea of an icecream more than they like to eat them!

Our Farm Theme - Activities

We've been doing some more farm activities in this house. Unfortunately we got a bit behind. Life happens sometimes.

But we've made a shape art tractor, built a duplo farm and did some counting and sorting with some farm animal pasta.

  

This activity was perfect for Molly as she loves to glue is has become very interested in shapes. You can find the shape tractor activity here. There are lots of other farm activities in the download pack too.

 

Another thing Molly has become very interested in is counting. I found some farm animal shaped pasta in the health food aisle at Woolworths (total fluke find!). One afternoon we sorted and counted to our hearts content! Jasmin was asleep at this time otherwise she would have wanted to eat them!!

We also made the Duplo farm. It lasted a while until Jasmin decided to push it off the coffee table so she could sit on it!

  

Molly requested to glue some more puzzles so we completed two puzzles that I blogged about here.

More activities to come soon :)

Engel Organising - How I Organise our Engel for Holidays

We are Engel lovers in this house. We've had ours for a few years now and have found this portable fridge invaluable when camping but also great for day trips to keep our food and drinks cold. An esky is great but I rather not have to buy ice everyday. That can get quite expensive and lettuce never does to well in an esky of ice. So I want to share with you how I keep my Engel organised so that everything is easy to find.

 When we first got our Engel I got a few tips on packing it from a friend by simply using glad bags to seal everything in. However after a while I found this didn't suit me. If I pulled out the milk everything would fall into the space left by the milk and it was a pain to rearrange everything to get the milk back in. I also found that sometimes those glad bags failed and meat juices are not something I really wanted in with all my other food. So I went with my favourite .. Tupperware. Luckily I had a Tupperware Party at my house and asked the demonstrator what might fit in the Engel. We grabbed the Tupperware Antarctica range and tested it .. it was a perfect fit. The best thing was it was the host gift that month so I got it free!

How I pack the containers, how many and what's in each one changes depending on the type of trip we're going on. I've been packing my Engel like this for a few years now

Last week we headed off for a 3 day quick getaway. It was in a holiday house but I still packed it like we were going away camping so that we could still pack the Engel easily for travelling and day trips.

I need to plan for two dinners (BBQ and tacos), one cook up breakfast and lunches. I choose easy meals and have everything ready to go so that I can have a holiday too!

This time I packed our meat in the large size Antarctica container. In the rectangle sized containers I put a pre-made salad, bacon, cold meats and pre-chopped onion. In the small square containers I had sliced cheese, grated cheese, pre-chopped lettuce and tomato. I usually pack the cheese with yellow lids so they are easy to find.

I always buy my milk in one litre bottles and a round tub of margarine as they fit perfect in the Engel next to the containers. Fruit goes on the top and I reused a plastic basket that my apple came in that week. I top it off with some squeezie yogurts for the kids, dip and any spare room might be filled with extra fruit or water bottles for the drive.

Now sometimes I still use large glad bags for salad to chuck on the top of the esky, and if we and in the future we will buy a second Engel to use as a freezer when we go camping for more than just a few days. And if you're wondering where our drink are I keep a small soft esky in the car for the drive and we use a small tropical box esky for drinks when camping.

This is how much my husband loves his Engel on his fishing trips ...

 

Love an organised Engel.

How do you pack your Engel, Waeco, ARB or other portable fridge?

Got any great tips to share?