Time flies when your having fun.....

Wow, well it has been a while, a loooong while in actual fact.

My last post here was in September.....September!  That is a mental long time to not have posted here. 
We have had a pretty hectic schedule the last couple of months, quite a few trips back home, a visitor from New Zealand and quite a bit of tiki touring around this beautiful part of Queensland, Kindy and the whole breakup at the end of the year, friends opening up cafes yes multiple friends opening up different cafes, parties, countless trips to the supermarket, a camping trip, my sisters 18th birthday, and then we have Christmas the holiday break and the upcoming New Years.

We have also endured some interesting and trying moments in the last few months of the year.  TWO pairs of broken eye glasses yep even my spare pair broke thank goodness for superglue and electrical tape SIGH, a broken car TWICE, a HUGE bill that was most unexpected, a dying computer, a broken washing machine which meant lots of hand washing and trips to the laundromat and then there was my miss T's feet....weeks of leg casting, an operation to both feet, a wheelchair and then the whole experience of  learning to walk all over again, it was sobering and sad and frustrating and hard but at the end of the day she is back on her two feet and I am so proud of my strong little trooper.

My creativity has taken a huge backseat over the last few months.  I have made a few cards which I forgot to photograph, I made some customised towels for two little twin princesses a whole tonnage of birthday cakes and an almost no sew Christmas outfit for my kiddos but apart from that anything crafty has just been a no go, I even put my foot down and refused point blank to do any Christmas cooking which is something that I ALWAYS do. Speaking of cooking I have been baking again for work which has been fun but I am getting the itch for and would rather be back in my cave and getting my craft on.

Here is hoping that the New Year brings some better luck our way and waaaay more creativity.

Week in Review

What a week, apart from the two straight days in the kitchen, a house inspection, kindy runs and a very over budget grocery shop we also had a wedding, ohhh I love weddings.

 Something that is a fairly normal morning sight around here, while they still are little and want to cuddle with mum in the mornings I am not going to make any complaints, the time will come all too soon when they both want nothing to do with me :(

 Hungry Hippos, I am not sure if it is the lure of the "marble" or the sheer deafening noise but Hungry Hippos is his favourite.

 A wedding.  this is a very special wedding for me, that is my High school best friend, old flat mate, party partner in crime and Brother from another Mother getting married there, yep when I was a youngin my best friend was a boy.....This is something that he has always wanted and I am so happy for him and that I could be a part of his special day.

The groom and groomsman.  I have also known the groomsman for a ridiculous amount of time and his ex partner is my best friend, it was very special to be with some of the people that I shared some the best and craziest times of my life with, it does not happen enough these days.

Ohhh not every day that you get your hair did and get to wear stupidly high pretty pink shoes, that light does not do the colour justice.

 As the Wedding was on a Sunday we had Monday to ourselves and we decided to indulge the kids in a bit of Underwater World for the afternoon before we headed home.

Yeah, I did say kids right.....

Re purposed Jewellery.  This was a bracelet in a previous life and a pretty heinously ugly one at that, a few changes and I have myself a very cool necklace that I do LOVE.

Zach's attempt at helping me scrapbook, this is not the first time that he has "helped" me with a almost finished layout in fact this is the third one in less than a year.  Lucky I was able to disguise the damage here but it is still not what I wanted :(

 

Just because it is the greatest thing I have seen in forever, that dog totally looks like a Wookie, hahahaha.

I have been on a HUGE Sublime kick recently, I was not the biggest fan in High school but I certainly had my fair share of listening to them in my friends bedroom while we painted our nails, talked boys and how awesome it would be if our parents would let us go to the Vans Warped Tour.......Memories.

Anywho, for some reason the self titled album from Sublime has been really kicking me in the nostalgia pants and I have found a whole new level of respect and love for these crude Cali Punk Rockers.  Warning this song does have adult themes.

And just for the sheer awesomeness and justice that Megan Washington gives this song here is a cover of Santeria, she makes this song so beautiful.

Speaking of Covers this is one of my new favourites.  Katie Noonan was in one of my favourite bands from my High School days called George.  It was so different from anything that was out at the time and she had the most amazing voice in all honestly she was someone that I looked up to in those horrible hormone filled teen days.

Whoa, where have Kingswood been hiding?  The last five years have been a bit of a music wasteland for me hence the HUGE nostalgia vibe I have had for 90's rock and indie alternative and late 90's to mid 2000's house music.  This song is EPIC, epic I tell you.  I just want to rock out as soon as this song starts, please tell me that the days of generic manufactured pop and boring flavourless hipster music is over.....  

Pinterest Picks

We have had a bout of illness through this house that has been going on for at least three months now and all of us have suffered from multiple different things at varying times so I have been at home quite a bit in the last few weeks and Pinterest has really been feeling my presence lately especially those few days that I was on bed rest.

There is so  much inspiration on that site I have no idea how I am going to do all these wonderful things but here is my pick of the week and four things I am certainly going to do.

Shoes.  I love shoes, like I can't tell you how much my love for shoes and bags run, the trouble is I can find nothing that I like anymore and the ones that I do love are way, way, way out of my price range so after seeing this beautiful pair of shoes I have decided that I am going to try my hand at customizing a pair of cheap shoes into a one of a kind pair of me shoes.  

Neapolitan mousse cake.   Wow, I have no doubt that this would taste amazing but I just love the was that it looks.  We have a very good friend come around for dinner every Tuesday night so sometime in the not so distance future I can see this being made.

Photo Letters.  Again WOW, I am going to do this for the front entrance of our home it is a sad boring and bare area of the house that needs something to cheer it up, I think this project which not only looks great but seems to be on the cheap side of things is perfect.  

Fantasy Direction Sign.  Oh my, I would have loved something like this when I was a child.  I( was an avid reader and this would have been like the greatest thing ever).  We have access to as much and many pallets as we want from my husbands work and we actually have one out the back as we speak.   With the help of my Cricut I can see our sign having places like the Enchanted wood, Hogwarts, Never Land and Far Far Away.

Thank You cards

I love making invitations and cards, the card thing is a fairly new hobby of mine but really there is nothing better than getting an unexpected card or letter in the mail, I will openly admit that a hand written envelope makes me rather giddy and excited for what may be inside especially as these days everything seems to be done via the digital route.

 Seeing as I had to make a few of these I decided to go for the most simple yet effective design that I could muster.  The paper was a no brainer, it was pink and orange I already owned it so no extra costs and the print tied in with some of the fabric that I used for my party.  Quick, simple and stylish, perfect....well almost perfect.

I ran out of paper :(

Actually I finished the first sheet and then could not bring myself to use the second sheet as I know they no longer sell this paper and I figured it would be perfect for a scrapbooking layout of my party, so what's a girl  to do?

I dug around to find an orange that matched the Kaisercraft paper and I actually had something that was very close.  I used a damask stamp and although I did not have any pink embossing powder I did have a metallic purple so I used that, I LOVE how this turned out, win!

Okay so I had one more to make and I really could not be bothered to emboss the rest of the paper just for one card so I came up with idea of a collage.  This is possibly my favourite one out of the lot and it reminds me for some reason of serendipity squares from waaaaay back in the day, now that's showing my scrapbooking age right there LOL.

The party goods

So a few weeks ago I celebrated my 30th birthday and as always it was a hugely DIY affair.  It was actually really hard to pick what I was going to do especially with the influence that pinterest now has in the home crafters life, so many choices.....
Dress up or not, casual or dressy, daytime or night, family orientated or a adult only?

Basically I had no idea what I was doing until about three weeks prior and a purchase of a few meters of fabric.

The invites, please excuse the dodgy iPhone photo but this was all I took before I posted them off.  Howe awesome is glitter paper, I have only ever used the DCWV glitter stack paper and it is more of a varnish with silver flecks through it, this however is glittery awesomeness.

The Table runner.  I managed to find the perfect tassels and was able to run this up in less than an hour, I love it so much that it has become the runner on the dining table.

The bunting, I had two separate buntings for the night, this short one that was perfect for the cake table or just my beat up old dresser that I am hoarding and a ten meter one that went around the perimeter of where the party was. 

The garland.  I am so shocked at how easy it is to make these, it probably helps a whole lot that I have a Cricut, seriously the whole thing took maybe two hours maybe three and it was huge, again I loved it so much that I kept some and am using it on my shelves.  And then there was the left overs.

Yep, waste no want not.  I have been hoarding my mums old coffee jars for months now and all the wonderful pinterest ideas I had found were just not turning out the way that I wanted them to.  In a mad flash  of inspiration I thought of the garland off cuts, the jars were filled with flameless candles and scattered around the fence lines no one could see that they were off cuts wrapped around the jars and the looked so pretty twinkling away all night.

The cake.  I had no idea what I was going to do and the plan I had went out the window as soon as I put icing into the piping bag.  it was not what I envisioned at all but I do love it.

The cake table, I wish the white background was bigger but it was all I had on the night and I thought it was way bigger than what it was despite that I really loved the way it all turned out and came together, another day of organising would have been great but in the end it was pretty and girly and bright and fun. 

Girly Layouts

I made both of these quite some time ago but we have had the busiest last two months that they just sat there waiting to be photographed and put into an album, kind of like the laundry and all the junk in garage, just sitting there waiting to be dealt with.... 

The Pose.  I have been a real pink, girly kind of kick recently and I think that that comes across in this layout.  Flowers and butterfly's, pearls and lace, you don't get much more girly than that.  The best thing about this layout in particular is that all the papers except the Sassafras foldies have come from paper and cardstock bought from Big W.  As much as I love going to my LSS I also love being able to get more "bang for my buck" and brands such as Grace Taylor and DCWV do offer that.

How cute is this stack?  I like most of the papers in this pack as they are perfect for little girl pages but what I really, really loved was the yellow chevron paper and the pink polka dot that they had in the back.

Simple Pleasures.  This layout was done using some of that left over chevron and some papers from the Crate paper pretty party line, surprisingly I loved a lot of that line as normally I am more about the brights.  This layout has a lot of bits and pieces in it from a few manufactures and as per my normal scrapbooking procedures is a mixture of new and really old, everything from Queen and Co corner stickers, eight year old brads and brand new paper.

Recovery....

Will do a blog post soon on my party and the crafty bits and pieces that we had but in the mean time I have no voice what so ever, I am feeling pretty yucky and need to have a rest today.....this is why.....

To much celebrating and possibly too many cocktails and jelly shots, possibly, okay maybe a slim chance.....

Comings and goings of an inconsistent blogger

So I am fairly terrible at this blogging thing, I will most certainly not be winning any awards for the most consistent blogger of the year, but in any case a small tidbit into whats been going on in this slack bloggers life.

The school holidays were a bit of a let down in here in sunny Queensland as I can tell you that it was anything but sunny, just lots and lots of rain.  I planned a trip to stay at my parents house with the kids and visit all our friends and have picnics and fun in the parks but sadly it was lots of inside play, movies and multiple trips to Underwater World (thank goodness for yearly passes).

I have quite a few firm favourites at UnderWater World the otters being one and the "Nemo" tank being the other, I love seeing the kids take in the amazing beauty of all these different underwater beauties.

A hard day of movies, UnderWater World and grocery shopping will tucker a poor little boy out, he slept like this the whole way around the store.

Teela celebrated turning five this year and as we were a few days out from her birthday my mum decided that we needed to have a pop up party of sorts for Teela at the Grandparents place before we headed home to Brisbane.

On her actual birthday with just the four of us.

Invitations.  With my 30th creeping up it was time to get creative and make some invites to what will be the celebration of my thirtieth year, eeepp.

 Sun, finally sun!!  Taking full advantage of a beautiful sunny winters day playing outside and exploring the long forgotten yard.

My latest op shop find.  Not what I went in there for but I could not leave this spinning rack behind, currently it is filled with my inks, embossing powders, glitter and wood mounted stamps but who knows what I will end up doing with this, I think it would also suit cosmetics, bracelets even fruit.

Birthday gifts, the best kind there is...I pick and he pays :D

Another set of birthday gifts, thanks Mum.  I already had these Napoleon Perdis Set cosmetics on a layby after a really decent special but I never got around to paying them off, the annual birthday money that mum gifts me every year paid for a new cosmetics haul, droool...

Peg bags, I have wanted some peg bags for ages.  The plastic ones you buy from the grocery store are flimsy, fall apart often and in the hot Queensland sun disintegrate in next to no time.  The pretty pink peg tin I bought a few months ago was pretty but 100% impractical, the kids kept stealing it, it made a horrible noise and it was far too small so one day in the midst of boredom and the feeling of needing to tackle something I have never done before I made a peg bag, and then another as the first was just not big enough, turns out I have a LOT of pegs.  They are not perfect they have faults but they are 100% what I wanted and I made them and I actually sewed them (that happens very infrequently, I am no seamstress).

A haul post....

Generally as a rule I don't do haul posts,  I don't buy terribly exciting stuff, I actually buy very little these days as I scrap quite infrequently and lastly most of my stuff comes in dribs and drabs a sticker sheet here, four sheets of cardstock there, nothing worth doing a post about.

A few days ago I went to my closest Spotlight looking for some fabric and I just happened to hit paper crafters heaven, discount scrapbook supplies....

Kaisercraft, Bella, Pebbles and American Crafts paper all reduced to 70c a sheet the five sheets at the front are either embossed or glittered, I don't think I have ever bought paper that cheap before.

 The glitter ribbon and the the glitter dots were all 99c a pack from Riot Art And Craft and the American Craft Remarks stickers and rub ons were from Spotlight and were all wait for it......50c a pack.

I have never seen specials like that before and I normally never get those kinds of prices, very lucky indeed.

I left quite a few things behind especially at Spotlight but after the cleaning and re-organising I did the other day adding in more supplies that I don't need but was cheap was just not going to work, it is a hard lesson that I am slowly getting better at, leaving cheap craft stuff behind and only buying the things that I will actually use.

That's it for me for a while though, I honestly have very little time or mojo these days for crafting and I can't keep buying things if I am not using them so that will most likely be the last craft shop I do for some time.

Another long winded review post....

Things have been CRAZY busy since my last post and to top it all off I have gotten sick, hence why I have not been on here or Two Peas or doing any crafting :(

We have had two weekend on the coast, three thirtieths and a third birthday.

A visit with one set of my grandparents

Making cakes galore and cards and presents

A number of tantrums and that is not just from the kids

A house that needs to be scrubbed from top too bottom, I wont lie I am no house cleaner but all this busy and two kids and trips away have culminated into an exceptionally messy house that I am currently have my blinders on for.

And an exciting instalment in my life....

 Rearranged, cleaned, reorganised my craft space and decided to do a purge in the process....that was a disappointing purge I will say...

 Experimental lime pie, it turned out amazing but was disappointed by the two child sized finger marks through the top....

Finally got the cricut out and made something.  Teela's kindy class is learning about dinosaurs so I figured why not make a whole heap of dino's for them with the paper that I will never use.

 Instagram, decided to get my hipster on....

Ploughman's lunch, I love living close enough to Patton's which is a big butchery and green grocer but also has discount cheese and grocery items, always different stuff and if it wasn't for that place nice cheese would be a hardly ever item in this house.


The thirtieths....

Three layer Caramel mud cake with chocolate mousse cream and chocolate ganache.  Did I mention that I made this?  No, well I did not just a paper crafter, actually I used to do cakes for a business and I worked in a bakery so I have had some practice.

 

 The second cake for that weekend, three layer white chocolate mud cake with white choc ganache, this is my secret recipe, i have only ever given it out to one person and that is because she asked for it at a hens night after my one hundredth cocktail...  I made this one for my life long friend and best friend Lisa and her husband Nat we have known each other for ever, all went to school together, lived together and had children at the same time, it was always my pleasure to make them their favourite cake.

Rich chocolate cake with strawberries and whipped cream.

My husband turned thirty-one this year so we had a visit to our favourite restaurant ever Ahmets and then home with my family for coffee and cake.  I was such a good wife that I actually forgot that it was his birthday and organised a trip to a friends place so the cake was a 5.30 am number and  a five minute ice job, I LOVE this cake and my mum has been making it forever, one of those stand the test of time numbers.

Teela playing with Zoobs and made herself a microphone from them and tyre.  I am always amazed at how my children's brains and imaginations work and Teela has been blowing me out of the water with her creativity lately.

Fortnight in review....

Wow I really am slipping on this blog huh...
 So what have we been up to?

 Blocks, Teela has recently rediscovered building blocks and has been making quite a few castles, towers and dinosaurs.

 A trip to the grocery store and a bribe with the Clifford ride, I can remember when these things were 20c, sadly no more :(

 A few trips to daddy's work and some delicious coffees and hot chocolates for this cold weather we have been having.

The Rodz rock'n'roll festival.  This is highlight of the year for us living in the pine shire.  We are not to bothered by the bands or the carnival food but we are 100% there for the cars, sweet sweet car love.

The almighty SLR5000, my ultimate dream bogan car.  They sure aren't the prettiest car out there and they are certainly not the most rare or loved of the Australian muscle cars but they have always held a special place in my heart, I would give anything to own one, swoon....

 The thing that my kids look forward to the most at the car show, a ride on the dodgy carnival rides, again  another good behaviour bribe.

The unfortunate reality when you leave two under fives in a naughty mood in the TV room for some rest time alone.   Since this incidence the craft box is now located in a locked cupboard and the games and puzzles have been moved to the top of the linen cupboard. 

It is not an ideal situation and I hate that they sometimes do things like this, I hate it more when I can't get them to clean it up.  I wish I had the perfect system and routine in place to avoid messes like this but I am not super mum and I am not aiming to be, I have to wash and cook and clean and my kids can't and don't want to be with me all the time while I preform these menial tasks.  For the most part my kids are great, they have wonderful personalities, great manners and I love them dearly.  On the other hand they are stubborn and difficult and can be rather naughty, this was just one of those days when the naughty kicked in..
  

Mexican night...starring the famous chicken enchiladas.  I have not made this dish in almost thirteen years and my husband has heard about it a million times from myself and others, I finally caved and made a quick version of it, almost as good, so very close but nothing beats marinating chicken for 12 hours and fresh hand made tortillas.

 Pumpkin pie.  This is not an Australian dish at all and is something that I associate with Autumn, log fires and turkey.  It was a really nice dish not too sweet and with the perfect amount of spice.  My husband was not a fan and I don't think it is a dish I will make again in a hurry but it really was lovely and paired up with the right main meal and company I can see me using this recipe again.