Cook Clean Craft: December 2010

2010: What a Year!

The year is fast drawing to a close, and what a year it’s been! My life looks so different from 12 months ago. My family has grown with the addition of our adorable baby girl, and I entered the fun world of blogging. I’m loving all the changes life has brought me this year!

Looking over my blog this year, here are some of my favourite posts:

Cook

I’ve enjoyed sharing some family favourite recipes (my comfort food):

Apple and Cinnamon Pancakes

Clean

My three favourite cleaning posts:

10 Tips for Clean as You Go Cooking

5 Cleaning Tasks Before Going on Holiday

Kitchen Cleaning Confessional

Craft

The tutorials were the most time-consuming, but I love sharing them with you. Here are my two favourites:

My favourite craft project without a tutorial (if I had to pick just one) was:

My son’s big boy bed quilt cover!

Thank you to all the people who have stopped by my blog this year, especially the people who followed or subscribed, and the people who left comments. You all bring a smile to my face!!

Happy New Year!!!

PS. I hope everyone who celebrates it had a great Christmas. I never got around to wishing you all Merry Christmas. I’ll try harder next year…

Christmas Fruit Cake

I've returned to the world of baking this week. I've found it keeps my son (22 months old) entertained and gives me a chance to do something I enjoy (to help me keep me sane with 2 kids under 2). One of the first things on my list was my traditional Christmas cake. I'm not always a big fan of fruit cakes, but for some reason, I love it at Christmas time. It also doubles as my Christmas pudding - I heat it up in the microwave and serve it with custard. Yum!

The recipe is adapted from Nigella Lawson's in How to be a Domestic Goddess. Get the full recipe here:

When I was growing up, we always used to have cheap plastic stockings that always ripped apart. When I caught the sewing bug, I decided to make Christmas Stockings for our kids.While looking for fabric, I spotted this gorgeous Christmas print. I liked it so much I bought the remainder of the bolt. It was too cute to cut up for stockings, so I made "Santa sacks" instead.

No time (or photos) for a detailed tutorial, but here's a quick rundown of what I did.
1. I cut the Christmas fabric to size (on a fold to minimise sewing!). I then cut a 10cm (4 inch) strip of fleece to use as the cuff.

2. I sewed the fleece onto the fabric, right sides together (I actually just used my overlocker/serger, but sewing machine would work just as well).
3. I then sewed (serged) across the bottom and up the side of my sack.
4. I folded over and used a blind-hem stitch to finish off the top of the cuff.
5. Finally, I cut letters out of felt and glued them to the cuff. (I probably should have appliqued them before I sewed the sack together - might do that one day if the letters fall off - or just glue them back on...)

After making two nice big sacks, I had a little bit of fabric leftover, so Mum and Dad got little sacks as well.

Maybe Santa will bring us a little treat as well. I swear we've (mostly) been good!

Nursery Rhyme for Crafters

Curly locks, curly locks, will thou be mine?
Thou shall not wash dishes, nor yet feed the swine,
But sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam,
And feed upon strawberries, sugar, and cream!

We listen to a lot of nursery rhymes in this house (thanks to an ABC double CD of 200 of them), and this one always captures my attention. If only someone would sing this to me!

Unfortunately, I have dead-straight hair, but as all good blog posts need a photo, here's a flashback to my perm days in high school. I think this was Year 10, so I would have been 15 (let's not discuss what year that was).