apple mint salad

Fresh green salad with pistachios and apples with a lemon, mint & gin dressing — this is really good with leftover turkey. The original recipe calls for turkey, but this is a good green salad on its own and would be refreshing in the summer. I think next time I will try it with pink lady apples instead of granny smith.

merry christmas

I love this X so much. So clean and swoopy. Merry Christmas.

year of the snake

I've had a banquet sew-a-snake-kit in my sewing box for almost 2 years and this Christmas was the right time to make it. The scarf I was knitting for my son wasn't working out and I like to give one homemade thing — this was quick and pretty. I used all his favourite colours: orange, yellow, gold, brown, purple and navy. This year will be the year of the snake...the forecast is calm and bright (also kind of sexy) but we have to wait until February. I'd quite like to convert from Christmas to lunar new year.

This snake looked so pretty under the tree. I overheard Auggie showing it around his room. Then he gently broke the news to the snake that he preferred his new Brüder garbage truck (to the snake) and comforted it with a dish of water and the promise of a trip to the garbage dump. If you make homemade gifts, that might make you laugh :)

joulun sisustus

Christmas decor from Marimekko. Perfect colours for this time of year — even more when it's rainy and grey rather than white. They have a sweet Christmas stocking there, too.

felt & glass

Pretty felt ornament tutorial from the purl bee via pinterest. — we've had a few false starts making these for the tree. We begin, and then become distracted (by trucks and getting dinner ready respectively). However, we are very enthusiastic in our intentions... I think half of crafting is just the pleasure of imagining doing something anyway.

Update: we did make a couple and ^ this lovely one is by my niece, age 6.

This is the first year we've had glass ornaments on the tree for awhile. I like my son's tree decorating style — fit as many on each branch as you can. He likes to put them in pairs according to colour.

holiday stockings

Last year I made these oversize holiday stockings from the purl bee. The heels are turned as they are on a regular sock, but it is knit flat with bulky yarn. It's a very good project to try out sock knitting. I did one in the round, but I wouldn't recommend it. The seaming up the back gives the stocking extra structure and it looks better seamed.

baby pine trees

We got our tree last night. I don't really want to decorate it at all, it looks nice just plain in our living room. That's obviously not going to fly with the 3-year old set, though.  I have only just figured out why our trees weren't smelling like anything the last few years — we were picking small trees. I like small trees, but they don't have enough sap to smell like a tree, so we've switched back to the bigger ones.

auggie mini cards & tags

tag

I was doing some test images today for the auggie printables I made earlier this week — gift tags and mini class cards.

bright snowflakes

I put up a simple tutorial for paper snowflakes up on windy today. We had a lot of fun making these yesterday, as school was cancelled and we were footloose and fancy free.

hello, winter

A plate that came home from school this week (the only plate I ever wanted to hug) and a great advent calendar (free printable from mr printable) that my son would love to park a lot of cars around. I don't think I have the time to do it, though ‚ we picked up a playmobil one yesterday as a treat.

Lucky star necklace

Noodling around with lucky star necklaces and garlands with black and kraft paper strips ordered from the origami resource centre with knotted linen thread. These would be pretty at Christmas, too.

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