tiny happy

It rains, then it rains some more. Actually, it's very welcome, because we were all beginning to worry about drought. And it means that we can spend a cosy day inside with the radio playing and steam on the windows. 

I wanted the children to help me with some holiday baking. They were enthusiastic at the start, but then disappeared until the cake and biscuits were finished. Ah well, that's fair enough. I made some small packages of sweet things to give to their swimming teacher, and assorted aunts and uncles. 

The apricot balls are a bit of a favourite and they are gluten and dairy free, too. I used this recipe (from years ago on the blog! What a handy catalogue it is.) And the cookies are these ones which are also favourites. I've discovered that if you beat the egg-mixture part of the recipe with an electric beater, the cookies get that shiny crackled texture on the outside. I chopped up a block of extra-dark chocolate to put inside them. I last blogged about them back here in March.

I hope that you have a lovely weekend ahead. We're heading out of town for a few days to stay with friends by a beach. See you next week! 

I've been thinking about small gifts this week- things to make for the neighbours and teachers and others we know for Christmas. I'm thinking about making chocolatey things like fudge and truffles because, well, I don't think you can ever have enough chocolate.

The children have had such great teachers at school this year. They seem to be truly sad to have their last day of term today. I'm especially grateful to Keira's teacher who has made her first year at school so easy and happy. These are some small gifts I made for the teachers: zip-cases from fabrics the kids chose for them, which I've filled up with soaps from this local shop. Easy. 

My project this week was to make some clothes for Arlo to wear this summer. So far I've made a few pairs of these long shorts/short longs (which are they?) which he seems to like wearing. To sew these, I used my own simple pattern that I've been adapting a little every year since he was a baby. It's a pretty simple one, with lined patch pockets on the front, with lots of room for bits of lego and stones, etc.

His favourite pair are the ones with robot-pockets, of course. It's Japanese linen I found on etsy. Where would we be without those great Japanese prints? Next up, a shirt. I'm a little nervous about that.

Thank you for your kind support over the weekend with regards to my table at the Auckland Art and Craft Fair. It was an amazing event, and I loved getting to meet blog readers and fellow crafters in person. So, thank you for coming and visiting me, if you did. It was very nice to make your acquaintance.

One of the highlights for me was getting to see my fellow NZ craft-blogger friends, including Heleen, Ellie, Jenny and Louana . And, shopping of course. I bought some Christmas presents, as well as some decorations for our tree this year (they are pictured above, made by the sweet Flossy's Fancy.) And I was able to meet Barb and Isaac of Spirocreations, after admiring their handmade shoes for a while on etsy. So that was pretty great. They have recently arrived in NZ from Winnipeg, Canada, and make beautiful leather goods. We did a trade, and I scored three little keepsake bags. I had a feeling that my kids would be into them and I was right about that. They are heavily obsessed with rocks and stones and have been buying crystals, etc from markets for a couple of years now. They also have an extensive collection of other natural artifacts, such as shark's teeth and sea urchins and shells. So these pouches are perfect for carrying such things around every day. (And I think my pouch makes a cool grown-up necklace.) 

I hope you had a good weekend. See you again tomorrow.

Did you know that the collective noun for jackrabbits is 'husk'? A husk of jackrabbits. You could also say a wrack of rabbits (I'm sure some farmers would agree) or a down of rabbits or a trace. They all sound quite fitting to me. 

Here are some long-eared rabbits that I have made for my stall at the Auckland Fair tomorrow. They are both machine and hand-sewn, and made from thick, vintage, cotton velveteen and other old fabrics. I think there's something old-fashioned and slightly gothic about them, but I'm okay with that.

If you're going to be in Auckland-town tomorrow, I'd love to meet you so please come and say hi. It looks like there will be lots of lovely stuff on display and for sale at the fair- with free gift wrapping too. Should be a good adventure.

I hope you have a lovely weekend, wherever you are. 

p.s. This is my favourite song about rabbits.

We have a climbing rose bush in our back garden, I think it's a Cecile Brunner. It's growing quickly and had completely covered the garden shed, so I cut it back this morning, and now there's a jug filled with roses on my desk. Very nice.

I've made these little pins as a last-minute project for my stall at the Auckland Art and Craft Fair this Saturday. I had some clay to use up, and wanted something small for my table. I made them from oven-bake clay and decorative paper, and coated the finished pins with several layers of mod-podge varnish. Some of the papers were from old magazines. The folksy illustrations came from a second-hand that book the children loved to death when they were babies, and I saved a few of the pages because they were just so beautiful. I think the name of the book is 'The Little Wooden Farmer' by Alice Dagliesh and the illustrations are by Anita Lobel. Actually, I think the book would make a good Christmas gift for my little neices, so I will try and track it down again.

In other news, I went to see Rhys Darby live the other night, and he was amazingly funny and clever. If he comes to your town, you must go along. You won't regret it.

I made these simple paper globe decorations to attach to some gifts I was wrapping this week. They were pretty fun to make, and yet another way (a bit like the notebooks) to use up some of my paper collection. A double-win. I cut up some old Christmas cards and also, the pages of a black-and-white book about fancy flower arrangements that had come apart. But after a bit of experimentation, I found it was best to stick to one weight of paper for each ornament- so the 'pages' of the globes are evenly balanced.

Do you want to make some too? There are a few tutorials online, (like this and this) but here is a quick description of how I made them. 

1. Trace around a jar or bottle to make a circle template. Mine was about 2.5" in diameter. Then use your template to cut 12 circles from some decorative paper. You could use the pages from an old book, sheet music, kraft paper, junk mail, old maps or cards, etc.

2. Fold each circle in half and join them all together by sewing down the fold line with your sewing machine (or you could staple down the fold line a few times.)

3. Place a small blob of glue (or glue-dots that you use in photo albums) about a third of the way down one of the circle edges, and attach the adjacent circle to the glue. Then, on the next circle, place the glue at about a third of the way towards the bottom of the circle's edge and attach to the next 'page'. 

4. Continue in this way until all of the 'pages' are connected in an accordian-style fashion. Then you can thread a needle with some embroidery thread or twine and thread it through the top of the globe to make a hanging loop.

Hope you are having a good Wednesday. I need to go and make some more of these globes- they're strangely addictive.

A while ago, at our local recycling centre, I came across an old ring-binder folder filled with papers and cards. Only two pages inside had been used. On one was written 'tomato crop report, 1945' and on the other, a half-written sponge cake recipe.

I had to take the folder home, and decided to re-use the papers to make some notebooks. I used the collages I did the other day to make the notebook covers, and then just trimmed and folded lots of different kinds of paper to make the pages. I used my sewing machine and an industrial-sized needle to sew the pages together. Easy peasy.

The notebooks were a fun project on many levels, (I love cutting and matching papers- hmm, a closet scrapbooker perhaps?) not least because I could use up all sorts of favourite bits and pieces that were cluttering up my workroom. I used plain white paper for most of the pages, with offcuts of graph paper, fallen-out pages from old books, maps and drawing paper. I think they would make good Christmas gifts, too. Might be handy for jotting down shopping lists and stray poems.

When we first moved into this house a few months ago, my friend Jenny was visiting and pointed out that we had an upturned sink buried in our garden. I'd seen the base of it poking out amongst some weeds, but never realised that's what it was. And then it stayed there for quite some time until I could successfully cajole Tom to move it for me (it was heavy and housed a colony of unusual-looking spiders). Anyway, one evening after a couple of glasses of wine he agreed to let me 'help' drag it out of the dirt and set it up as a planter box (my idea was to place it outside the kitchen window but, on account of its weight, we decided that one metre away from where we found it would be fine.)

So now I have a beautiful antique concrete sink planter-box with herbs and flowers growing inside. I planted some miniature sweet peas inside, so am interested to see what they will be like when in flower.

Also pictured above: strawberries for pudding picked from outside (my current favourite food) and a stack of finished needlebooks. That's what I've been making lately with my small embroideries. I'm getting ready to have a stall here at the Auckland Art and Craft Fair on December 11th. But a fair bit more work will be required this weekend. 

Hope you have a good one, blog-readers!

I went out walking early this morning, and this is what I found, growing wild. Buds and tendrils and leaves.