Hello all. I'm moving house in less than a week. And of course, that means I simply HAVE to post an update on here rather than do any packing, sorting, cleaning, etc.

Its been a long while since I last updated. I had a lovely Christmas time and was thoroughly spoiled by everyone. My lovely other half bought me a candle-making set and whilst I haven't use it yet I'm really looking forward to trying it out! it came with one fragrance and some colours and there's 2KG of wax so that'll keep me busy when I get round to it!

We enjoyed making some Christmas decorations as well this year. We bought a really cheap Argos value tree, but we tried to liven it up as best as we could by making some of our own decorations and by buying a value pack of baubles from Argos which we sat down and decorated with pens and glitter paint and various things. And I bought some felt and made a couple of felt decorations. I'd post pictures but really, Christmas is well and truly over!

What I would like to share with you is the present I made for my OH's sister and her fiance. I really struggled to think of something for them, when I decided I'd like to get them monogrammed mugs with their intials on them. I looked at a few websites but I was low on time (and money), and needed something immediately. Then I stumbled upon a tutorial for making your own and I thought 'hmmm, hobbycraft isn't far away!' so I took a stroll down there and picked up everything I needed for very little money:


The first mistake I made was buying white transfer paper rather than black or graphite coloured transfer paper. So I used that old fashioned pencil tracing trick and made a square of graphite transfer paper by rubbing an artists graphite stick that I may have liberated from my GCSE art days and using that to get the fronts to transfer. I scoured the internet for various free fonts and chose a few and tested them out in word before choosing my favourite, which I printed out and transferred onto the mug:



This took a little while and I had to wash it off and do it again for one of them, but once I had these marks, it was time to use the special porcelaine pen to fill in the design! For a first attempt, it didn't come out too badly. A little wobbly, in future I will buy the thinner nib as this one was thick and a little hard to control:



These then went into the oven on a low heat for about 20 minutes which sets the paint and makes the mugs dishwasher safe. And looking entirely identical to the last pictures, here they are:


I then filled each one with some lindor truffles and wrapped them. They were apparently very well received by my 'sister-in-law' and her fiance so I'm glad about that! I'd definitely do it again, it was fun!

I made my own wrapping paper this year as well which everyone was really impressed by. Its funny how the simplest easiest things can really look impressive to others isn't it? I just bought a big pack of brown paper and a set of 4 Christmas-themed stamps off ebay and a pack of ink pads and got to it! And I bought some traditional brown luggage labels to make the gift tags, which worked nicely:


I got into a habit before Christmas of baking something for my co-workers for our Monday team meeting. They LOVED it, they especially loved it when I took cupcakes in in bakery boxes (again, it never fails to amaze me, what people are impressed by! I just bought them from a bakery for 20p each!). The carrot ones and black bottom ones when down a real treat!

Black bottomed cupcakes in their box!

Carrot cupcakes fresh out the oven. Such a delicious, moist receipe!


As I said at the start of the post, we're moving house. I've loved the flat, but some people at work have found out where I live, which is not that great for me. We're moving into a 2 bed terraced house with a garden, which is a huge step up from a 1 bed flat! Its a small house, but still. It needs a little bit of work, it needs to be redecorated and I need to make some curtains and things. Its a rental property but the estate agent thinks that not only will we be allowed to redecorate but the landlord might actually give us some money towards doing so. I am SO excited and have been picking colour schemes for days now. The only thing getting in the way is the dark blue carpet in the front room and my wish to have some pale green on the walls (all our front room furnishings such as cushions, throws, rug etc are green), but that will clash horribly with the carpet, which we can't do anything about. I guess I'll have to move the green rug to another room and start again with our front room furnishings. maybe a nice pale soft blue? Don't want anything to make it look too cold though!

Last thing I want to talk about is the fact that I've taken up knitting again. I found a local knitting group that hasn't been going for too long and first started going a couple of weeks ago and I love it. Its a small group but I've been having a lovely time, the ladies I've met there are really nice and its been great fun. I haven't done a lot of knitting outside of knitting club, but I haven't really been doing any crafting at all lately, been too busy!

This has been the most slap-dash post I've ever made, but really, I've been meaning to post up this stuff for weeks and weeks and I am aware that I can't pretend I don't have a LOT to crack on with today! Hope everyone is having a lovely weekend!

My blog is a bit of an 'all or nothing' venture of mine. It seems I do my crafting/baking/cooking in fits and starts.

Yesterday I made my first foray into the mysterious world of jam making. I've watched my mother make jam a few times and I've always wanted to make my own. When I was home in April, I managed to get my mother a Tefal Electric Jam Maker for half price, simply because the box was a bit battered, so she sent me her jam pan which was originally my grandmother's. That's perfect for me, the older a piece of kitchen equipment is, the better it is as far as I'm concerned. By the time the jam pan arrived we were right at the end of the fruit season so I didn't think I'd have time to make jam this year. Until I discovered Tesco were selling punnets of plums for 50p each! So I bought 4 and some sugar and a couple of cooking apples and decided to make jam!

I consulted a few different online recipes and decided to use equal quantities of sugar to plums as this seemed the be the general online consensus, any recipe that used more sugar than plums and people reported it being far too sweet. Earlier in the week I washed, halved an stoned all the plums and whacked them in the freezer as Monkey kept trying to convince me they would go mouldy if I didn't (unlikely as they were 'ripen at home' plums, but nevermind!).

Firstly, in went the plums into the pan with just under 500ml of water and two cooking apples, one I peeled and chopped, one I grated, I wasn't sure what to do so tried both. Here that is in the pan:


I cooked it down for about 30 mins until everything was soft and squidgy:


Then I put in the sugar. There was a LOT of sugar. This is the jam not long after the sugar was added:


I had to bring it up to the boil then keep testing it to see if it was set or not:


And this was the jam right before I bottled it up:


And this is it in massive 500ml kilner jars:


I think it might be too sweet. I was so scared that it wouldn't set that I think I overdid it and now its a very firm set jam, almost at that chewy stage.


But there was really only one way to know for sure how it tasted... try it out with something suitably delicious! So I made scones! I've tried to make scones a couple of times in my life and they've not worked out at all. Having a light hand and not touching things too much is something I am hopeless at. But I was browsing online the other weekend and found this recipe which I knew deserved a try. And you know what, it worked remarkably well!


We made 4 more than that but by the time I remembered I should take a photo, I had set up Monkey and I's afternoon tea up!



The scones and the jam were completely delicious! The recipe was so quick and easy (and messy, but the scones are in the oven just long enough to tidy up!), I know I'll be making them again and again and again.

As a final parting shot, here is my new Kenwood mixing up its first ever cupcake batter. The shape of things to come I hope!

No, don't be alarmed, I didn't have a baby, but I received a gift from my mother that is on a level with having the first child to me! Monkey and I had been looking for a hand mixer to make our cakes with, but we didn't quite expect to be getting this monster machine!

My mother has treated us to the Kenwood KM030 Titanium Chef Timer Mixer. Its INCREDIBLE. I'll start by saying that actually, all my life I lusted after a Kitchen Aid, and they are truly beautiful and iconic. However, being realistic, all the Kitchen Aid does is mix, it does not liquidise or process food so you need extra gadgets for that. And the Kitchen Aids are never as powerful as their Kenwood counterparts. And now I own my Kenwood, I appreciate it VERY much. I'm really impressed by its footprint actually, we only have a small kitchen and it doesn't take up as much room as I expected it to.

My mother came to Watford at the start of the month for a few days but it became clear that the mixer's box was far, far to big and heavy to walk home with, so she paid in store and they delivered it on Monday evening just gone. The box was MASSIVE:


(the sheer size of the box has been demonstrated here by Monkey's hand!)

Here is the mixer on our dining table. You can tell it to mix things for a set period of time and it will! It also counts how long you've been mixing something as well which is useful.

An up close shot!

It came with a really heavy glass liquidiser and a food processor with loads of blade attachments free! There's 4 different places you can plug various attachments into, like ice cream-makers, mills that can grind coffee, mincers, paster makers, its a pretty endless list. You can even buy an attachment that will sift your flour for you. How lazy do you need to be?!

I also got a balloon whisk, a flexi-beater, a K beater and a dough hook for all my mixing needs.

This answers all my kitchen gadget prayers really, couldn't be more pleased with a kitchen gadget if I tried!

Its a good job nobody reads this blog as I've somewhat neglected it!Since my last post a LOT has happened. My Mum came down to Watford to visit me and we had a glorious time, the highlight of which was Mum, Monkey and I enjoying afternoon tea at The Ritz! I ate SO MUCH FOOD it was all completely amazing. Totally worth the price tag. They keep bringing you more food if you let them (or if you're prepared to look like a real guzzler like me!). Also when my Mum was here we went to Canary Wharf and managed to score free goodies bags. I love a goodie bag!:

and the contents:


After my Mum left I started my new job and was only there about a week and a half before I had minor surgery which basically was successful. The day after my surgery my boyfriend and I went to look at a flat, the first we've ever viewed. We didn't like it, too overpriced and really small, you were paying for the postcode and nothing else. Then the same weekend we looked at 3 flats and ended up taking the last flat we saw! Finally, a flat of my own! It all happened so much quicker than we were expecting but it was the best amount of space we had seen and I still look at flats from time to time and I've basically never seen a better flat than ours. Hurrah! The move was extremely stressful as my body was not happy with me for having surgery. But we moved on August 1st and are enjoying being in our own place. Here are some pictures of it the day we got the keys, before we moved our stuff in (it looks very different now! A lot more furniture!):

The front room, which has a dining table and chairs in the bay window. Its a really brilliant sized room. The flat was furnished to a very basic level but we asked the landlord to remove most of the bits and bobs and moved our own stuff in. Looking at these pictures reminds me of how big the flat was till I went mad in Ikea!

The front room from the opposite corner. The closed door is our front door, it leads to a communal hallway so I don't mind the front door opening straight into our front room as at least that door doesn't open directly onto the street! We got rid of that tall shelf thing but kept the massive cupboard as its secretly a computer cupboard!

Into the hallway, on the right is our bedroom and on the left the hallway leads to the bathroom and kitchen.

The bedroom. We asked the landlord to store the bed and brought our own. We moved the entire room around and it looks really different now. What surprised us was when we viewed it, we thought the bedroom was small and the front room was huge, when we moved in we thought the front room wasn't as big as we first thought but the bedroom was massive. A hilarious tale!

Another view of the bedroom. The wardrobe is pulled quite far out as the landlord had everywhere cleaned and painted between the old tenants and us. We kept the wardrobe but moved it. Our bed goes against that wall now.

The rest of the hallway. We whacked a big Ikea Billy bookcase in there and also my Urban Outfitter mirrored pictures from a previous post!That 'light at the end of the tunnel' is our kitchen.

Bathroom. Quite possibly the worst picture I have ever taken! But hey, its a bathroom.

The hallway looking back up to the front room. There is no room for a fridge freezer in the kitchen so its tucked under the stairs for the flat above us in the hallway. We don't mind that at all, our kitchen is still bigger and better than any of the other flats we looked at, some of them were miserably small!

The kitchen! Has enough space to fit all my crazy gadgets, etc in. Yeah its not huge but as I said, significantly better than any other kitchen we saw!And not open plan with the front room so we can stick the washing machine on whenever we want and it doesn't affect our tv viewing!

The rest of the kitchen. We have a dishwasher, AMAZING! Also we have a fridge that we don't use there as well, its literally just for decoration! There wasn't much point asking the landlord to move it, we couldn't really do anything with that space anyway.

So, that's our flat. I should take pictures of it now but its perpetually a mess! We only just finished buying all the furniture and things we wanted and I've been crazy busy at work. I haven't even done any crafting lately! We really like our flat. It only has electric storage heating so I'm currently sat here feeling a bit cold, but nothing can be perfect. I fear we may need to move a lot quicker than we'd hoped because the flat is very, VERY close to my work and given what I do these days, thats a bit of a risk to me. If we could move this whole flat somewhere else though, I'd do it in a heartbeat (installing gas central heating on the way of course!). We had a disaster the other week though, we both got home from work to find our flat COVERED in dust. Mainly the kitchen and hallway but it really did get everywhere. The are ripping the basement flat below us apart and all the dust somehow got into our flat:

It got all over the surfaces and floor:

And it even got IN the cupboards, which was the most devastating part of it:


But our landlord is a nice person and offered us £100 for our troubles.

Finally, a picture from ages ago of me trying to make my lunch look like it walked straight out of a recipebook photoshoot. This is one of my favourite lunches, French Onion Soup, served with creme fraiche and chives and slices of cheese topped baguette. YUM!


And thats all for me for now!

Hello world. I quit my job on Friday and I have two weeks off. Not a lot of crafting has taken place though, I've been trying to battle through my to-do list of boring, grown up admin. Wow, being a grown up is no fun at all! Monkey has been referring to me as a 'WAG' as I basically stay at home and go shopping and do 'nothing'. I thought I'd really enjoy it, but I haven't. Well, I enjoyed making him dinner yesterday and I intend to do some baking today and tomorrow, but I'd rather be at work, in all honesty. Which I guess is the correct answer!

Anyway, two small reasons to post today. Firstly, my oldest friend (who is younger than me by about 2 months, I've just known her the longest out of everyone, thus she is my oldest friend) is getting married this year, which is terribly exciting! I got my wedding invitation a little while ago and although I did let her know via Facebook that I'd be going, etiquette dictates you should really RSVP in writing. So I whipped up a quick card to say 'absolutely I'd love to come!':


As you can see, card making is not really my forte (nothing is to be honest!), but I was fairly pleased with it. The butterfly is flocked and fuzzy, who doesn't like a bit of that?!

I am a member of Brand Alley who have discount sales on various things (I have not linked to a referral page although if you were interested in joining and were going to be kind enough to mention me when you sign up, please let me know and I'll get some sort of referral link, otherwise, have at it without me!). I've had mixed but mostly good service from them, occasionally something I've ordered couldn't be delivered, then I've had my money back and a voucher to say 'sorry', you can't really argue with that. Today, they have a Bombay Duck sale and I'm a big fan! They have this doormat for £10. They have others but they're far too girlie for Monkey to ever ok it. I think I could get away with this on (the others have ladies shoes on them. He's never going to be ok with that!). Do I buy it? Hmmm. We don't technically have a door to call our own, but one day we will! Oh yes, one day! I'll probably spend the rest of my day deliberating over it. Because that's the sort of thing you can get away with when you are off work and behaving like a desperate housewife, your big decisions in life extend to whether or not you should buy a doormat. I should enjoy this kind of mundane existence while it lasts.