Slated.

Just a quick one this time.  It's all about table mats.
We've wanted some slate table mats for ages.  They tend to go for about £15-20 for 4-6 placemats.  (In fact, I've just checked and it seems to be £20 for 4 for the bottom-of-the-range)
So, we figured we could do better.
Trip to Build Base (I was actually looking for an architectural salvage yard, but found BuildBase instead, and they did reclaimed slates)
Buy 20 slates for 62p each (and have an extra 5 thrown in for free, because some are a bit damaged)
Go to Dunelm Mill and buy a fleece blanket for £4.99
Get home and chop the blanket into slate size squares (it's a bit tricky, because fleece is a bit of an awkward fabric to work with)
Following the example of the Nester, who seems to have a fascination with glue guns that verges on fetish, hot glue the fleece to the slates.
Hey presto, you've got yourself a whole bunch of tablemats for less than £1 each (including slate, fleece, and glue for glue gun)
They are pretty heavy, which makes carrying them all at once a good workout.
The only down side is that the slate 'splinters' easily, so we have lots of shards on our table cloth.  However, I reckon this would be solved by varnishing them, which I may or may not get around to doing one day.

A quiet Christmas Eve?

So, the presents are wrapped, the mince pie and carrots are out for Santa and co., and everyone's looking forward to a chilled evening, after putting the boy to bed.
"Where's the stocking?" seems like such an innocent question to throw into the ether.  But after a hasty search results in no stocking, a full scale search and rescue effort is mounted.  Again, no joy.  Not so much as an old sock.  Solution?  Well, make one of course.

Bits:

Fabric (in this case, red stuff from a bean bag (yeah, I do seem to make loads...) for my sis-in-law) for the stocking itself.
Some white felt/fleece (in my case, it involved butchering a pair of white stockings (no, they wouldn't have worked for Santa's offerings!) that we'd bought the boy last year for his role of '7th sheep' in the nativity, only for him to refuse to take part)
Some black felt/fleece (as it happens, we had some lying about from the table mats - a different post altogether...)
Thread
Sewing machine (if you don't fancy doing it by hand, that is)
Fabric glue.


Grab a piece of fabric that's sort of squarish, and sketch a stocking shape on it that you're vaguely happy with. 
Cut this out. 
Use this as a template to make the other half (though remember that if you've chosen a fabric with a 'front' and a 'back', you'll need to make sure that you end up with both the 'fronts' on the outside of your stocking (unless the look you're going for is 'weird') and this will require you to cut the shapes out the right way round!
Cut the other half out (if you ignored my advice above, and now discover you have a 'front' and a 'back' that stick together, try again!)

Hem the tops of your stockings.  This will just mean that there's no taggy bits on the top - everywhere else will take care of itself.
Put them front to front (maybe I should mention at this point that I chose a fabric that didn't really have a discernible front and back, so less care was needed...)
Sew them up, using your sewing machine (or your mother, or whatever works best, really)

Turn your stocking inside out.  It should now be neat and tidy.
Next, cut out some bits of your white fabric (felt would be best, if you want to avoid butchering things) into circles.  One big for a snowman's body, one smaller for his head, and then a whole load of small ones for snow.

Glue all these onto the stocking, then cut out detail bits from the black fleece.  I went for a top hat, three buttons, a nose and some fluff for his pupils.
I didn't mention the blue fabric earlier did I?  No, that's because this was the point in the operation when I realised I needed it, so I figured you didn't need to know in advance either.  Now, I was a little bit shocking here in choosing my fabric donor.  I went to the cupboard where we keep his too-small clothes, found a blue polo shirt from his school uniform and, where there's a double layer of fabric at the top of the back, I cut out two small circles from the inside of the polo shirt.  No-one will ever know...  These were also glued to the snowman, along with the black bits.
Next, stop at the top of the stairs for an impromptu photo shoot with your stocking.

 Finally, hang the stocking up on the fireplace.  Yes, that is a real fire - I don't think my camera phone has really done it justice.  That and the fact that the wood's a bit damp...

Of course, you could add more decoration, trees, stars, angels and the like.  In fact, if you were talented, you could probably go the whole hog and hot glue a felt nativity onto it.  But that's out of my league :)
You can now enjoy the rest of your Christmas eve in peace.  (It took just over an hour, if you're wondering.)

Rex.

Well, last year it was a pirate cake. This year he announced that he wanted a dinosaur cake. Specifically, Rex from Toy Story.
So here's a little outline of how it went. First, bake a cake in a sort of A4 sized tin. Just did an all-in-one sponge myself (Delia's, if you must know...) for this purpose. Then, draw a template on a bit of A4 paper. Look at the template, appear shocked at your own lack of artistic prowess, get another piece of A4 and try again. Finally, after a few tweaks, and some internet based research, you'll have a template you can show in public. Place this on top of the cake. Sorry this first photo's upside-down. Wasn't really thinking at the time.

Next, get a sharp (and, ideally, quite narrow) knife and start cutting out the template. You'll notice that the tail on the template is somewhat foreshortened. This is because I was intending to salvage a bit of cake from the offcuts to form into a tail. In fact, in this second picture, you can see the gap where the tail has been taken from. If I was thinking, I'd have cut the tail the other way, so that it was the same way up as the body. But I wasn't, so it wasn't...
When you've finished that part of the operation, you'll hopefully have something that looks like a cross between a dinosaur and a lizard who's shed its tail. I have to confess I didn't really try to make 'hands' for Rex's front limbs. Neither the knife nor the cake looked like they were going to be up to that sort of detail.
It's now ready to be transferred to its final resting place. In this case, a chopping board covered in tinfoil. Classy stuff. At this point, add the tail. (see - it's the wrong way up...)This is the fun bit. Make some green icing. Now, I looked at the green colouring and thought to myself that it would be pretty easy to get it to Rex-green. However, I ended up emptying the bottle into the icing and it still wasn't green enough. I tried a few drops first, then a lid full, then another, then just tipped the remains of the bottle in. Still ended up with a bit of an insipid outcome. Hey ho.
Start slopping the icing onto the cake in vast swathes. It's not exactly for the faint-hearted, this cake. Obviously, at this point it would be a shame to find out that you've not made enough icing, as colour matching is notoriously difficult at such times. I went the other way and hopelessly over catered. Thankfully, one of the birthday party activities was cake decorating, so it didn't all go to waste.
Once you've finished off the icing all over bit, add some detail. This is another stage where my lack of artistic finesse worked against me, but I think that you can probably get the general impression that it's supposed to be a dinosaur. If you're wondering what on earth is going on with the '4' in the top right, it's because Joshua doesn't actually like icing (ironic, I have to admit) and so asked for a bit without icing. I didn't really want a 'bare' bit of dinosaur, so opted for creating a '4' out of off cuts, and holding it together with a bunch of skewers.
And there you have it. A Rex cake. In fact, one of the kiddies said, as I put the cake down, 'it's a dinosaur' (cue sigh of relief from me). Another kid responded, "it's Rex" (cue declarations of undying love from me!). Top of the class boy, well done.


As it happens, it was a year ago today that I wrote,
"I'm seriously considering starting a blog called 'man made' to start to try and balance the approximately 40 billion blogs out there that are craft by women for women - or at least with the assumption that only women will be interested :)

Sadly, if I did start such a blog, I think it would only be read by women..."

Here it is :o)