A bowl full of lemons.: Home organization 101...

A bowl full of lemons.: Home organization 101...: The kids are in school and the house is a mess!  Sound familiar?   Its been almost 2 years since I created my 21 day challenge , so I w...

I made a top!

Let me start off by saying I am not a seamstress by any measure. My entire history of sewing consists of a variety of Barbie clothes, a tissue box cover in the Junior School and an apron. So saying I'm pretty damn chuffed with myself is an understatement.

I started off with the overgarment drafting tutorial by BurdaStyle with the intention of making a hoodie. Fearing the worst, I decided to "try it out" on some R15/m (about...1.2 pounds per metre) fabric I had lying around. Unfortunately said fabric turned out to be stretchy (or knit, as I know now), which complicated matters.

After basting it together (yay I knew my Gr.7 needlework skills would be up to good use), I started... modifying, as I ALWAYS do. Luckily in this case it all worked out in the end.

I did however cut the fabric of the body wrong, so the stretch goes vertical instead of horizontal, the colour is unfortunately similar to that of jeans and I'm still contemplating whether to add embroidery somewhere to it or not.

Project Run and Play: Time to Vote! Week #1--Circle Skirt Pattern Remix...

Yes! I managed to catch the start of Run and Play this season.

Project Run and Play: Time to Vote! Week #1--Circle Skirt Pattern Remix...: It's time to vote!!!!!  There are 8 contestants so make sure you scroll all the way down to see all of their designs.  The poll is in the l...

Shabby Chic Cabinet

[Forgive the quality of the photos, my computer crashed and this one only has Paint.]

So my husband and I recently moved house (again), hopefully for the last time in a looong while. For the first time we're not renting, so I can actually DO something to the place.

I'll be adding some photos on here as we make changes, but first up, something small!

A while ago we bought a set of bedside tables from a second-hand shop with the intention of repainting them to match my room. Sadly I never got around to it and by now I had already decided that I dislike their shape as well as their colour.



I eventually found perfect ones to replace them and decided to redo one of them as a bathroom cabinet.

First, I sanded the whole thing down. I didn't try remove the paint except on the corners.

Then I painted the whole thing with a light grey paint that I had a sample of (for my waaalls!)

After that dried I sanded it down lately. Then I diluted some white wall paint about 50/50 and painted over the grey. With both the grey and the white I tried to keep my brush strokes in the same direction, in an attempt to fake some wood grain.

After the white had dried a -little- a took a cloth and wiped it off, in areas where the paint was still too wet (and thus wiped off completely) I just repainted and waited.

I decided to varnish the end product, even though the paint I used didn't really need it. I wouldn't do it again, the varnish was horrible to work with (being non-water based) and it added a brownish tint to the corners.

Here's the end product:

Lasagne Cupcakes

"Holy smokes, batman!" says all twelve of you, "Two posts in one day?!"

I've been meaning to make this post for a while now, but these things are impossible to get nice looking photos of. They inevitably look like... cheese blobs. What they are, is pure brilliance! (I'm allowed to say that because it wasn't my idea!)

Using the No 1 Best Lasagne Recipe (they really aren't kidding), instead of layering it in a lasagna dish, I layered it in a muffin tray. For the pasta, I used home-made pasta (Flour, Salt, Eggs) and pressed out little circles with a cookie cutter. You want to cut your circles that are about the size of the TOP of the muffin trays, allowing it to fold up the sides, thus keeping your layers together.

As for the layering, I didn't follow the exact layering, I just add stuff as I feel like it. I used about three pasta circles for each "cupcake".

The nice thing about it is, if you have picky dinner guests, you can make three different fillings (beef, chicken, vegetarian) and just layer it differently for each guest!

Cupcake Swap!

So I entered a Cupcake Swap on my favourite site, Crafster. The aim of the game is, you get given a swap partner and the both you craft cupcake-themed items and mail it to one another.

Completely by chance, Urban Threads happened to have a special on cupcake themed embroidery patterns, AT THE EXACT SAME TIME! Coincidence?! ...probably.



After splashing out horrendously I decided that I was going to make an apron. Mostly because I know how to make aprons. I also decided to make a matching dishcloth and due to the fact that half of my baking episodes consist of going "where the hell is the dishcloth", I decided to velcro the dishcloth to the apron.

As you can see from the top image, I also added a cupcake pincushion (which my husband says looks more "muffin-like" and little cupcake notebook (which I didn't make).

Surprisingly our postal service even managed to get it all the way to Canada!

Soap.. at last I have attempted it!

So after perving (almost literally) over the wonderful soaps I've seen the people on Crafster make for months, I've at last tried my hand at it. Now before you get excited, it's only Melt-and-Pour soap, I'm still girding my loins for lye (and searching for lard).

The first step was of course trying to get my hands on supplies. Which is pretty much the first step of ANY craft in South Africa, other than scrapbooking. Eventually after much searching, I found a South African site (Fun With Soap) that sold the stuff. Yay! I ordered my box of supplies and a couple of weeks later (thank you SA Postal) my box arrived, though it looked like someone had kicked it around a bit, it'd come open and a bunch of the stuff inside had leaked (thank you SA Postal, again).

The first soap is a Brown Sugar and Vanilla Soap (with added Vitamin E).


The second soap is a Lavender and Olive Oil Soap. The flowers were supposed to be suspended, not floating on top, but oh well.

Now I just have to find people to test.. I mean gift them to.