Busy bees

I have dusted off the paintbrushes this week, I started off trying Anna Maria Horners silhouette idea, I just tried one as a tester but it worked quite well and I see more being made soon...

I also got BabyEbi this unpainted jigsaw and decided to paint it myself since it looked a bit too detailed for him to try his hand at it - took me three nights, bit of a fiddle but enjoyable, there is something very relaxing about painting especially when there isn't a little person around to help! So, that is all finished and ready to be wrapped....

Then today we made some salt dough ornaments there seem to be several variations on the recipe, I used

2 cups flour

1/2 cup salt

about 3/4 cup warm water

once we had cut out the shapes using cookie cutters, I popped them into the microwave and cooked on high for about 4 minutes - I think you need to play around with this, it will depend how many cookies you are 'baking' you can see when they have dried out and become hard. Once they were dry we cleaned up and let them cool then got the paint out. We just painted a base coat and left that to dry whilst we had lunch and nap time then with new energy we decorated with glitter glue, he spent a lot of time working on the green Christmas tree, he says that it is a present for Baa-chan (his Japanese Grandmother). So tomorrow we will find some pretty ribbon out of my stash, which grew considerably when I was in the UK because my friend Shirley had 2 big boxes full of ribbons (there is a ribbon factory in my hometown and she knows someone who works there) and she let me have the pick of what I wanted - ohhh like a kid in a candy shop!!

Baa-chans present

My favourite

I think that is it for the painting, I have to stay in tomorrow because......my new sewing machine is being delivered, sometime. Not that I am allowed to touch it until my birthday, that is going to kill me, but I have several projects planned and I can see the next week I will be reading the manual (not usually my kind of thing but that is all hubby will allow me to do!) and cutting out my projects so I can get sewing as soon as I can get it out of the box. I have this really cute horse material that I want to make a bag with and a Christmas present or two to make and Meg's reading pillow, I bought the pattern but I am a bit scared of the trimming idea - I'm sure it can't be that hard.... and I also have a load of new babies to make pressies for, can't wait, want that sewing machine NOW!!