Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Everyone else has snow… but we have super-cool frost spikes!

Frost Spikes

It’s a day late….. but I wish you all a Happy New Year (if there is anyone still reading my muchly neglected blog, that is!).

I was talking to my lovely ever-so-far-away Jumbleymama friend today and she mentioned that she hadn’t seen the partial eclipse of the big Blue Moon on New Year’s Eve as it happened in the daytime in her neck of the woods. So Jumbleymama…. here is what we saw…

The full moon, with the eclipse just starting to start…

The eclipse at its peak (yes it was only a wee eclipse – 8%, but still cool to see)

(I used the good old trusty settings for the moonshots – Panasonic Lumix TZ5, 10x optical zoom, Standard setting with ISO 100, Shutter Speed 1/200, -2 ev)

And this is the sight that greeted us at dawn on New Year’s Day as we plucked up the courage to run the New Year through the house (it was very cold outside)… a beautiful moonset in a red morning sky. We’ve had a lot of “red sky at morning” days this past fortnight, the weather has been very cold and icy and frosty and snowy in Ireland (only not snowy here, of course, the sea air stops the snow… grrrr).

We had a white Christmas! No snow… it was ice… pure ice-rink quality ice, on Christmas morning it started to rain but it was so cold that the rain froze on contact with the ground so within minutes the frozen ground was slick and crazy slippy. Utter madness!

This is how cold it’s been, this icicle stayed on our swingset for a week!! Even in direct sunlight it didn’t melt, it finally fell off today, seems the temperatures crept over 0°C in the sun today, the shade is still covered in ice and frost.

Happy New Year everyone!!!!!!

This morning myself & Littlepixie attempted the mammoth task of restoring my desk area to normality again now that the gnomes are all finished :)

We had a massive stack of felt scraps to deal with, they were too small to be useful and the pile was too big to throw out! So I googled, and found this fun idea… and then we made these…

Cute eh? We also had lots of colouredy “wool” (the bright funky acrylic stuff) in our craft box and we located various bells, pine cones, buttons and beads to attach to the bottoms of them. I also sewed on a couple of adorable cupcake knitted embellishments I’d saved off an old babygro of LP’s, this was an ideal use for them! I reckon you’d pay a small fortune for such Christmas decorations in a craft fair, and these cost us zilch :)

And don’t worry, we haven’t left them outside, they are safe and dry inside and will be on our tree as soon as we put it up!

For The Horde!

The HPP household is now hooked on Klean Kanteens, our tap water tastes just staggeringly wonderful out of them, and our tap water is normally pretty yuck, so that’s saying something.

Mr.HPP’s new Kanteen arrived today and, good wife that I am, I busied myself about sewing him a wee holder for it. He plays World of Warcraft as a Horde character, who is just a gorgeous brute, as they tend to be :) And he graciously and subtly im’ed me a link to the Horde logo after he ordered the Kanteen, so I got the hint and here it is…. cool and horde-ly eh?

Cookies & pizzas

One of the quite splendid benefits of being a mammy is that Santa automagically adds you to the nice list. You see, we mammies are such a hard-working, self-sacrificing lot that we are above mere “naughty or nice” labels, so Santa, recognising this, adds us to the top of the nice list, and most importantly, doesn’t audit us, so in reality, we get away with a lot!

Like this book, which um, just may be falling into my Christmas Stocking this year… Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar! I ask you… Doesn’t it just scream “well behaved, nice, self-sacrificing, hard-working mammy” to you, I mean it’s a cookbook, it’s for the kitchen, see what a good mammy I am??? Look at these pics on flickr, hom nyom nyom nyom…. can’t wait (in a non-naughty way of course, it’s for the kitchen, people, just a cookbook, nothing to see here… move along)!

On an aside…. Bibble received her goodies from me so I can do the big reveal…. it’s a pizza :) I went back to basics and redesigned the pizza I originally made last year for Littlepixie. It had been too fiddley and pieces kept getting lost, so this time I sewed the tomato sauce & hummus layers onto the pizza sections. It comes in a handmade cardboard pizza box with 4 funky napkins (not pictured) and it has mushrooms, orange peppers, green peppers and some round red things that I liked the colour of, let’s say they’re vegan pepperoni, shall we?

Hours of fun and games :)

Tomorrow is the day that I shut up Littlepixieshoppe for the Christmas, there is still one custom slot remaining… go on, you know you want a babywearing gnome for your Christmas tree, they’re kitschy and cool!

On another aside… did you all notice the snow is back on my blog! Hooray… It’s almost Christmas!

Tomorrow is December and I will soon be shutting up Little Pixie Shoppe for at least a month, probably more. Littlepixie no longer naps so my sewing time is greatly reduced, but I’m very proud of her, she’s getting so big!! So I have decided to wrap up gnome production for the foreseeable future.

Before I close up the shop, I have put two custom slots in the shop for either a babywearing mama gnome keychain or Christmas decoration. If any of you fancy getting one as a special Christmas present for someone special or indeed for yourself, now’s your chance. The shop will be open till Friday, Christmas preparations will take up most of my time after that you see, we’ll be putting our tree up on Saturday so it’s all go from then Christmas-wise!

76 gnomes have passed through the virtual doors of Little Pixie Shoppe, isn’t that splendid? Suffice to say, I am utterly delighted that I was able to make so many, as they enabled me to send quite a pile of treasure to Barnardos! Here are a few of the mama gnomes in all their glorious colourfullness…

So, yes, if any of you want one, there are two custom slots in the shop….. quick run over and grab them before they’re gone :)

Onwards and upwards!

An accidental waaaay over-ordering of courgettes from Tesco’s (I asked for 4 courgettes, not realising that I had asked for 4 multipacks!) followed by the arrival of more courgettes the following day in our vegbox prompted me to hunt out the recipe I printed out last year for Zucchini Cake from the PPK.

The magimix made quick work of the courgettes, Littlepixie got busy mixing all the ingredients and I found our muffin tray! Along with using up my courgette stash the recipe also required chocolate chips, unusual thought I, but who am I to toy with the ppk? I poured them in lavishly and gleefully while Littlepixie stuck her hands into the mixture to fish them back out to scoff! Actually that’s one good thing about vegan baking, the absence of raw eggs means LP is pretty free to taste any stage of the mixing, and she does, especially if it involves chocolate!

We made one loaf & lots of muffins and ate them all. Very delicious! I think we could cut way back on the sugar in them, I just need to rope my brain in and figure out what to put in instead. I still have more courgettes left over, methinks I might make some more this weekend. Has to be done, you know :)

The Pixie Bag

Today was wet and rainy and dull and stormy but the postie brightened up my day with a splendid parcel containing two exciting things from my good friend Bibble! The first was for Littlepixie – a mermaid & pink cord SSC for carrying her dolls, she absolutely loves it! In exchange for this carrier I made a special felt food gift for Bibble’s daughter which I will show you all after she receives it (can’t spoil the surprise!).

And the second goodie was my new bag, I have been soooo looking forward to this bag. I was able to ask for as many pockets as I wanted (I love pockets!) and it is just perfect. It’s so hard to find the exact right bag but methinks this is it! Some pictures….

The front:

Shall we count the pockets? Here goes…

The back has a velcro pocket (1) – Continue Reading »

After reading about the wonders of them for ages, we can finally get the Klean Kanteens in Ireland, yay! So I got one for Littlepixie, and she absolutely loves it. LP informed me earlier today that it was very chilly on her hands, and that it needed a red cover with a purple flower. So I got out the needle, thread & felt (of course) then a little snip here, a bit of blanket-stitching there, a flower here, some more stitching there et voila…. a snuggly cover for the Kanteen. Marvellous :)

kleenkanteen

Just wishing my favourite little pixie a big huge “Happy Birthday”!! She’s 3 already, I can hardly believe it!

birthdaycake

Cake was our good old reliable – vegan victoria sponge – filled with strawberry jam, lashings of coconut cream, sprinklings of cocoa powder and dottings of chocolate buttons – so, so, so very delicious! Go on, make some – I command it!

Older Posts »