More Button Love!

I'm in LOVE with buttons at the moment.  The possibilities are endless!  Here's some inspiration for you...

Lots of ideas for buttons on cards...

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Beautiful button embroidery to swoon over...

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 Button bobby-pins...I'm definately making some of these!

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Button bracelets...yep, I've gotta make these too!

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 Button paperclips...CUTE.

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Button Initials

Remember the white buttons and pink paper from last post?  I used them to make a button initial for friends who are having their baby girl's naming day ceremony soon.

I arranged the buttons and then stuck them down with clear glue onto heavy scrapbooking paper before whacking the lot into a frame.  The button-sticking part was completely painful but the end result was worth it.  I don't have a photo, but I also printed out a card with the event, the baby's name and the date which I mounted onto matching patterned paper and stuck onto the back.  Some of the buttons are newish ones of mine but most are from the big stash of old buttons from the button drawers that used to belong to my hubby's grandma. 

There are some lovely button letters out there in internet-land.  Inspiration from here, here and here.

Button Stash!

Check out my button stash...

This set of drawers originally belonged to my hubby's grandma.  When they came to me, the casing around the drawers was a funny brown colour with big marks all over it from where other things had been sitting.  I sanded it all back and resprayed it with red enamel.  I sorted all the buttons into colour groups - there are some amazing old buttons in there!

I love my button drawers!  I sorted some of my own buttons into them too but unfortunately (or not!) I have waaaay too many buttons to fit them all in.  I shall need to find some other way of storing my extra buttons - I am thinking, a big glass jar!

Also, do you see the white buttons and the pink paper in the first picture?  I am doing something with those.  Stay tuned!

Onion skin dyed eggs for Easter

Miss Seven and I had a fab time last night dying blown eggs with onion skins.  I have been wanting to try this technique for years.  We stayed up a bit late (which was very exciting for Miss Seven), ate delicious choccy eggs and watched movies while we worked!  I only had six eggs to blow and one broke so we ended up with five.  I'm glad I didn't have more than that 'cause I just about blew the top of my head off trying to get the eggs out of their shells through the tiny holes!

For the dying -  collect as many onion skins (the dry brown part) as you can and lay them on a piece of cloth (we used the cheap homebrand version of chux superwipes), then lay leaves, flowers, fern fronds etc on the skins THEN lay your egg (blown or not) on top.  Wrap the whole thing so the flowers and leaves are closest to the egg's shell and the onion skins wrap around the shell entirely and then your cloth wraps around THAT....yes?  Secure it all with rubber bands then  your eggs need to spend half an hour in water at boiling point.  Take them out, allow them to cool and then unwrap and marvel at the beautiful patterns left on your eggs!

You can rub a little oil into them to really bring out the colour and make them shine.  Here are ours:

This is my fave one...it has a clover flower straight out of our lawn on it.

Then you can do what we did...and have scrambled eggs for brekky the next day :)  YUM!

Hooray, crochet! Cute knotted headband...

This very clever, pretty-haired lady made an awesome knotted headband from simple crochet chain stitch!  Look!

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She has an excellent tutorial you should check out.  In fact, she has quite a few!  I'm going to see if I can make one like this as well.  (It's an excellent excuse to purchase a hot glue gun, yes?)

Are you going to make one too?

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Good one, Cami, I think you started a trend.

Family Rules

I got a new printer...hooray!  I've been without one for so long that it's really quite a novelty to have one now.


To celebrate I did a print to display in our living area..."Family Rules".  Miss Seven helped lots - we looked on etsy at all the beautiful family rules prints and wrote down the "rules" we liked the best.  We changed some and added others, then had some fun arranging fonts and colours...printed, threw it in a frame and voila!  Miss Seven styled the final product with melty-bead shapes.  Nice.

Lovely Links

There is a lot of lovely stuff out there in internetland..isn't there?

Here are some lovely things I've found lately...

 
Beautiful vintagey goodness and pretty crochet at MemeRose

 
Divine paper projects, scrap-happiness and photospiration at Dear Lizzy

Lots and lots of swedish prettiness in a language I can't read (Google Translate is so much fun to use) at Mokkasin

I hope you enjoy discovering them for yourself!

Xx

Paradise

I love hearing a song and imagining what the clip will be like.  I always get a certain idea about how it will be and then I'll actually watch the clip and my ideas will get totally blown out of the water!  This clip was no exception.



I mean...elephant suits?  Who'd have thought?

New Crochet Project

Here's my latest crochet project...a blankie for the Little Mister!  I think it looks suitably boy-ish (rather than baby-ish) and I can't wait til it's complete!  I'm finding it much easier to crochet row after row than it was to join squares like I did for Miss Seven's (Six at the time) beautiful granny square blanket.

This one is the Larksfoot pattern by Pip from Meet Me At Mikes.  Thanks, Pip!  You're clever!!

It's an exceptionally easy pattern to follow and seems to be making up as quick as a wink.  Which is lucky because I only seem to have winks of time to myself lately.  The yarn came from Spotlight's sale last year - and also lucky for me, the colours match the vintage train wallpaper prints which hang in the Little Mister's room.  Nice!

Who would you invite?

Are you up for a game?

If you could invite five people (living or dead, real or fictional) to dinner, who would they be?

The Dinner Party by Jules Alexandre Grun

I would choose...

Sir David Attenborough He would have so many interesting stories to tell!  Plus I know my daughter would drag out all her wildlife books and ask him dozens of questions...I hope he likes kids as much as animals!

Diana, Princess of Wales I just know she'd be lovely, don't you think?  And just imagine her stories!

Jamie Oliver He always seems to be up for a get-together...perhaps I could rope him into helping with dinner?  I hope he brings some free range meat and eggs to use - they'll go well with my garden fresh veg.

the fourth Doctor Who He holds a special spot in my heart seeing as he's the first Doctor I ever remember watching...plus, he'd bring the TARDIS and K-9!  What's not to love about that?

and last, but definately not at all least, my best friend Jo, because it simply just wouldn't be the same without her.  I can't link to her, you'll just have to trust me that she's ace.

Who would you invite?  And why?  DO tell!

A Little Bit of Orange

I've been all about blue and green lately.

But a bit of orange snuck into my home via my cooking today.

Pumpkin Soup...

and Mango Icecream...

I'm in love with my Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker which I got for Christmas - it's wonderful to be able to share ice cream with Miss Seven, who can't have the shop bought stuff due to her peanut allergy.  I couldn't find a good mango ice cream recipe so I just winged it and it turned out absolutely delicious...though I forgot to write down how much of everything I put in, so unfortunately I don't have a recipe for you.  I will probably never make mango icecream as nicely again...oh well.  Also, those that know the extra fattening divineness that goes into making good homemade icecream will know that one scoop is enough and I definately didn't eat all three of the scoops that you see in my photo.  Maybe.

I can share my pumpkin soup recipe though,  I've been making it forever so I have no idea where it's from but it's super (souper? ha ha) simple and Miss Seven (who refuses to eat pumpkin in it's whole form) actually asks for me to make it.

Lillabilly's Delicious Pumpkin Soup 

Ingredients

1kg Pumpkin - get some nice golden orange stuff!

1 Onion

4 cups of chicken stock (you can use vegetable stock if you want to make a vegetarian version)

1 tblspn sugar

Fresh fine ground pepper to taste

1 cup of single cream

Salt (perhaps)

Method

Dice up the pumpkin and onion  and add them, the sugar, pepper and the stock to a saucepan.  Bring to boil, then simmer until everything is nice and soft.  (I leave it for a couple of hours)  Switch off and allow to cool, then puree completely in a blender or food processer.  Pour back into saucepan, add cream and mix through.  Reheat (taste and add salt only if necessary) and serve!

Extra nice with some sort of toasty bread to dip!

You should also head on over here to How About Orange which is a nice place to go when you are keen on some extra orangey lovliness amongst all sorts of other interesting things.

Hello Again!

I've been having a blogging break while getting to know the newest addition to our household.  It's a bit exhausting, this baby business - especially since I havn't done it all for a while.  But lovely at the same time.  Things are beginning to settle into kind-of-a, sort-of-a, somehow routine now, so hopefully I will be able to get back to blogging a little more!  I've missed it.

Here, by the way, are some pretty poppies that Miss Seven grew (yes, she's been a Miss "Seven" for a while now...just shows how slack my blogging has been!).  Poppies are by far her favourite flower to grow, though unfortunately we had a bit of a heatwave that killed many seedlings and we only ended up with a few adult plants.  They still put on a pretty display for us though and it was extra exciting to come down into the garden in the early morning each day to see whether any new poppies had burst open at first light.