Month in Review

Gosh, I've just realised that it has been a whole month since my last post!  I guess you could say that I've suffering from general lack of mojo.  August was incredibly cold and wet (just the weather to dampen one's spirits) and my husband's new business is taking off, which is good...but...it leaves me feeling like a bit of a phoney because my life is far from simple.  Time to take back a bit of control and at least make an attempt to regain my simple living mojo!

Since my last post, we have celebrated daughter number one's 8th birthday.  She asked for a birthday cake that looked like our Kitty, so I whipped this up...thankfully it seemed to fit the bill!

Kitty birthday cake

Our local kindergarten also held their annual trivia night at the end of August.  We formed teams of about 10 people prior to the night.  Each team was assigned a different colour and we were asked to dress up and also decorate our table using our assigned colour.  There were prizes for best dressed person, and for the best dressed table.  My team was assigned the colour Orange.  I managed to find a nice piece of orange fabric at the opp shop that made a perfect tablecloth.  One of my team mates had a lovely contrasting table runner.  I made a centrepiece by placing a couple of branches in a vase.  I cut out some orange tissue paper leaves and glued them to the branches.  I also made orange some tissue paper pom-poms and placed a few in the branches.  To add to the orange-ness, I lined the vase with slices of orange.  On the table we also placed some orange coloured objects, including Christmas baubels and orange jack-o-lanterns that I made by hollowing out a thick-skinned orange, carving a face into it and placing a tealight inside (the orange scent was beautiful!).  We even colour coordinated with orange food!  The one thing, however, that got us over the line was a couple of vases containing goldfish!  It was a really fun night...even the goldfish had an enjoyable time ;-)

The Orange Table

Miss Eight has also been doing some creative things recently.  Her primary school held it's annual Show Day yesterday.  Show Day is a scaled down version of a country fair, and involves craft exhibits and a pet parade.  Miss Eight decided she wanted to enter the cake decorating and flower arranging sections, and here are her entries:

Alien cupcakes

The cupcakes were inspired by  Martha Stewart's Creepcake Cupcakes.

"Keep off Grass" flower arrangement

Special acknowledgement to Miss Five for this one for donating the wheat she sprouted at kindergarten :-)

There were so many delightful creations on display...but silly me forgot to take photos!  Thankfully Christine had it covered and has given a wonderful description of the day here.

To wrap up my overview of the last month, here is a picture from yesterday's pet parade.  Miss Eight took Pierre along.  It seemed like a good idea in theory, but the poor thing was one of two cats in a sea of dogs!  This picture says it all really...

Pierre and some canine friends

Fleecie Pets

About six years ago I made a basic 8-colour patchwork blanket out of fleece. I had a narrow strip of each colour left over from that project and of course managed to convince myself that I needed to keep the surplus fabric because I would be sure to find a use for it one day. Imagine my delight when I found this book containing patterns and instructions to make gorgeous little toys out of, you guessed it, narrow strips of fleece!

I had a couple of problems when I started to make my Fleecie Pets. Firstly, which pet was I going to make first...Squealy the piglet, Joe the monkey, Leapy the frog, Hoppy the rabbit, Spangles the cat, Patches the dog, Sniffy the mouse or Fuzzy the sheep? My second, and more concerning problem was that my fleece off-cuts were agonisingly too narrow for the pattern pieces! I managed to solve the latter problem by scanning the patterns and reducing their size a little before printing them out. Crisis averted!

In the end I managed to make five pets, along with some of the cute outfits in time for my 4yo daughter's birthday. The sewing and knitting patterns were very easy to follow. I'm sure it would have been even easier had I been making the full-sized pets, as at times the sewing was a little bit fiddly. I also had a little trouble figuring out how to re-size the knitting patterns (I ended up opting for slightly smaller needles) so the knitted components were a little too big.

Bag and Pencil Roll

This was a gift I made for a 7 year old girl...


The child's bag was made using a Simplicity pattern (5531) that I had purchased a few years ago. The matching pencil roll was adapted from One Red Robin's Notebook & Pencil Holder tutorial. To work out how wide to cut the fabric, I allowed 2cm per pencil and then added a 1cm seam allowance on each end. To figure out the height, I measured a pencil and again added 1cm seam allowances to each end. The pencil tips were a bit too close to the edge for my liking, so next time I make one I think I will and one more extra centimetre to the height.

Colouring Book & Pencil Holder for a 4 year old boy

This is a gift I made for a four year old boy. I followed One Red Robin's Notebook & Pencil Holder tutorial. Instead of fastening it with ribbon, which I thought was a bit too girly, I sewed a black button to the front and a piece of black elastic (I actually used a hair band!) to the back (the elastic was sewn into the seams in the same way as the ribbon in the tutorial).

I teamed the pencil holder with a handmade colouring book, using Chez Beeper Babe's fantastic tutorial. I found some colouring pages featuring some of the birthday boy's favourite characters on this site. I personalised the colouring book by printing his name on the front cover.


I have since made countless versions of the colouring book and pencil holder for my kids and their friends...and they just loved them! When I have some more free time, I would like to have a go at making the colouring pages more personalised by either drawing some pictures myself, having the kids draw some pictures, or even altering our family photographs in photoshop.