Christmas bunny in July??

Well I have completed my first cross stitch, and it is as the title says a Christmas bunny. Many people would be saying but it is July, but all you crafty people out there know that really you should be thinking about your Christmas crafts just after New Years. This bunny will be put on to a writing book and will be given as a gift to some one (not telling who so don't ask lol). Here is how it went.

 Day one I started by finding the centre of my fabric and working out from that. Using the colours I had, as I was five short of the colours needed. I went online to order the ones I needed on Wednesday which was the day I started this stitch, they arrived in the post on Thursday, super fast delivery from sian2407. 

 By the end of day two this is how far I got. Jessica kept guessing what it was we had bears and dogs and for some reason a dragon, bless her.

This is the completed cross stitch without the back stitching. I think it looks quite cute as it is, but next comes the finishing touches.

How cute is this bunny?? The back stitching really brings it to life and makes you want to say awww! I think this would look great on a note book for one of mt nieces (I can say that because I have seven of them and they will never be able to work out which one of them gets it lol)

This is the chart I used from an old copy of Cross Stitch Crazy if you want to give it a go.

I have also started my next cross stitch this one is a lot bigger 99x72 stitches. So this one will be going on a photo album me thinks, here is how far I am so far.

Looks spectacular so far doesn't it lol. But bear in mind there are 385 stitches in that border and bit of purple in the corner. My hands have frozen up holding the fabric in place so long.

I'm not going to tell you what it is a picture of you will just have to wait and see any guesses are welcome just pop it in the comments section underneath :)

So, in other news, the girls teachers were thrilled with their body scrubs. One teacher saying she would use it tonight as she wants to prepare her body for her holiday (I'm paraphrasing here), another thought it smelled really nice. Hoping for some good feedback from them after the school hols hope they liked it.

The girls have asked if tomorrow we can paint nails as I don't allow it during school term and they love having it done and practising on each other, so there may be pics on tomorrow to show you how they did.

Yesterday I bought some M&Ms to make some muffins with but the girls snuck in and ate them before I could so need to go get some more and will post up how we make them tomorrow.

We tried to go puddle splashing today but the rain stopped and most of the puddles had dried up by the time we were on our way home from school. I don't know, we moan when it rains and moan when it stops lol.

Anyway, off to bed for me now, speak to you all tomorrow

Teachers gifts and getting back

Well I managed to get some of the ingredients for the teachers gifts, and I had to improvise on some too. The recipe I have uses coconut oil, but I could not find any locally at all and so I decided to try olive oil with flavouring instead, I will tell you in the recipe.

I suppose I should tell you what we made... All natural vanilla body scrub. It should have been coconut (I should have used coconut oil) but as I said earlier I couldn't find any. 

The kids had great fun making it, I had to try to keep them from eating it though. They thought it was delish lol.

Any way, here is how to make amazing body scrub. I will tell you the recipe I used but I will tell you we made two huge batches (quadrupled it both times and it made enough for 8 jars) this recipe is enough to fill a Kilner jar, there is nothing on the jar or the information on the jar to say how much it holds so use this recipe wisely lol.

You will need

1/2 cup demerara sugar

1/2 cup golden granulated sugar

1/2 cup white granulated sugar

2 tablespoons olive oil

1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence

2 tablespoons of honey

put the sugar into a bowl and mix to distribute the different sugars evenly, 

add all the other ingredients and mix to coat everything evenly, don't worry if you get a few clumps it adds to the effect but you don't want them too big. 











Spoon into the jar and seal.

We then made labels to put on the jars, 

I wrote all the wording but I got the girls to write their own names onto the labels for a bit of personalisation.

They chose the yellow colour, not 100% sure why. 

  

We then added some ribbon to the tag and tied them to the top of the jar. The girls were so proud of themselves bless 'em.






We will wrap them in tissue tomorrow ready to give to the teachers.

Today, I have also been getting back my stitching bug, I used to love cross stitch with a passion and today I decided to start on some stitching for Christmas. 

I chose my design, out of my thousands I have, and chose a small one to start me off (I don't count the bookmark). The design I chose has only ten different coloured threads and guess what I only have five of them in my stitchy stash. So before I could change my mind about getting started I went straight onto Ebay and ordered my missing threads, (this section removed as it mentions my OH) but I also bought myself some more fabric. I am going to start stitching again and I have set myself to do one hour each day. I can post pictures on here of my works in progress and you can even rate them for me :) Here is what I have done so far today.

You can't really see the white stitching I did but that is because it is on white fabric, which by the way is super difficult to do without daylight, so I gave it up as a bad job lol. I think I haven't done too bad for the first proper stitching session I have done in a while. What do you think?