finishing touches

Creating an eye-catching prezzy stash is my favourite part of the Christmas preparations. I love the moment when the hard work of making is done, and the finishing touches of gift-wrapping and making cards and gift tags is all that remains to do.

This year, a couple of packets of patterned origami paper supplied colourful backgrounds for cut-outs from vintage Ladies Home Journals and a bunch of cute critters snipped from assorted battered and scribbled on picture books including a Richard Scarry Christmas book.

 Space is limited around here, so a bookshelf has been enlisted to host the growing prezzy stash.

 And that's me finished for another year.

Thanks for dropping by everyone.

Wishing you a safe and happy Christmas and I look forward to blogging again in the New Year.

shortbread and wisdom

There has been a lot of pre-Christmas socialising lately, and a lot of gifts from the kitchen to bake. My new Madeleine and mini-muffin trays (early Christmas prezzies) have been indispensable.

I can highly recommend the recipe for 'Hazelnut and Burnt Butter Madeleines' in the September issue of Cuisine Magazine. They are delicious - with a subtle nut and butter flavour, crisp outside and soft cakey interior - YUM.

My Mum-in-law's cheese muffin recipe is so simple you won't quite believe it. The recipe generates 24 golden mini nuggets of cheesy goodness.  This is it:

June's Cheese Muffins
Pre-heat oven to 220 degrees celcius

Ingredients:
2 cups Self-raising flour
2 cups grated tasty cheese
1 1/4 cups milk
pinch of salt

Mix flour, cheese, salt together. Stir in milk to make wet, sticky dough.
Spoon mixture into 24 capacity mini-muffin tray.
Put an extra pinch of cheese on top of each muffin (this is essential for crunchy golden muffins)

Bake for 15 minutes.

Best eaten straight from the oven, and for extra decadence you can butter them warm (using real butter of course!).
Great with a pot of tea, or with a frosty cold lager on a hot afternoon.

Enjoy!

There is an excellent pikelet recipe in Alexa Johnston's book, Ladies, A Plate. I may have already mentioned the handy cooking tip (in small print at the bottom of the page) of rubbing the hot pan with a cut potato, instead of using butter to cook the pikelets. We enjoyed a batch of pikelets yesterday afternoon with jam, cream and a fresh strawberry on top, accompanied by a crisp glass of bubbly.

Ladies, A Plate also provided me with three tasty shortbread options to parcel up as gifts from the kitchen. I chose the recipe by Alexa's mother Paula, which you can find on page 34-35:

The recipe makes about four dozen small shortbread, which I parcelled up in cellophane tied with green raffia. A few special people are going to receive a gift of a dozen shortbread along with an oracle box this year.

 Shortbread and wisdom go together nicely, don't you think...

frocks

I decided to make sundresses for my brother's partner Celia and my sister Therese as their special Christmas present this year. I printed out Melissa's excellent instructions for making a shirred beach dress and managed to complete two lovely dresses in a day, which was very satisfying.

I chose a summery green, grey and white check print for Celia in lightweight cotton, and for Therese, a glorious multi-coloured print with vertical patterned panels. The colours will go beautifully with her auburn hair.

Once I got the hang of it, I found shirring fun, as Melissa promised it would be.

 I've nearly finished my Christmas productions.

Yay for that because I'm a bit pooped!!

for Jack

There's nothing Jack likes more than to see his writing in print, so every year I sneakily select something that he's written during the past twelve months, and create a small edition for him as a special present. This year, I chose this poem:

Britain’s Missing Top Model

I’ve only got
one hand
I’d like to be


a fashion model
Trying on her jeans
she finds a rip

on the morning
of her interview
with the Agency

This day can only go
uphill from here
heroic

nervous to the point
of near-paralysis
she manages to smile

at the brusque no-nonsense
manager
embrace the team

sit quietly while they
critique her
32 23 35

(too hippy)
23 (too old)
and then debate

her fate
cries when they say
they’ll represent her

I need to tell my Mum

Jack's poem was inspired by the final episode of a British reality show we watched when we were staying at a friend's place earlier this year. The show was based on the America's Next Top Model format, except that the contestants all had physical disabilities of one kind or another.  Although the idea was to highlight the need for people to broaden their view of conventional beauty, the show itself was an unsavoury and exploitative production that did nothing to advance the cause for greater inclusivity of disabled people in mainstream culture.

The eventual winner  of the contest was a lovely young woman who had been born with one arm missing below the elbow. It was apparent that she could easily be posed for photo-shoots in such a way that her disability was entirely concealed from view, thereby completely undermining the whole  point of the show, it seemed to us!

In an understated way, I think Jack's poem perfectly captures the monstrosity of the programme, and I wanted to enhance the idea further by making a small edition of ten collaged poems. The design uses more images from the supply of 1950s Ladies Home Journals that I used for the picto-poem Silhouette, also inspired by a reality TV show.

I deliberately selected younger models for this series. I cut off one arm from each girl, and  then I added a couple of disembodied hands to each composition, cut from an old 1940s book, How to Draw Hands. This Dada-inspired detail was designed to signal the manipulation and exploitation of the women by the producers of the show, as well as the naivety of the contestants. It's not subtle, that's for sure! Here are a few examples from the series:

Continuing with the Dada design, I made a special folder for the poems using more illustrations of hands combined with some of the captions from the book:

I added a final hand to the inside back cover:

notebooks

One of the great things about having so many writers in the family is that notebooks are always welcome as presents. The Molskine range (I think that's how it's spelt) produce packs of three card-covered notebooks with thin ruled lines and stitched binding. I bought two sets in black and manilla, and I've embellished them with vintage stamps (continuing with the postal theme of this year's gifts). I love the detail of each stamp and really enjoy putting together each composition.

I'm always on the hunt for good plain notebooks, and I discovered a stack of perfect 50 page lined notebooks in the $3.00 Daibo store on Queen Street last week. They are a bit smaller than the standard school exercise book and have brown card covers, perfect for embellishment. I'm afraid that I bought all they had in stock, but there are still some unlined ones there for you to buy.

I decorated some with rubber stamps and others with shapes and flowers cut from a couple of rolls of vinyl wallpaper I found in a retro shop on a recent trip to Christchurch.

 Next up - Jack's special Christmas present.

After that I shift from paper to fabric

and then it will be sunfrocks and soft furnishings

for the rest of the week!

 I hope your own present productions are going well!

ladybirds and snails

Christmas productions are now well underway. I made a cosy felt leaf for these two dear little ladybirds to decorate Rita's Christmas present, which is a gorgeous 'Colours' cloth book bought from The Trading Circle in Milford. I can't show you the prezzy because I wrapped it up before I realised that I hadn't taken photos of it. Sorry about that.

Continuing with the garden bug theme, one of my handmade prezzies this year  is a 'Snail Mail' Stationery set:

Each Snail Mail set contains 40 sheets of hand-stamped paper and 10 envelopes. Hopefully that should encourage my nearest and dearest to put pen to paper from time to time.

Designing the templates is always the longest part of the process. I used a pack of 10 manilla folders and made up a template with scored foldlines as well as a template for the snail shell.

Jill McDonald's 1966 School Journal illustration provided the inspiration for my patterned snail,. The orange and black decoration on the shell was made with handcut rubber stamps that I made a couple of years ago after being inspired by Lena Corwin's book Printing by Hand.

The envelopes and paper were arranged in large groups on my desk and stamped in two sessions.

I'm really pleased with the way they turned out!

Up next - notebooks, notebooks and more notebooks!