We joined the library!

This may sound completely obvious, but I highly recommend joining your local library!

When I was a kid we all belonged to the local library and borrowed books regularly.  When my now 6.5 year old was a baby, we used to go to Newtown library for Reading Time, but since we moved 5 years ago, we haven't actually visited the library at all.  Considering we're trying to reduce the purchases we make, it's crazy that we haven't been borrowing books from the library!

Day three of Winter school holidays, and one of my daughter's school friends had just been to the library and was showing her the books he borrowed this morning.  We had no firm plans today, so headed up to the library and joined.  We found five books she was excited to read, joined up and headed home.

Turns out there's also a whole online Library that comes with the membership too, where you can read online, or order books to be collected from your local library.  If you're in the 'Inner West Council', which used to be Marrickville Council, here's the link.

Now we have all the books we can possibly want to read, and don't have to waste money buying them all, or waste space storing them all in our house.

Last Minute Halloween Bunting Tutorial

This week Miss 4 and I made some quick paper bunting for Halloween, using just materials we already had at home.

This is a really simple and expensive option for decorating the front of your house.

What you'll need:
- a few sheets of A4 orange paper (we used neon orange)
- a few sheets of A4 black paper
- string (ours happened to be black string from IKEA)
- glue
- stapler (optional)
- ruler, pen, scissors

Fold one piece of A4 paper in half, as shown.

Then fold that piece of paper again, into thirds.  To make sure it's folded evenly in thirds, you can mark a dot at 7cm and 14cm and fold to them.

Once folded into thirds, find the middle of the panel, which should be 3.5cm.  Make sure you mark the end of the panel that has the open edges, not the folded edge as this will need to be at the top of the bunting so it sits over the string.

Draw a line from the 3.5cm dot down to the corner of the panel on either side, so you end up with a triangle that looks like this.

Next, cut along the lines with scissors or a knife.  I used a knife to make sure all the pieces of paper underneath didn't move around while I was cutting.  But if you don't have one, you can use scissors.

Repeat these steps again on the other pieces of A4 paper until you have enough triangles for the length of bunting you'd like to create.

Miss 4 drew 'halloween faces' and triangles on our orange pieces, while I cut out the black ones.  We ended up with 15 triangles from 5 pieces of A4 paper, but the quantity is up to you.

The triangles can then be slipped over the string, folded bit at the top.  Once on the string you can glue the two sides of the triangle together so keep them secure.

We decided to staple the top of the triangle too, for added security, but they would probably look better without.

Space them about 3cm apart, or whatever spacing you'd like, and leave a length of at least 40cm at either end to allow for tying.

This method can be applied for any event of course just using different coloured paper.  A great option to have on hand if you find yourself in need of last minute decorations!

Rainbow Streamer Garland Tutorial

I've had a lot of people ask about the rainbow garland I made for the table backdrop at the 'Neon Rainbow' party, so I've written a quick tutorial.

As mentioned in my previous post about the party, I had a rough idea in my head about the look I wanted to create, but had no idea if would work until I started making it.

I started with a packet of 6 rolls of crepe paper streamers, which I cut into lengths of approx 1.4 metres.  I cut one length first then used it to measure the rest of them.

Next I grabbed a length of ribbon roughly 1.6 metres in length, which was the right width for the amount of streamers I had as well as the width of the wall space it would hang on.

I tied each end of the ribbon on my washing line, then started tieing the streamer lengths to the ribbon starting from the middle.  

Now, tieing paper streamers is not that easy.  In hindsight it may have been easier to make this out of ribbon lengths, but I already had the crepe paper streamers, and I haven't come across many neon colours of ribbon.  Depending on the colours you want to use for your own streamer garland, you may want to try this with ribbon.  And if you do, please let me know how you go.

I just tied a simple knot around the top of the ribbon, keeping it really loose so the paper didn't rip, but tight enough that it wasn't going anywhere.  To keep the appearance of the garland uniform, it's important to ensure all knots are facing the same way when you tie them, so they all have the small end sticking up to the same side.  Mine all stuck up to the right simply because that's the way I tied the first one, and did the others to match.

Continuing to tie the streamers from the middle out to the edges, the finished colours ran red, pink, yellow, green, blue, purple.

The garland needed some finessing, to space the streamers all out evenly along the ribbon so they had enough space and were on the right angles to sit flat.

All I did to hang it on the wall was stick a couple of 3M adhesive hooks to the wall with the recommended waiting time, then the garland was hung proudly on the wall.

The hardest part of the whole project was discouraging cheeky Miss 4 year old from running through the garland and pulling on it while I was making it!

If you have a go, please share your photos and feedback with me.

Neon rainbow party!

I'm sure you're curious about how we put together parties for our own kids, given we've now been catering for kids parties for 4 years now. So I thought I'd share some photos and details from my little girl's 4th birthday party with you.

Last weekend we celebrated my little girl's 4th birthday, with a 'neon rainbow' themed party. She wanted a rainbow theme for her party, and with neon / fluro being so on trend right now, we decided the rainbow should be neon!

Lots of very bright colours everywhere!

Aunty Dani made all the food, including pink iced cupcakes with neon edible glitter, and a pink gradient / ombre birthday cake. Miss 4 requested a 'rainbow' of pink for the inside of the cake, and wanted it to be banana flavoured. Dani thought it would be too intense if the whole cake was banana flavoured, so it was a traditional vanilla butter cake, with banana icing on the top, sides and in between each layer of cake. 

I made a cake topper to sit on top, with a rainbow coming out of a sparkly gold 'A'. The cake looked amazing when it was cut as you can see from the photos. It tasted fantastic too of course!

The cupcakes were vanilla butter cake as well, with vibrant pink icing which was dusted with amazing neon edible glitter that caught the light perfectly in real life, yet was hard to capture in photos.

The savoury food was all our usual favourites, petit pies, cocktail sausage rolls, mini hotdogs, veg samosas, and caramalised onion quiches.

Home made marshmallows were on the menu of course, this time they were vanilla bean marshmallow dusted in pink and purple sugar.

The kids also had a large bowl of orange quarters, and individual mini water bottles as it was a hot day.

We had 1kg of 'Happy Birthday' rainbow rock candy to fit with the theme. These were displayed in a glass jar, a glass bowl, and popped in cello bags in the take home party bags, along with fun brightly coloured sunglasses, neon giant balloons, neon slinkies and a few other little things.

The backdrop of the whole table was a garland I made the day before, using EXTREMELY neon crepe paper streamers. It was so bright it practically glows in the daylight! I had the idea for this in my head, but couldn't find any images or tutorials online about how to put it together, so I just made it up. It was really easy, so I'll try to put together a tutorial soon to share with everyone.

We had giant neon balloons as well, but unfortunately due to the heat outside, they popped when they went in the sunlight so we ended up with them all taking over our lounge room. I also found some neon pink round lanterns, so we hung them outside along the front of the shed. They looked so pretty I wanted to keep them up permanently but I think they colour would fade too fast if we did that.

It was great how easily this party theme came together, and surprisingly even with all the items I made it felt like very little effort was required on the actual day. I guess a lot of that is to do with having the food catered!

The birthday girl said she had a fun party, so looking back at all the photos I'm glad we put it together for her.

If you have any questions about where I got anything from, or how I made anything, please comment below and i'll let you know :)

Just catching up

It's been a while since I last posted.

I've been working more hours each week, while also working on getting my 9 month old sleeping longer in the day. I'm trying to stay on top of the housework and garden, investing time in my 4 year old's reading and settling her into a new Kindy (daycare). There's been another venture taking up time and headspace, but I won't be able to share that with you for a while. 

The last thing I felt like doing at the end of these long days was sitting at the computer, or doing anything at all apart from 'loosing myself' in front of TV. The 'me' has been lost in trying to keep everything else afloat! I've had no time (or energy) for sewing, blogging, or any sort of social life. I can't remember the last time I went to the hairdresser, and I still haven't spent my birthday money from July! Getting woken around 5am every morning also hasn't helped with fading energy levels as the day progresses. 

But with the warmer Spring weather, baby sleeping well during the day, and not having to drive to Chippendale and back for Kindy 3 days a week, I'm starting to feel on top of things again. And as a bonus I had a night out with a dear friend this week, and truly let my hair down for the first time in a long time. Thank you lady! 

I have decided now, starting from this very minute that I will make more time for 'me'! I will continue sewing and my plastic-free / chemical-free conversation of our house, but more importantly i'll make time for working on myself.

Oops I just fell asleep mid thought! (I'm writing this on my phone) Time for bed. Next post will be something more interesting I promise.

Phasing out plastics...

As we gradually work towards a more sustainable living for our family, I'm also attempting to phase out plastic where possible, especially when it comes to food.

Today I started tackling the pantry cupboard.  I went to IKEA and bought some lovely (and affordable) glass jars to replace the plastic containers I'm currently storing dry ingredients in.

The first pile I need to sort.

I won't be throwing away the old plastic containers though, as that won't help our carbon footprint either!  I'll find another purpose for these away from food.  And I will choose to use glass instead of plastic going forward.

While Mr 8 Months sat in his highchair next to me chewing a rusk, surprisingly I managed to achieve a bit.  I wrangled this pile of chaos out of the pantry to sort through, washed the new jars ready to be filled and started reorganising the section of the pantry this all came from.

I quickly realised I don't have enough jars and that I will need more of certain sizes to transfer everything across.  But hey, this is a work in progress, and the jars always look like a different size in the store than what they do when we get them home.

Most of you know what it's like when you attempt to tackle a job like this when you have kids.  You have the idea, but it's days before you get the chance to do anything about it.

Then the opportunity popped up when my oldest was at daycare and my baby was happily occupied and NOT IN MY ARMS!  That's the moment I got motivated and started.  I got into the swing of it, and had a massive pile out on the table which was partly sorted.  Then Mr 8 Months started to get bored, threw his rusk down on the floor started 'hinting' he wanted Mummy cuddles.

So the pile was left on the kitchen table until the kids were in bed and dinner had been made.  By then, I was over it so packed it all back into the pantry in whatever stage it was in, and retreated to the lounge room for the evening.  I WILL get back to it again soon though, maybe on the weekend...

An update on the potatoes

Happy potato plants transferred into the larger tub.

So, we've had success with our potatoes!  They have actually grown into plants, much to my delight.

After just a couple of weeks, little green plants sprouted up out of the potatoes in the soil.

Since then I've had to transfer them to a larger pot with much much more soil as they filled the tiny pots.  As I was transferring them I discovered they had already produced some tiny brand new potatoes.

I have no idea how to tell if the potatoes are ready to eat or not, and I'm sure we learnt this all at school, but can't remember any of it now - I blame 'baby brain'.

Now I had better do some research about when to harvest them etc... If anyone knows, let me know :)

The random tomato plant that has popped up under the fence is thriving.