More homemade birthday cards

Here's some more homemade birthday cards and gifts I've recently made for friends.

This one I made for my best friend Amy's birthday. For the paper flower I followed a tutorial I found on youtube (with background music from Emilie Simon which made it even better!), and I then stuck a piece from a broken bracelet in the middle with sticky pads.

I also made some photo-candle-jars or whatever you want to call them using some old photos of us and our friends from over the years which I printed on normal paper in black and white and glued onto a clean jar on top of some old book pages I'd already glued on.  I then tied some cream ribbon around the neck of the jar added the tea lights and voila!  
 

 

That's a photo of the cardamom biscuits we made together in case you were wondering...

It was also my friend Becky's birthday a few weeks ago but because I was away working at the Chelsea Flower Show with work I didn't have time to work on a nice card before her birthday, which I felt pretty bad about. So since we were going to her Dad's birthday this weekend I decided to make them both a card. 

They're both very musical so the cards had to have a music theme. With Becky's I decided to make a heart shape out of a treble clef and a bass clef (I've seen it on a tattoo before and it looks cool) which I made a stencil for and then cut out of book pages (I love using old books for craft projects, in case you hadn't noticed!) and stuck onto some nice red card and added some more book paper to the edges. It was pretty tricky tracing the treble clef and cutting it out so I'm even more proud of how it turned out (even if the whole thing could have done with being a tad more central).

I then cut out a happy birthday message from the remaining red card for the inside, which again I stuck on top of old book pages to make it stand out more against the black card. Ideally I would have liked to have used old music scripts but I just don't have any lying around and didn't have time to go hunting for some.

For Becky's Dad I decided to make a piano themed card from some ideas I'd seen on the internet and this is how it turned out.

 

It might seem pretty simple but it was actually quite tricky making sure everything was the exactly the right size and getting the white keys to lay out right without either overlapping each other at the bottom or leaving really big black gaps at the top. I probably should have made the curve a bit less pronounced, or made the keys themselves narrower, but it didn't turn out too badly in the end. I was going to add in black music notes to the red section at the top but it would have been very fiddly and I didn't really have all that much time before the party in the evening (which was a musical extravaganza itself!). Both Becky and her Dad liked their cards which is the main thing anyway! :)

Right that's enough blogging for one day I think. If you have any comments or questions about any of these cards or the photo jars, just leave me a comment below!

Thanks for reading!

xx

Cooking Challenge update 10.06.12

Hi there,
hope everyone's having an enjoyable Sunday. Once again I've been a bit lax updating my blog so apologies. I have been ticking a few recipes off my list though as well as learning some new recipes that weren't originally included on my 'to cook' list...

Inspired by Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution Day on 19th May I cooked a couple of meals from his Ministry of Food cookbook, including this chicken and leek stroganoff which is just delicious. I also made my very first mince beef and onion pie (in fact my very first savory pie full stop) which also turned out very nicely.

Mmmm, pie and chips...

Apart from those digressions from the cooking challenge list I have also managed to cross off a few more recipes from the list:

In complete disregard for the hot weather I decided to have a go at the beef and ale stew recipe in Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food book, accompanied by dumplings and creamy baked leeks - I actually made this over two days as the stew was going to take a long time to cook - and since it was actually really, really warm the day I had planned on cooking the stew we decided to have an impromptu bbq with some friends instead and delay the stew until the following day.  It was worth the wait though!

I had fun learning how to make dumplings though (I'd only ever made them once before, many years ago when I was living in Germany so I doubt the recipe would have been the same anyway).

What else...? Oh I also made some brown bread ice cream for my best friend Amy's birthday - now don't pull any faces, it's a genuine dessert made from toasted breadcrumbs and muscovado sugar with is mixed in with whipped cream and egg whites to make the ice cream, and I used to have it probably every month with dinners at uni so I've been desperate to lean how to make it to have a little reminder of my years at Trinity College.

Now that pretty much all my friends from college have now moved on to new pastures there's hardly anyone I could visit nowadays, so opportunities for sampling that delicious creamy sweet ice cream again are diminishing rapidly, which makes me very, very sad... So you can imagine how happy I was to find a recipe for it! When I decided to start the cooking challenge that was one of the first ones on the list I can tell you!

And recently Amy and I made Parmesan Chicken with Proscuitto while the men went out to the climbing wall in town - I think the original plan was to prep the food (which involved a lot of 'breast bashing' - chicken breast that is - great if you've had a frustrating day at work!) and get on the Wii Fit / Just Dance to get a bit of exercise in ourselves, but unsurprisingly a couple of cups of tea led to a long girly chat, which just about left us enough time to get the food cooked by the time the boys got home.

I should have taken more photos of the cooking process as it was a lot of fun, and I'm afraid the photos I do have aren't great as I decided to cut the cooked chicken into strips just to make extra sure that it was cooked all the way through. It was absolutely mouth-wateringly delicious though, so next time I have a few extra pennies to spend on the food shop I shall definitely get some prosciutto to make this again.

So that's it in terms of the cooking update. I'm hoping to make a Thai green chicken curry this coming week (I already have the spring onion, mangetout and asparagus in the fridge so I don't want to waste them!), and since it's Tom's birthday and Father's Day next Sunday then I'm anticipating making a couple of the sweets from the list for the two main men in my life, although I haven't yet made up my mind which ones (desserts, not men!). Perhaps the Tiramisu, or maybe the apple pie... who knows!

Bye for now!
xx