Minecraft Hama bead keyrings

It's only been a few months since we introduced Minecraft, but already Harry is pretty well addicted. I did have reservations about getting the game for him, and it is a little concerning how he would play it all day if he could, but I'm also very impressed with how well he gets on with it, he builds all sorts of complicated structures with things that move and so on, and the game really appeals to his mechanical little mind.

It's his birthday in January, and I somehow seem to be finding myself hosting a Minecraft party at our house for a few of his friends. Not an easy party where they sit and play Minecraft, but a themed party with various crafts and activities to keep them all entertained for a couple of hours. It's a bit daunting but luckily I have some good friends helping me out, and I'm sure I'll be sharing some of our ideas in a blog post shortly!

In the meantime over Christmas I've been working on the party bags. I found that small official Minecraft toys were quite expensive, and Minecraft themed partyware isn't really available, so I've been making a few things myself and with Harry's help. The first thing that we made together are these Minecraft Hama bead keyrings.

For the designs I used these Minecraft designs for Hama beads from Minieco. They are so simple to make on a square pegboard, and if you are looking for different designs it's easy enough to take the pattern straight from the Minecraft game itself, as it's perfectly suited to Hama beads!

I ironed the beads firmly on both sides so that they would be sturdy, but I made sure not to over iron so that the holes were still open. Then I bought some blank keyring chains which I could attach to the corners of my designs. The end ring fitted nicely through the hole in the Hama bead when opened with some pliers.

I hope that his friends are pleased to receive them! The party bags themselves in the picture are simply green paper bags (affiliate link) which I decorated in black pen with a Creeper face. I'll be sharing some of the other things that I made for the party bags in a few weeks!

Our Gingerbread Houses - Christmas 2015

I started our Gingerbread House tradition back in 2012. I was inspired by ones that I'd seen on blogs and Pinterest, and so I added it to my Day Zero Project list. I spent ages fretting about my first Gingerbread House, but in the end it wasn't nearly as difficult as I expected it to be! I always use the same recipe from Tesco which includes an easy template and also a video to follow - you can find the Gingerbread House recipe here. The first house I made pretty much by myself, with Harry adding a few decorations under careful supervision.

Over the years I have adapted the recipe slightly, I decrease the amount of the wet ingredients by about 20% and by reducing the size at which I print the template to 75% it makes just enough dough for two slightly smaller gingerbread houses.

In 2013 we had two houses, and while I pretty much decorated Mia's house, Harry did it by himself. Then last year they were both very much involved in the decoration and loved making them.

So continuing tradition, here are the 2015 Jain Family Gingerbread Houses!

I made the gingerbread and assembled the houses but I had no role in the decoration apart from piping the icing where directed. Mia went with a pretty house, with jelly heart sweets on the roof and neat lines of chocolate buttons. Harry came up with an imaginative house which has sweets formed into the shape of a moose with antlers and a butterfly, and he embellished with a paper cut out snowman.

Now to see how long we can keep them around for before they are broken up and eaten!

Here are our previous Gingerbread Houses:

The very first gingerbread house

The 2013 Gingerbread Houses

The 2014 Gingerbread Houses

And here was our 2016 Gingerbread House which was also captured on video as part of Vlogmas 2016

The end of Mia's first term

I can't believe that Mia has finished her first term of school already. I sat in the carol service at school this morning, having been there for the last two years with her sitting on my knee, and this year she looked so grown up sat down there on the floor with all her friends. 

This was her very first day. I'm afraid that she doesn't always look quite as neatly turned as this (and she definitely doesn't by the end of the day!). She is enjoying her hot school dinners which is brilliant because Harry only lasted with them two weeks, and she is trying all sorts of different foods. The trouble is that while Harry could wear the same jumper all week she really needs a clean one every day, and we don't own enough jumpers to keep up to that standard, so along with her wild hair she generally looks pretty scruffy!

She's settled into school absolutely fine, we've had no clinging, no tears and no complaining. I've noticed that she tells me a lot more than Harry does about the relationships between children in her class, who plays with who, who says mean things to who, and she's also obsessed with which children get to take home one of the special teddies at the end of each day.

Mia has been very much a Daddy's girl since she was a baby. As a toddler she'd often scream if I tried to hold her when Ram was about. Once when we were going through US immigration I was convinced that the officer would think I was trying to kidnap her because she screamed the place down when I held her so that Ram could do his fingerprints. When out and about as a family she's always naturally gone to Ram and Harry has gone to me.

But since starting school Mia has been much more clingy to me. I get so many more cuddles, and when we are out she often asks to walk next to me and hold my hand. It's lovely, and it makes me wonder if she took me for granted before - perhaps now that I'm not around all the time she realises that she does want me after all!

I'm so proud of her!

Buying our first flat

A first step on the housing ladder is a very exciting moment. For me, that was back in 2003 when I bought my first property, a lovely two bedroom second floor flat in Worthing. We were lucky to have some financial help from my parents as well as some savings that we'd built up which gave us a good start. Ours was the one in the middle with the green plant in the window, which is still sitting on my kitchen windowsill today!

We spent a lot of time searching for the perfect flat. Fortunately Worthing has plenty to choose from, which are generally a good size and well maintained. The first property that we saw was actually the flat on the top floor, which we fell in love with, but as we hadn't yet sorted out any of our finances we were in no position to put in an offer. It's funny how these things work out though, and we were actually better off where we ended up as our flat had an extra toilet and needed less work.

We moved from a rented furnished flat so we had to buy pretty much everything. The majority of our furniture came from Ikea, and we had to drag my parents along to help us bring back everything that we bought! But it did mean that our actual move was done in a couple of car loads, along with a bit of extra help to carry the massive old style television up two flights of stairs.

The location was perfect - just off a lovely tree lined road filled with big houses, a short walk to the seafront and then to town, close to the station, and near enough to walk comfortably to work. We used to go for long walks along the sea in the evenings.

Inside it was lovely too, we had a huge living room and all the windows were massive, including a glimpse across the South Downs from the main bedroom. There was so much storage too, huge wardrobes in the bedroom the length of the room and a pantry in the kitchen which was brilliant.

We didn't need to do too much work to it at all, although we painted every room, replaced the flooring in the kitchen and had the windows done. Looking back through the few photos that I have (which were taken as part of a home inventory when I had much more time for such things than I do now) I'm amazed by just how little stuff we had. It's no wonder that I could clean the whole place thoroughly in under an hour!

After our wedding, with some more savings built up and plans to start a family, we knew that the flat would no longer be practical for us but it was a real wrench to sell it. We still drive past from time to time and reminisce. Perhaps we'll end up living there again in our retirement!

This is a sponsored post in association with Santander.

Infographic - Christmas Crafters are worth £376 million to the economy

Research from Direct Line for Business has shown that over three million people in Britain will be selling their crafts this Christmas, both online and at Christmas craft markets across the country. It's something that I often feel I should be doing, especially now that with both children at school I have a bit of extra time - although the research also revealed that these crafters are working on average 19 hours a week from October to December and I'm not sure how I could fit all that in! 

The Infographic below shows some of the ways that these 'Christmas Crafters' are making money, along with some top tips for starting or running your own crafting business. One thing that I'd not thought about before is purchasing Craft Insurance - it's really important if, for example, a customer is hurt when using one of your products, or if you suffer damage to your stock. You can find out more information here - Direct Line for Business Craft Insurance. 

I have also shared some more tips on starting a business as a parent here. 

This is a sponsored post in association with Direct Line for Business.

Salt dough tree decorations for Christmas

This month, appropriately enough, the theme for my Bostik Bloggers craft box was Christmas. I've been meaning to make some salt dough tree decorations for a while now, so it seemed the perfect opportunity to give them a go. They are simple to make even for very little ones, and make lovely ornaments for your own tree, or to give to friends and relatives to treasure over the years.

You need:

Flour, salt and water to make the salt dough
Festive cookie cutters and a straw
Paint in a variety of colours
Glitter glue and other sparkly embellisments
Twine, ribbon or sparkly pipe cleaners to hang

Instructions:

First you need to make your salt dough. Mix together two parts flour, one part salt and one part water, adding the water gradually until you have a firm dough. I used a cup as a measure and it made enough for about 18 decorations. Roll out the dough to a thickness of around half a centimetre, and cut into shapes. Use a straw to make a hole in the top of each shape. Harry also added some details to his decorations with a cocktail stick.

To dry I baked it in the oven at 100C for about half an hour, until the shapes were firm to touch, then I finished them off by leaving them on top of a radiator for a few days, if you need them to be finished sooner then you can leave them in the oven for longer but keep an eye on them so that they don't burn.

When dry the ornaments can be painted and decorated. Children's ready mix poster paint works well for painting salt dough, but we did use some acrylic paint, especially for the white, as it covers better and gives a stronger colour.

We waited until the next day to make sure that the paint was completely dry, then we decorated the salt dough ornaments with some Bostik glitter pens. The glitter pens can be used to make dots or by squeezing our a larger amount you can then spread the glue with a paintbrush and it dries to a lovely, sparkly, shiny finish.

Finally each one was threaded with a length of red and white stripy twine, making sure to use a generous amount, and they were ready to be hung on the tree.

The box of craft materials was provided to me free of charge by Bostik as part of the Tots100/Bostik Craft Bloggers Club.

My granny square crochet blanket in progress

Update - Here's the finished crochet granny square blanket!

I've been wanting to crochet a granny square blanket for ages. Like many of my crafting projects, I'm sure that Pinterest had a lot to do with the inspiration, and you can see my Crochet Blanket board at the bottom of this post. I had a bit of a shaky start when it came to getting to grips with crochet, but with the completion of my gorgeous crochet Afghan I'm feeling pretty confident, and I'm very much looking forward to starting the Sky Blanket project in January.

As part of my learning to crochet process I started making granny squares. They were pretty terrible at first, but I persevered and eventually they started to look alright. Some of my early squares have mistakes in, where I've started working a new colour on the wrong side of the square or I'm missing one of the groups of trebles in the corner, but I'm still going to use them in the blanket, nobody's perfect!

Each square is made of five rounds with the outer round always the same colour (and I really that hope I don't run out!). This is a blue yarn that I bought in Hobbycraft ages ago when I first had the idea of making a blanket. Most of the other yarn was given to me by my Mum in blue, cream and purple, and I've bought a few more purple balls since. The finished blanket will measure 13 squares by 11 squares for a total of 143 squares. I might do a border as well, I'll see how big it is and how much yarn I have left over!

I don't have a plan at all when it comes to the distribution of the colours having gone for a cheerfully random selection, so I'm hoping that it all works out well in the end. I'm vaguely trying to alternate light and dark colours as I go around but that's about it. I'm going to have to find myself a huge space somewhere in the house and lay out all the squares in a way that pleases me, it's going to be like an enormous logic puzzle trying to make sure that all the colours are balanced. Then I'll have to sit there for hours and hours sewing them all together!

It's quite a slow process, I reckon that it has been taking me almost an hour to make one square (!) but it's a good project that I can take out and about with me. Progress will slow down I'm sure once I get started on my sky blanket, but I can take the squares with me when we go away and I don't want to be lugging a huge blanket about. I've made 50 squares so far, so just a few more to go!

Here are some blankets that have inspired me, many are beyond my current skill level but maybe one day if I keep practising!