Last week I went to a new friend’s house (Rachel – Orange Whisk) with some other lovely handmade friends (Stacey – Cheeky Textiles & Jenny – Posie Patchwork) for a Gingerbread house decorating party! I’ve never done a gingerbread house before, because I really dislike Gingerbread. Luckily for me though, Rachel was kind enough to make me a house template made from Vanilla Cookie dough instead =D

I had SO much fun!

It was surprisingly a lot easier than I thought it would be to do the decorating (never mind it took me 4 hours, because I had little Rafa with me and ended up having to sway with him in a sling while trying to pipe the straight lines on the roof).

I love all the little spinkles you can get these days to decorate with! We had little sugar snow flakes, and tiny peppermint candy canes!

I’m pretty pleased with my creation, you can see my tiny wreath above (another reason it took me 4 hours perhaps? Maybe a bit too much of a perfectionist. Though it’s definitely not perfect, will have to do much better next year!).

It’s a small house, to get a sense of scale here’s a photo next to a mug (hence the difficulty of the wreath):

And of course, what DIY project by Mikaela would be complete without something messing up! One of my walls fell in when I put the roof on. I didn’t line things up properly and even though the “cement” for the wall had set, the roof knocked it in. Rookie mistake.

And OF COURSE, after taking all these photos, I left the room for 30 seconds and Girds took a nice big bite out of the whole thing. Lucky it was on the dodgy side =P

Do you make Gingerbread Houses for Christmas? Did you make one this year? I’d love to see some other creations!

I’ve come to realise I’m definitely more of a decorator than a baker, so I bought a chocolate mud cake from The Cheesecake Shop and decorated that. I bought the icing sugar animals along with the ladybugs and butterflies, and made the vines and leaves myself from fondant icing mix and regular food colouring. Next time I’ll try making everything myself from the fondant mix =)

{How to} post coming soon!

I used up all the milk for this so have to have my tea black! Whoops.

Sunny Day

Husband left on a jet plane this morning

Just tea today.. No Husband to make coffee for!

Welcome home husband! Sorry my skills haven’t improved =P

Flaming Heart

Blossom?

hello!

Love Heart:

Erm… me doing Pilates? I admit to failure on this one:

This one is also bad. It was supposed to be a star, not sure what went wrong…

Finally, a winner! Cloudy Day:

Too tired to do anything properly:

Epic Fail at writing “love”:

Success! Love:

Butterfly:

I guess this silly little coffee illustration thing I do is kind of like temporary street art. Time consuming and difficult, and short-lasting, but fun. So however street art people justify that form of art, I’ll just CMD+C CMD+V please.

Our Pram! The Urban Combi Walker Prestige (wanky name or what?)

Making Burgers with JA's dad

Yum!

Making a cake!

Naughty dog Girds got to sample it before we did

Making my baby shower invitations =D

Sewing a ribbon edge onto a little minky blanket

Mutant Capsicum!

Bella - 10pm crazy face

Baby Shower invites post coming soon! Hopefully before I finish work in 4 weeks. And one day.

Sunflower / Lion. Excuse: half asleep

Picasso Cat. Excuse: The milk ran out and I had to open a new carton which is hard to pour evenly.

Today we went to the Hellenic Club in Woden to have lunch with my extended family, I went with the Chicken Snitty, it’s always a winner.

We have about 15kg’s of ham leg left over in our fridge, so I think we’ll be having ham sandwiches for dinner!

On Thanksgiving day we had JA’s dad, his sister Katie & her boyfriend Pete, Chloé & Scott, and Lexi over for thanksgiving dinner. I think I enjoyed it because I didn’t have to actually do anything in preparation. The Thursday was our biggest deadline of the year at work, where we have to have all the students marks done to give back to them (“Handback day”), so there was no chance of me doing any house cleaning or food prep during the week leading up to Thursday. Luckily for me, I have an amazing husband, who came home early and cleaned the whole house. His dad then came over with a big turkey and candied yams (sweet potato & marshmallows) to bake. Katie brought scalloped potatoes, and Clo and Lex both brought salads. It was a feast! Yum.

Then on Sunday evening we had another family dinner at JA’s mom’s place, with Katie and Pete again, my mum, and Pete’s parents. Thanksgiving at Susan’s is always really nice, and so very filling, and this time we got to share it with new people so that was fun too.

Ahhh my favourite past-time… food. nom nom nom