What The Flock - Audrey's Three!

This week Audrey celebrated her 3rd birthday and it's been a full week of festivities. 

It was a really fun one this year. I've been looking forward to the year that Audrey picks the theme for her party and she didn't disappoint when she picked a FLAMINGO PARTY!

I got her to decide about 3 months ago so I could get started on planning and prepping everything. Which has meant that for the last 3 months she's told us that 'tomorrow is her birthday' and we've had to explain that she was wrong.

It's been a full on year with the shop and i've been single parenting it a lot because of BJ's hours and i've been feeling really guilty about Aude having to spend a lot of time at home while i'm working my two jobs so I wanted to throw her a really fun party. I needed as much time as possible to make this party happen.

Audrey made a list of who she wanted to invite and I did the rest. I designed the invitations, made the decorations, the snacks and the cake of course. 

I design all of our invitations and I had a lot of fun with this one. Really happy with how it turned out. 

Once the invitation was out of the way I planned out all the other decorations and started bringing them to life. The thing I actually slacked on this year was the cake. I usually have a very detailed plan of what i'm going to make with drawings and even test cakes but this year I just had a vague idea of what I wanted to do. I whipped together the topper the week before her party and the rest of the cake I threw together the day before. 

I also managed to find a few minutes to chuck together some cute cookies. 

I was really proud of the paper garland I made for the wall. I honestly wasn't sure how it was going to turn out but I spent ages with my silhouette curio cutting out all the leaves and flowers and am really happy with the final result. It's been hanging up for 2 weeks now because I didn't want to have to do EVERYTHING on the day of the party. And it may be up for another 3 hahaha.

On top of the decorations we had a couple of games. Flamingo ring toss and Pass the parcel. Wasn't sure how Pass the parcel was going to go with a bunch of 3 year olds but it was a total success. And lastly, I couldn't resist in getting a giant inflatable flamingo for the kids to go nuts on. Surprisingly, it didn't pop and it was a huge hit.
Best $20 ever spent!

xx

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Busy! Busy! Busy!

I can not begin to tell you how busy i have been this year.

On top of working full time running an office, i have also been trying to plan a DIY wedding... It's not as easy as it sounds.

I have had more then a few occasions where the tears have just started and could not be stopped because I've been soo overwhelmed with what's going on.

With exactly 5 weeks to the wedding I've come to realise that I cannot do it all myself. As much as I want to.

I have started to give jobs to others who are willing to help (as much as i don't want to) but still i have soo much to do.

This next month is going to be ridiculously busy.

This probably sounds horrible but I'm very much looking forward to the whole thing being over. I'll be happy to be rid of all this extra stress and be heading on our honeymoon to celebrate with friends overseas.

Today i had what i call my non hens party with family and close friends. I called it 'Goodbye Newman'. It is the only way i could force myself to take an afternoon off and just get excited about what the next month will bring.

My sisters went with the Seinfeld theme and we all had a lovely afternoon full of good food and laughter.

Thank you to everyone who came to celebrate with me.

Oh and here is this week's Fork This

xx

Smorgy

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Homemade Christmas Hampers

Because BJ and I have just purchased a house we did Christmas on the cheap side and decided to make all our siblings homemade hampers with lot's of tasty treats inside.

We decided to make lollipops (Which we didn't burn this time), coloured popcorn, coconut balls (With coloured coconut), gingerbread (Snails, squirrels, hedgehogs - You know, the usual thing) and candy cane meringues... plus we included an invited to dinner at our house and a heap of chocolates.

Coloured Coconut

Mustache Lollipops

Coloured Popcorn

As a lot of the stuff we decided to make doesn't really have a long shelf live we were literally cooking our arses off Christmas Eve to get it all finished... AND then i still had to put the hampers together and make them all look pretty.

I had this little cardboard boxes in amongst my craft supplies which i used, lined them with some of the brown packing paper we used to wrap our other presents, stamped them to look all pretty and then filled the box with the goodies.

Of course we did post a Fork This episode about this which you can watch here.

Here are some close up photos of the finished hampers

 xx
Smorgy

PS: I love this photo

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Homemade Wrapping

This year BJ and I decided to save money we'd make a lot of our own gifts (Blog about that coming soon) and we made our own wrapping paper and gift tags also.

I had a roll of brown packing paper and an idea. I carved some awesome stamps of Christmas trees and holly and BJ designed some beautiful gift tags with a very 50's feel to them.

We stamped the hell out of the paper, tied them up with some twine and attached the tag. They looked fantastic. I'm soo happy with how they all turned out and I will continue to use this style of wrapping, Making different tags and stamps to suit the theme of the gift.

Here are some photos of the gifts.. Let me know what you think

xx
Smorgy Pin It

Wild Bore Xmas

Soon after BJ and I start our podcast Fork This BJ and our mates Pat and Speds started an audio podcast called Wild Bore. (I recommend you all listen to it as it's very entertaining.)

Not longer after they started the podcast BJ and I went garage saling and I found a chocolate mold of bore heads.... That's right!!

I decided right then that i would spend the 50cents and buy that chocolate mold and make the members of Wild Bore a christmas present they'll never forget.

Now i know i've already blogged a little bit about this as we did a Fork This episode of us creating these presents but i thought i'd show you some more photos of the finished products and also the faces of the recipients.

If you missed the episode of Fork This here it is ...And this is the final product

 

Speds

Pat

BJ

 
I didn't noticed till just now that none of them look happy about their gift in their photos hahaha.

I'm soo happy with how these turned out. A couple of issues i had were that the mold was difficult to release the chocolate without it breaking (I had a chocolate bore graveyard by the end of the day.) I was also planning to 'mount' the bore head to a cookie but had a few issues making that work. I think the shield with the Wild Bore logo turned out awesome.
Also, they were a BITCH to wrap.

I plan to make lot's of bore heads in the future. Think i'll try and do a resin bore for something.

xx
Smorgy Pin It