What we are eating....

Garlic and sesame toasted haloumi with roast chicken,
tomatoes and spinach. Amazing.

My first EVER potato bake. With lamb and veggies. yum!

Crepes with strawberries and vanilla sugar creme.

• Sometimes it's super hard to find the motivation to cook.
• I am buying more cook books, which I find helps! A lot.
• Get other people involved, husband, friends, family etc.
• Shop when you FEEL like it, and take your time, you'll end up
  with a much better set of options and you won't feel stressed.
• I've tried meal plans. I now cook what I feel like eating. 

Easter Craft

I know it's June, but I really wanted to share my Easter craft this year.
Call me insane, but I actually made an Easter tree. It confused my husband for a while.
I thought it was pretty cool. It was SUPER easy. Well, sort of.

Easter Eggs - Dyed eggs:
6 eggs
Food dye
Vinegar
Cups

1. Empty eggs - You'll need to poke a hole with a pin and then poke the yoke.
    Shake the insides out into a bowl
2. Drop the eggs, Gently, into a cup of 1/2 cup of vinegar and as much food dye as desired
3. Let it sit until you're  happy with the colour
4. Dry :)

The tree:
1 x vase (mine was a wedding present)
5 - 8 long sticks (or however many you'd like)
White paint
Paint brush
Newspaper - to paint on and to stuff the vase so the sticks stay.

I went hunting for my branches/sticks in our local park. Yes, I looked weird. No, I didn't care.
I then painted them and let them dry. Sorry Will and Kate, Easter tree was more important....

Then I did this....

I added an extra hole on the other end of the eggs, and threaded through some string. Then I tied a knot and it hung. Lovely! And easy too.

What do you think??

Carrot cake

Mini Carrot cakes

I attempted something new. Carrot cake.
It was successful! And quite easy too. There are heaps of free recipes online, I found one that had the ingredients that I already had at home, so suss out what works best for you. The cream cheese icing was so yummy too. I made little cupcakes instead of one big cake, however I think that unless you are going to feed 24 people with the cupcakes, just make a cake as it's much easier to store.

Lots of mini Carrot cakes!

Christmas!

I love Christmas.

I can't get enough of decorations, carols and baking yummy things!!
This year we bought a new Christmas tree - VERY exciting.

Our fake plastic tree brings me so much happiness

So I really didn't want to go too overboard this year, as I know I have the potential to just buy everything. What helped what planning what style we would use and our budget (sort of..). I chose red and gold (how original!) and stuck with that. We bought our tree early, in October, for $38 and some decorations from various places, in total around ($4 + $3 + $5 + $5) $17. I was happy with just this, but alas I saw some $5 lights and had to give in. So that makes our total around... $60. Which I'm happy with. I found that IKEA and local supermarkets were the best places to buy cheap decorations. I saw some at larger stores for around the $50 mark, noooo way!

All decorated!

Also, I plan on making some bunting...

Of course I'll need to take some sewing lessons, or convince my amazing mum to sew it for me.  I think something like this would be lovely. Oh how I love Christmas.

framed

So the other day, we were in a antique store and right near the counter were bags full of stamps for $2 each! I could not believe my luck! Not just boring every day stamps, but cool international stamps and stamps from cool places likes Egypt, Holland and even some interesting Russian stamps. I bought a few bags, probably only needed to buy one, but ah well. I decided to fill some IKEA photo frames with a cool layout of the stamps. This is how it turned out:

The final product!

I think they turned out well!

Definitely a fun/easy project. I could even consider giving these away as gifts to family/friends as they were a little unusual and quirky. I thought I was a little revolutionary with my stamp framing, however I think the idea of framing has been done before. I wonder what else I could frame....

Other interesting things to frame....