Week 30: Maxi dress, mini dress

As my clients have more or less all gone on holiday, it's been eerily quiet on the work front. That means I've finally had some prime crafting time and that makes me so happy!

I'm on the short side, but just not quite short enough to fit into most stores' petite range so I often find myself having to shorten newly bought clothes, the worst offenders being trousers and long skirts. I've recently purchased a really beautiful, allbeit simple, maxi-dress which needed shortening by a good 4 inches. I'm glad to report that is now done and I'm very much looking forward to wearing my dress. 

A little while ago, I came across a fab online tutorial on how to make a t-shirt dress for a toddler. I have tons of small length (50cm-1m) of really pretty lovely fabric in my stash and this seemed like a great way to use some up. I've bought a small selection of £2.50 t-shirts from Next and paired them with some of the fabrics I had. All I needed was some free time to make the t-shirt dresses.

I had in mind to turn my efforts into my very own tutorial (I haven't exactly followed the one mentioned above) but I got a little carried away and forgot to take pictures along the way. Never mind, as the first attempt was a roaring success, I'll be making a couple more this week and I'll use those as a tutorial for you lovely readers.

All in all, not counting my time obviously, I reckon this little t-shirt dress cost me less than £10 to make. Pretty good value for a one-of-a-kind item, non?

I can also say that it fits my daughter perfectly but she was too wriggly for me to take a decent picture. Maybe in one of the next dresses. Something for you to look forward to next week :-)

Week 27, 28 & 29: Playing catch up

So it seems I haven't posted for the past 3 weeks, eek!

Early July was just a bit frantic with work, it was quarterly reports time and that's always time consuming and a bit stressful. I seem to remember crashing with exhaustion one Sunday evening and saying "fuck it" to writing the blog. Sorry!

Then last week I was armed with good intentions but I was defeated by my internet provider who conked out on me for the whole evening, just as I was ready to write my update. I thought I'd just write on the Monday instead but I forgot, oops! Re-sorry!

So what's happened these past few weeks? well, loads! Some good like my daughter developing an entire vocabulary nearly overnight and my planning a street party with my super duper neighbours, some not so good, like losing (albeit temporarily) a client and thus a huge chunk of my income on the same day my hubby got a gig cancelled on him, leaving us in a rather precarious financial situation.

I have cried and worried and not slept over this whole work and money thing but I'm keeping faith that this is just a period of change and that something wonderful is just around the corner for hubby and me. We just need to ride this storm and keep thinking of new ways to generate an income and somewhere down the line, we'll realise this was a key turning point for us, one that was scary but probably needed.

As always, there's been much baking and cooking. A couple of noteworthy experiments were frozen yoghurt lollies and Swedish cinnamon buns.

For the frozen yoghurt, I simply blended strawberries with greek yoghurt then sweetened to taste.

I then put the mixture in a tub and left it in the freezer for a few hours until frozen through. Then I whizzed the frozen yoghurt in the blender again. That's to break down large ice crystals and add a bit of air to the yoghurt, thus making it softer.

Once blended, I transferred the yoghurt to lolly moulds (Ikea sells some cheap ones) and left them in the freezer for a day.

The big test of course is whether or not our little madam will like them but they were an instant hit.

The finished product

I can't really take credit for the cinnamon buns other than I asked my swedish colleague for her recipe. After that, I entrusted it to my expert husband and he went to work with it. The finished product was a bit on the large side but they were really delicious. We'll be giving these a go again in the near future.

The dough pre-being rolled

The buns ready to go in the oven

The finished buns. Nom nom!

I haven't been very productive on the craft front, instead I have spent a lot of time reading. I think after all the stress and worry of the last few weeks, I just needed the quiet contemplation that reading a good novel offers.

Until next time dear readers!