Merry Christmas to you and to you and to you

Christmas is always a crazy time for me.  This year is crazier than normal and I'm not even halfway through.

Christmas Eve is always with my extended family.
Christmas Day is volunteering at Wayside Chapel and then lunch with Tom's family.
This year, Boxing Day will be spent on a plane to Melbourne.
30th Dec we fly back to Sydney.
31st Dec (NYE) will be spent at Opera Bar.

Christmas Eve with my family always involves a colour scheme which everyone must adhere to.  This year was blue and silver/white which is the same colour scheme I used with my snowflakes, gift wrapping, and gingerbread cookies.  I wore a silver dotti tank top with sequins, a blue skirt with white piping from ebay, silver snakeskin peeptoes from Glamourpuss, blue and silver nails, and standard silver T&Co jewelry.

In the afternoon I received my bleu saphir Pigalles from matchesfashion (ordered Friday, received Christmas Eve Monday) and they just so happened to  match my nails and skirt perfectly, but I wasn't game to wear new Louboutins out in the rain.

This is my adorable puppy dog (Hi Bailey)!

I made a banoffi pie ahnomnomnom:

After getting to bed at 2am, we were up at 7am this morning at Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross to help them feed 600 homeless people.  Nothing more satisfying than volunteering to help the less fortunate.

Around midday we went back to Tom's parents' for lunch with both sets of his grandparents.  After an amazing lunch, some chit-chat and an intense game of Trivial Pursuit, we finally arrived home at 6pm.

It's now 10:20pm and we've just finished watching Home Alone.  Still need to pack for Melbourne eek!

Wishing everyone a very very Merry Christmas time.  

I hope you were able to spend it with your loved ones.  I also hope you ate a lot and drank a lot and were merry.

Gingerbead House!

This morning I "assembled" this gingerbread house (with the help of Mr Aldi and something in the vicinity of $7).  There is no way I would attempt to make a gingerbread house from scratch after I know how long and tedious gingerbread cookies are to make.

Before

During

Adrer

DIY 3D Snowflakes

These are super super easy but look super super amazing.

You'll need:

• Paper (any paper really - but not magazine/newspaper as it's too flimsy)
• Scissors/blade
• Sticky tape
• Ruler
• Pencil

Basically for each snowflake you'll need 6 identical squares (the bigger the square, the bigger the snowflake obvs).

These squares are 10cm and make my medium sized snowflake

Fold each square diagonally TWICE.  Rule 3 lines starting from the side last folded, and leave about 1cm at the other end (there are different tutorials that rule and cut differently but I find this the easiest by far):

I'm OCD so my lines are 1cm apart, and 1cm short on the right.  For the top line, it's 8mm short on the right.

Cut along the ruled lines and open  up:

Then fold and stickytape the 2 innermost corners together:

Flip the square and stickytape the next corners together, and continue until you have a completed piece:

Repeat with 5 more squares and you will have this:

I used 5 blue squares and 1 white square 

Because I'm OCD, I have each piece facing the same way (longer side turning clockwise).  Stick double-sided stickytape to the inner bits and stick them to each other.

Voila!

Large snowflake uses 20cm squares, medium snowflake uses 10cm squares, small snowflake uses 7cm squares.  I personally wouldn't go much smaller than 7cm squares as it gets fiddly and difficult to fold.

Happy craft-ing!

First Christmas pressie of the year!

This is sad but my first Christmas pressie of the year has come from my Chiro.  About time, I've only spent a half a dozen grand with him.

Delicious, can't wait to consume all this stuff (except for the coriander relish.  coriander.  bleurgh).

First day of annual leave!

My fear of being idle leads me to run myself in circles and become exhausted, but I wouldn't have it any other way.  When I was told I would need to take 4 weeks off I freaked out.  I can barely handle a weekend with nothing to do, how would I handle 4 whole weeks?

Obviously the first thing I did was start to create a list of things to do during my time off:

I allowed myself a sleep-in til 9:20am this morning and started the day with a cup of T2 Melbourne Breakfast tea:

PS how fitting/awesome is my mug??

I started ticking things off my To-Do list.  The first thing I did was a trip to Aldi/Coles to stock up on stuff my kitchen has been needing for a few weeks.  When I was at Westfield, I came across the Cake Decorating Society of NSW Christmas Cakes and took a few snaps of my faves:

You can't tell from the photo but the red cake was taller at the back than the front (reminded me of the base of a topsy turvy cake).  The bottom left cake looked like it was a cross-stitch Santa on the top but upon closer inspection, it wasn't cross-stitch.  Couldn't work out exactly what it was but it looked fab.  I like the bottom right cake because it's so Aussie - playing cricket, wearing sunnies whilst sunbaking.

On my trip home I managed to drive into the back of a woman.  Of course she drives in Audi.  Great.  Bye bye $650 excess.  Last thing I need when I'm off work for 4 weeks and already spending a lot because of Christmas but oh well, lesson learnt.

Came home and made myself a yummy sandwich (rare roast beef, cucumber, truss tomatoes and spinach with real egg mayo) before attempting to make my Rhubarb Gingerbread Sponge Pudding (I'll share the recipe tomorrow):

I spent the next few hours setting up the Christmas tree, wrapping pressies and making gift tags.  I'm not 100% finished yet so I won't show you what it looks like... just yet!

Now it's 4pm and I need to go to my Chiro before heading to my parents to help them host a dinner party (this is where the Rhubarb Gingerbread Sponge Pudding comes in).

Chat later!!

27 days til Christmas

I'm being organised for Christmas this year as Christmas snuck up on me last year (not sure how that happened.... pretty sure Christmas is on the same date every year and pretty sure after 26 Christmas' I should know, but nonetheless).  I ended up staying up til 3am one night making gingerbread cookies for Tom's grandparents.  They were delicious, but this Christmas I would like some sleep.

To give myself some inspiration I looked back at last Christmas and the stuff I did.

Fibre optic tree my flatmate got from Kmart for I think $20

Snowflakes I made from paper

Christmas coloured Hersheys kisses in a jar which I wrapped with Christmas ribbon

Making gingerbread for Tom's grandparents

Every year for the extended family Christmas Eve we have a colour theme and everyone has to come dressed in the colour theme.  A few years ago it was red & white, last year was green, and this year will be blue and silver so I've decided to adopt this blue and silver theme with other Christmas-y things this year.

Have you started thinking about Christmas yet?

Guitar Shopping and an early Christmas

I had an early wakeup call this morning to go guitar shopping at Gosford.  9am the shop opened.  7am Tom woke me up.  This was my "I'm trying to look as good as I can for 7am on a weekend" look:

Bardot top, Nudie jeans, Marc by Marc Jacobs Dr Q Groovee bag, Christian Louboutin Decollete.  Don't mind the random guy in the background :)

I grabbed a coffee to last me the car ride up (for those of you who follow me on Instagram you'll know that was my "breakfast").  We arrived just as they were opening the shop and I entertained myself by finding a guitar that matched my shoes while Tom played on the guitar he was about to purchase (I want to say Gretsch or Grestch?  I don't know... it's white and gold and pretty).

On our way back to Sydney we hit the worst traffic ever.  What was meant to be a 50 minute trip took 2 hours.  Consequently we were late to Tom's family's early Christmas lunch.  Which also meant we rocked up with a plastic bag of veggies instead of a beautifully cut and dressed salad in an appropriate salad bowl.  I hate doing this but I hate being late even more.

I loved the decorations and it reminded me how much I love Christmas.  We had a delicious Christmas Ham and Christmas Turkey with some roast veggies and salads.  Dessert was a fruit pudding with cream AND custard.  Washed down with champagne and white wine and then some rocky road, Lindt choccies and M&Ms for good measure.  Unfortunately the weather was rather crap so the annual game of cricket was short-lived and instead we partnered up and played Trivial Pursuit.  People showed their true colours and became really competitive (guilty) and started hurling abuse at their partner when their partner answered the question incorrectly when said person knew the correct answer (guilty).  Said person is still not over it.

Then it was presents time!  I know I'm 26 but I still love unwrapping pressies.  Between Tom and I we scored a wine cooler and a Brie/Camembert baking dish!

We were supposed to drive back up to Gosford to watch Sydney FC vs Gold Coast Mariners tonight but the boy has a bout of food poisoning and is feeling sorry for himself.  We are sitting at home watching Family Guy and I'm eating leftovers from the salad I made today.

Hope everyone is having a great weekend!  The temperature is meant to hit 27 degrees tomorrow so I might head down to the beach with my sisters.

Christmas in.... October?

I made myself a cup of tea this morning and saw this cup in the kitchen (excuse the teabag, I always let it sit in there because I like my tea strong)

And it reminded me of what I saw at Coles last night:

Serious??  It's barely the second week of October.  Even super hyper pain in the ass organised people like me haven't started planning the Christmas shopping yet.  Especially not for Christmas food.  Christmas gifts maybe but who's buying Christmas food in October?  Crazytown.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I popped into Mr Vitamin yesterday hoping to pick up some Vitamin D tablets due to my Doc telling me I'm severely Vitamin D deficient.  This is what I was confronted with:

This was only about one tenth of the store.  I walked around.... not in any particular order I could see....  couldn't find any Vit D... why are there signs everywhere?  So many bright colours....  What brands are good?  There are signs EVERYWHERE.  Does that guy work here?  What's happening?  Where is my effing Vit D?  Oh I need air.  Exit.

Now I'm no visual merchandiser but surely they realise they're not making their store inviting by shoving so many products, colours and signs in a seemingly haphazard order?  Rant over.  I'm off to the interwebs to buy some Vitamin D.