Quilt Progress

Ok so I haven't been very good at "fully photo documenting" this project like I was planning to. BUT I did find one old photo I took and I just took another photo tonight.

So here is the quilt with Winnie half tacked on.

Once he was tacked on I did blanket stitch around the edges each piece of material - including all those leaves!

Then I added the red border and the patchwork border.

Next step is embroidering Winnie's face on, and some bees. Then I'll start the quilting.

4 and a half weeks till bubs arrives... wonder if I'll get it done!

:)

Getting Organised... sort of!

Look I'm sort of starting to get organised! These are all our newborn baby clothes all washed and drying!

Oh if you've given us some clothes and you don't see them here then don't worry - it's probably just that they're too big for bubs to wear straight away.

:)

Apron

Found some more photos of a project I did awhile ago. It's a cupcake apron!
Sorry I couldn't model it, it didn't really fit my pregnant stomach :)

Random Photos of things I've been doing this year

Well this is just a cool photo I found on the camera that Darren took.
I went up to Nelson for a day and hung out with Bridget :)

Darren and I went to Hamner for the weekend with my parents which was awesome.

Darren did some sanding :D

Just this weekend Claire and I made this cake for her friend Hayley's 21st - I think we did awesome. Especially Claire to put up with my bossiness.

Yesterday was Phill and Terry's wedding - she looked gorgeous. (This is her Dad not Terry though!)

We all scrubbed up pretty well!

Ok that's all! Have a nice day.

A roundup of cakes

Hello People!

We are finally able to transfer photos to my computer and I found a whole lot of photos of old them with you lovely people so here goes.

I can't remember what this first cake was made for but I think it looks pretty ;-)

This cake had me saying "Cheeky Monkey" over and over again, much to the great annoyance of Tom, but it sure tasted good! Banana cake with butter not oil from the Magnolia cookbook with white chocolate icing- yum!

And this one was for Rose. I like daisies :)

A midwinter Christmas penguin cake which was (thankfully) promptly followed by some "welcome to Spring" cupcakes for my workmates.

And a hummingbird birthday cake for my workmates with pineapple flowers.

And finally my tea cup cake from my mad tea party on Saturday- I was so worried it would topple over!

New Project!!!!

Hello,

Ok well here is my new project. I'm planning on fully photo documenting it - it's a biggie - should take quite some time.

Anyway a couple of weeks ago I decided to start thinking about what colours/theme we'd put in the baby's room. I had a few ideas: Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, and Jungle Animals. I went round a few baby shops and quickly decided on Winnie the Pooh just because there's so much stuff out there - would be easy to tell other people that's our theme and if they wanted to buy a gift they could match in.

So I've always had intentions to paint a few pictures for the baby's walls - so I started looking for Winnie the Pooh pictures. It was when Beth lent me a Winnie the Pooh picture book that I got inspiration for this project - a quilt for baby! I thought about it lying awake in bed all that night (I haven't been sleeping very well lately) and woke up the next morning ready to race to Spotlight and get some materials!

Without further ado here's the first lot of photos:

On the right is the picture I am using as inspiration - Pooh is trying to get honey out of the "hunny tree" I'm going to have fun with the bumble bees! Also I'm going to add a little honey dripping out of the hole to make it a bit more obvious what Pooh is up to!

Ok this is the most boring photo - sorry I'm documenting for myself not just for entertaining lol. This is the layout I decided on plus a few calculations down the bottom.


Now putting pen to paper! The left is my first attempt, right is the second refinement and what I'm using for the final design (bees will be added later).

Then I had to make the pattern. That meant making the picture really BIG! I spent a long time making this piece of paper but cellotaping together 10 pieces of smaller paper. The idea is I cut out these pieces and use them for the pattern.

Here are the cottons I've got - mostly donated by Amy - thanks Amy!

And here are the gorgeous fabrics - the blue will be the main background colour, the stripes are for the back and for the border, the border will also be made up of the other colour bar brown (because brown isn't pretty).

Love,
Mindy

I don't mean to brag but....

Look at our weather forecast for the next few days!!!

One Project Complete

I was going to write about my new exciting project... but then I realised I hadn't written about my last project. What I've been working on for quite some time (far too long really because I've been a bit slack) is a cardigan for our friends Jeremy and Charlotte's new baby boy Tim. I've been taking so long infact that this cardigan was started before we knew the gender and was eventually given to him around his 9 week birthday!

Anyway here it is....


It was quite fun to knit but pretty hard work to do those stitches, just hard on your fingers, lots of knitting three stitches together.

Here I've tried to show the stitch detail - it's a bit hard to see with this wool.



Anyway tomorrow I'll tell you about my new project... it's so exciting!

xxx
Mindy

Pregnancy Musings...

Ok now it's pretty much all out in the open I can share with you some of the joys I've gone through in the last 19 months. Nah not really I don't want to whine :) But this blog probably will become more pregnancy oriented unsurprisingly.

One non-pregnancy issue I have is randomly placed condom wrappers (hehe this is like an anti-pregnancy musing). I went for a run yesterday and there was a condom wrapper on the footpath. Did someone desperately feel the need to get wild and go for it in the quiet suburb of Russley right in public view on the side of the road? A need so desperate it was indulged but the lucky couple very conscienciously used a condom? Baffling! I've been trying to think of less humourous but more realistic explanations but haven't got much... someone chucked it out the window, it fell out of someone's rubbish, a bird dropped it there!?

Ok so while I was running I was thinking how weird it is to be pregnant. How weird is it to be growing another whole person inside you. Although I don't forget I'm pregnant ever I do forget the reality of the situation that there is another person inside me. When we had the scan and there were measurements like 15cm, 10cm, etc coming up on screen it freaked me out. I can something that is 10cm, I could hold it in my hand etc Surely there isn't something that large inside me, this is all just fat from the chocolate biscuit supply at work that I've been frequently of late? Pregnancy was easier to comprehend at the embyro level now I can't get my head around if the baby wasn't inside me I would be able to see it and sit it on my desk and things (obviously I wouldn't do that but you know).

Strange stuff can happen when you're pregnant too. It's bizarre, like today I got my pregnancy exercise DVD in the mail so I decided instead of running to go home and lunchtime and try it out. The darndest thing happened though - I ended up driving to the mall and buying our baby not one but two full swimming outfits. I have decided to spend most of my maternity leave in Mum and Dad's pool and since I should probably be looking after the baby it will have to be in there with me :) It's going to get so cute and wrinkly from all the water!!

xx
Mindy

p.s. Still haven't looked at the pregnancy exercise dvd!

Don't tell my Mum

That we're having a boy. She doesn't want to know! I bet she will find out somehow accidentally but if we all try not to be the one that lets it slip then she'll go longer without knowing.

Ta! xx

It's a BOY!!!

Yay! Everyone was right, we all thought it would be a boy! And it is! Here he is... sorry I know scan pictures are so boring but you just wait until you are almost parents then you'll all change your minds!


The first picture looks very much just like one of the last scan 7 weeks ago!
Awwww how cute baby's foot!

And here's the kind of gross one - we are so proud of ourselves that he doesn't look like too much of an alien (there is another image where he does though). Also I'm not sure if it's posisble to tell yet but I'm pretty sure he has his Dad's eyelashes.

xxx
Mindy

Expanding Family

Hi Everyone!

Well most people have probably heard by now but Darren and I are expecting our first baby! Bebe as I like to call it, is due to arrive December 21st this year :) I'm keeping my fingers crossed for earlier than that - get it out before Christmas, or 2 days late so it's on my Grandad's b'day but I'm not fooling myself in thinking I've got any choice in the matter! The wee fella (girl?) is already surprising us, Darren and I started trying expecting it to take at least a few months, but no, straight away! That's how we're ending up with a Christmas baby!

Pregnancy has been a mixed bag so far. I didn't have too bad morning sickness so that was a bonus. Anyway here's the first couple of pics.





Yesterday I felt baby kick for the first time that I was sure that was what it was. So that was exciting. And yes we will be finding out the flavour, and we will be sharing with everyone!

Love,
Mindy

Skydive

Well since I posted about Darren's birthday cake yesterday today I'll post about his birthday present (his birthday was AGES ago by the way - May 24th - I'm just running a bit behind). So anyway for his 30th birthday I got him a skydive! He loved it, and apparently I will love it too and I'm getting one for my 30th too - got three years to figure out how to get out of it.

Anyway it was out at Methven and it was just an amazing day. It was all foggy and cloudy in the city then as we got about half an hour out of Christchurch we sort of drove through the fog and the mountains looks amazing... I am so lucky to live here!

So onto some photos:
Darren in his sexy jumpsuit - he looks aprehensive but he wasn't really.

There he is up in the sky! You can't really tell but I promise it's him (at the time though I had no idea as I didn't know what colour his chute was I had to take photos of all the jumpers and it was only when he got close that we figured out which one he was).

Just about to land!

Safe and sound back on ground - although he wanted to go straight back up again! Beautiful mountains in the background too!

I have no idea what I'll post about tomorrow but I'm going to try and keep posting more regularly so check back! I did make up an awesome new cake I like to call a banaramel cake but I have no photos of that so that won't be very interesting. Oh I did find an awesome brownie recipe so I could post that - brownies don't need photos they just look like brown squares.

xx
Mindy

Stargate Cake

Hi All,

It's been ages!

Anyway I made Darren a stargate cake for his birthday :) It was shiny... see:

Here is the event horizon, if case you are wondering I hand painted a sheet of fondant with blue food colouring to get the graduated blue. Then I covered the bottom of a dish with playdoh, covered that in gladwrap and then made a lot of indentations for the texture of the event horizon, then I set jelly in it - put the jelly and the fondant together to get my event horizon.


I covered the cake in black fondant which I spent ages making by dying brown fondant black and then made a ring of chocolate cake and covered that in gray fondant for the actual gate.

I then painted the whole thing with silver paint mixed with a little black, then I scratched in the stargate symbols and put the message for Darren round the outside. The gap down the bottom was where the candles went :)

Lesson learned: the jelly started to disintergrate the fondant (you can see if looks a bit messy round the edges) in the future I would assemble the cake as late as possible, in this cake I assembled it a day or so before it was being eaten.

Ok bye!
Mindy

p.s. Lots of other stuff has happened like I got married etc but I decided just to focus on the cake for this post :)

Elmo!

Hello!

I made an Elmo cake in the weekend for my very good friend Beth's nephew Jamie's first birthday. It was a lot of fun although I managed to cut my finger badly and also my thumb - how do you cut yourself decorating a cake? Well I'm just that damn clumsy. I was pretty happy with how the cake turned out - but also learnt some good lessons about trying to make icing red!



Hope you all had a nice weekend - less than 4 weeks till our wedding now! Argh!

Love,
Mindy

2009!

Well, it's 2009 and despite the impression this blog may give, I have been doing stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. Unfortunately blogging has not been one of those things - until now. So to kick off I'll give you a very brief photo overview of what I've been doing in 2009!

Well I sat around in the sun with Darren, Claire and Dad and we read Tintin!

And Amy and I made a whole wedding cake! All by ourselves!

It tasted great and looked very beautiful! Not as beautiful as the bride though...

And the bride was Kirsty and I was one of her bridesmaids!

Also for some reason Claire, Ame, Mum and I all dressed up in matching T-shirts and went for a run.

I went to a great welcome home party for Nick, Natalie and Adam, at this party Adam ate pies.

I made some pretty cupcakes.

That had pretty blue flowers on the top.

These were for another beautiful bride - it was Charlotte and Jeremy's wedding!

Oh somewhere in that time Darren and I got our first house.

And also I shared my cupcake making skills with Anca who was a very cool person who I got to meet, spend a few weeks working with and then say goodbye :( As she went to the UK to replace me.

I went to the Watchmen movie, loved it, and showed my appreciation the best way I know how - a cupcake homage.

I also went to a really fun cocktail party at Beth's and got dressed up all nice then pulled a strange face in this photo.

And most recently I made St Patrick's day cupcakes - yes the actual cupcakes are green!

Unfortunately you get to miss out on my 6 year old's birthday party cupcakes, and my Christmas cupcakes (which weren't in 2009 anyway) as I seem to have lost those photos.

Photos of the Elmo cake I'm doing this weekend will come soon though!

xxx
Mindy