Introducing...

...A new(ish) member of the family! Drum roll please... put your paws up for my sister's amazingly beautiful, couthie and totally huggable Rosie The Greyhound! Yay!


 

     Rosie is a two year old rescued greyhound from the Scottish Greyhound Sanctuary and was adopted by Kags in October there. Being a rescued dog it's not been all plain sailing as she has settled in. For a start she struggled with the stairs up to the flat my sister lives in. Also she has a sneaky streak which sees her helping herself to all sorts of things that are not good for her - namely a massive box of Heroes (part of Millie's birthday present!) and a whole bag of cinnamon nuts and raisins from Kags handbag. Both of these thieving episodes have ended in a hasty trip to the vet as chocolate and raisins are very toxic to dogs. I knew chocolate was but had no idea eating raisins can be fatal! Eeek! So, it's been a big learning curve for both sister and dog and Kags now has to store things not for Rosie away really high up or in a closed room/cupboard that she can't get to.  Amusingly, she can open parcels delivered by the postie and has opened one that was a new coat for her which she cleverly placed beside her other coats... yes, I say other coats plural as she is the best dressed pooch this side of town! Greyhounds need to keep warm but she honestly has more coats than me! Rosie's history is unknown, so who knows what kind of life she had before she was rescued. I for one certainly would not begrudge her a few coats... Kags has even started knitting jumpers for her and this Christmas she went for walkies round the streets of Dundee in a beautiful Santa red and white one! Bless! So my crafting duties for next year might entail (see what I did there!) some doggy craftyness. I have already made Rosie a swanky collar tassle  - a traditional decoration from when greyhounds were favoured by Royalty and other posh folks. I think these would sell well at a Greyhound fundraiser as well as cards and other papery goodies.
   So, now that's everyone formally introduced! I hope you've enjoyed meeting Rosie and wish her all the best for a lifelong bond and amazing friendship with Kaggy!

Here they are - Little and Large. How did Gypsy get so old and short?

Lots of love for a Magnificent Happy New Year to all of you catching up with me here at my blog!
Jak
xxx

Dough Tags! Twice!

As previously mentioned...
So, yep, I had a crack at making some cornflour dough to make some tags/decorations and as usual in my life anything to do with following a recipe almost always ends up in either a large scale disaster or a smaller scale catastrophe... this trial was no exception! Haha! To start off with, this extremely simple one step, one pot recipe turned into a a major panic-driven two pot escapade when I inadvertently managed to confuse baking soda with baking powder and ended up with a seething, bubbling, mass on a scale with Vesuvius erupting - the overspill of which had to be poured into another large pot which meant I had to look after/cook two at the same time. Eeek!  The recipe didn't give any warning to expect this! I'd followed the very simple, in fact I would say foolproof instructions to add baking soda to cornflour and water only to discover at my peril that baking soda and baking powder are NOT THE SAME THING! Now can I say in my defence I am Scottish and here we have Baking Powder or Bicarbonate of Soda to choose from when baking and so I just assumed that the Baking Soda referred to in the American recipe would be known as Baking Powder here. WRONG! Lol! Fortunately after quite a bit of boiling and stirring two pots at once, I ended up with a very similar sparkly dough that rolled out well that achieved the same results - it just didn't look quite as snowy white and dried a bit coarser looking. Oh, and for goodness sake it made squillions of tags in fact way too many which is why Millie ended up with a load of them to sell at the School Fair.  Not one to be put off by such experiences - hey I take mini disasters in my stride - I decided to give the whole thing another whirl and try making them properly using THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS and a bit less of them. Result! This turned out exactly the way it was intended to! Yippee! Lovely and sparkly, snowy white, smooth dough albeit a bit harder to roll out and softer to work. This time I got a more manageable amount to work with and so in future will stick with my own proportions of ingredients.
Here's my recipe...
1 cup of bicarbonate of soda
1/2 cup of cornflour
1/2 cold water
Heat together on cooker, stirring till it boils.
The mixture will thicken so keep stirring and it will turn into a dough (hopefully, hahaha!)
Let this cool and then you can roll it out. I used some festive cookie cutters to cut out the shapes. You can also use stamps to add a bit of texture - fabric doilies rolled over the dough add a lovely texture and glitter can be added in there too, but I wanted mine mainly plain so I could stamp names on them once dry.  Mine dried in a couple of days as the room they were in was nice and warm - we had the coal fire on and I positioned them nearby to dry slowly but gently. I'm sure they would be fine by a radiator or something similar, just make sure they don't dry too quickly or they might crack.
Here's a couple of piccies of the results and how they look stamped both as a texture and stamped with ink. I've used mine as little tags on my wrapped up parcels but they would look lovely as pretty, rustic decorations hung on a Christmas tree too...
Why not have a try at making them - after all, I make all the mistakes so you don't have to...heehee! That should be my mission statement in life!!!

The top samples are the wrong ones made with baking soda and the bottom row samples are the bicarb soda ones!

You can see that these ones don't take the stamping quite so well as they have a courser texture. They definitely have a pretty sparkle but have an off white colour to them!

This is a sample made with the right ingredients and as you can see it embosses really well with a stamp. As the tags dry the embossing deepens and sharpens up. These ones are beautifully snowy white but aren't quite as sparkly the baking powder ones.

Here they embellishing some parcels.

Here they are stamped...

...and they can be written on too as they are nice and smooth!

I hope the recipients like 'em!
Have a lovely Merry Christmas everyone - I know you will all be very busy in these last days leading up to the big day so thankyou very much for taking the time to visit me here! I appreciate it so much!
Best wishes,
Jak
xxx

So, here's what we've been doing...

Hiya all my crafty friends,
   Christmas is fast approaching and all the girls here have been busy, busy, making lots of fun bits and pieces for Santa's arrival. We've fimoed and cornflour doughed and made a couple of mini loo roll albums - tonight we will be attempting yummy dog biscuits! I'm hoping my (probably pathetic) attempts at doggy treats will be acceptable and that the family pooches shouldn't be too bothered that I'm no Mary Berry when it comes to homemade bakes...
   So, Millie did very well at the school Xmas Craft Fair with her Fimo earrings/badges and managed another sellout! This time we were quite festive with our makes and did some cute polar bears and penguins as well as the old standards - xmas puddings and trees etc and raised nearly £150 in sales! Just when I thought it was safe to put the Fimo back in the cupboard, little Sadie said she wanted to make some bear magnets for all her friends at school for xmas presents! Eeek! I managed to persuade her that she should really only give to her very best friends and so got away with making only four more - phew! Honestly I'm seeing Fimo in my sleep! Still that's it all done now and we can have a wee break.
   

There's some gingerbread men hiding in there somewhere!

Four little friends for four of Sadie's little friends!

I kept thinking of Feathers McGraw while I was making these!

These little bears were made with transparent Fimo which makes them look like they're made of icing!

Now that they are all gone I can't wait to get my table cleaned up and get back to some proper scrapbooking. What have you all been making for Xmas?
Pop by again soon!
Jak
xxx