Painting up a storm! (Tiles as coasters)

We have just painted our cold porcelain and when we had finished we had 6 tiles with paint on them. So we decided to blend the paint on the tiles to make 6 very different tiles. Its amazing to see how different they all come out! We did this with all our leftover oil paint.

easy sweets

This is one of those days where it is almost impossible to do anything on the internet a drawback of having a slow internet server! So I decided to add onto our blog as it is the only thing that seems to be responding today. These are some Butterballs that my children and I made the other day. We got the recipe from Family Favourites Cookbook-Alison Holst and it is really easy to make and uses almost no ingredients. The toffee is very hard and buttery to the taste....my kids love it and funny enough even my husband enjoyed them though he isn't big on sweet things. One thing I have to warn about the recipe tells you to put a thick layer of butter on and you really need to otherwise it sticks to the pan...you also need to work fast once you take the toffee off the heat as it hardens fast!

BUTTERBALLS

half cup sugar
2 tablespoons water
2 tablespoons honey (we used honey syrup)
2 tablespoons butter (we used margarine)
half teaspoon rum essence 

Put the sugar and water into a small pan and heat gently until it dissolves.
Add the honey and butter and boil gently, without stirring.
Get a shallow container of cold water, and dip some of the mix into it.
When the drops harden and break when you bite them take the pan off the heat and leave to cool a little.
While you wait rub a thick layer of butter on a metal plate.
Add the essence to the mixture, stir it gently then pour it onto the plate.
When cool enough to touch push into a lump and twist into a rope.
Cut pieces off the rope using buttered scissors, and roll into balls.
(We just shaped it into a long rope and cut square pieces)

Yum Yum all done!

Cold Porcelain (play dough)

So today Cath and I even got the men helping with the cold porcelain so we were all in the kitchen chatting. One thing we have noticed is that this brings the family closer together, our ears have been bombarded by ideas from our helpers and they have even made notebooks to put all their great ideas in!

You can make so much with this necklace pendants, beads, brooches. fridge magnets. We had tons of fun with this but as you can see we have to wait for it to dry before painting it. We will let you know how it dries and take photos once we have painted everything. Cath found the recipe on craftstylish and it has been so much fun trying this out. I am sure we will be using it many more times!

Sunny Cushions !

Hey Everyone,

Look at what we've made.  Sunny cushions.  Courtney and I got the inspiration for these delightful cushions from a very old book of crafts (from the 1930's).  It is a marvellous way to use up scraps.