Christmas Times - fun things with fun people!

Hello All - I hope you had a fun Christmas time, if you celebrate it, if not I hope you had a great weekend.

I've had a great Christmas day and Christmas time in general, so rather than just do a Christmas day post I thought I'd roll all of the Christmas adventures over the past few weeks into one blog post.

I caught up with Ria after she'd finished some big projects and we had dinner, ice cream and took selfie's by the city Christmas tree.

We went home the weekend before Christmas to have an early Christmas with my family, and I bought my nephew that "when I grow up I want to be a zombie" t-shirt, because I'm an awesome auntie. He actually DOES like zombies,  its not just because I like zombies. 

We also got to see Sultan and feed him carrots - I kind of love this photo as you can see the mountain between his ears!

We also visited Naumai Park before, where I had strangely never been! It was a really lovely spot.

I decided to finish up work early this year (my final day was the Wednesday before Christmas) and I spent Thursday afternoon hanging out with Ria - having lunch, sewing and exchanging gifts. She really spoiled me! I'm lucky to have such a thoughtful friend. 

She gave me a candle, some homemade passion fruit curd and toasted coconut, but the best thing of all was this portrait!

That's right! She painted me a portrait of Mia!! I was so excited - as you can see!

 I also bought her some treasures, I really had in mind something rad I wanted to make her but life was so hectic in the weeks leading up to Christmas and it didn't happen.

I also started sewing some fun Christmas stockings whilst I was at Ria's as this year Rich and I decided we would fill a Christmas stocking for each other.

Christmas day itself was pretty quiet around here, which was nice, Rich made pancakes for breakfast and we got to see what was in our stockings!

I will probably do a couple of extra posts about all of my Christmas sewing, but until then, I thought I'd share a photo of the stockings I made for us - no prizes for guessing which one belongs to me!

These are the goodies I received from Rich! A pin, patch, squirrel notebook and some hazelnut treats.

I also made Mia a wee bow tie for Christmas, she wasn't very impressed with the bow tie but I did manage to get one cute picture!

We went for a big walk on Christmas day, to the summit of Mount Victoria and along Oriental Parade.

I  also managed to finish up a new dress to wear to Christmas dinner on Christmas day! I will do a separate post about the dress soon as I need to take a few more photos!

Our friends kindly invited us to their place for Christmas dinner and we had a delicious meal and decorated cookies!

We also  got to hang out with some feathered friends, as our friends live near the Zealandia Sanctuary, this guy is a kaka which is a native New Zealand parrot.

Finally we opened the Christmas cracker that my Mum gave Mia, I promise she did play with the ball for a bit - even if she looks super GRUMPY in the last photo!

Handmade Christmas Present

I always have a million ideas floating  around my mind of what I could make my family near Christmas time - t-shirts for my brothers? shorts for my nephew? a shirt for Rich? an apron for my mum? But in the chaos that is Christmas I usually end up making nothing. So when I actually managed to make one Christmas present this year I was pretty impressed with myself.

I ended up making a dress for Sophiia, its another fancy party type dress and I used the same pattern as I did for the Princess Sophiia Dress. This dress is pretty much identical to the Princess Sophiia dress except for two things. First of all the fabric choice.

I don't really like making pink things for girls as whenever I'm in a store that sells clothes for kids all the little girl clothes seem to be pink and I don't like it - little girls should have variety too!

I totally opted out of pink and chose this fabric with a bunting print. I bought it from a New Zealand Fabric Destash Group on Facebook, if you're interested you can find the group here.

I also decided  this time around I wanted to add some trim to the dress, I'm trying to not always take the shortest possible route when it comes to my sewing projects and take time to add things like pockets and trim if I think it will actually make my projects better.

Your eyes do not deceive you, this is glitter ric rac - just when you thought ric rac couldn't get any better. I bought this ric rac at fabric-a-brac in its original packaging for a couple of dollars.

 

I should have perhaps given the dress a bit of a better iron before taking the photo - rookie error! I was pretty happy with how it turned out though. 

Also unlike the Princess Sophiia Dress I can actually share an action shot of this dress with a photo my brother added to Facebook on Christmas day.

The dress is a little too big for Sophiia right now, but hopefully she will grow into it soon and my Mum said she might be able to add a couple of darts to help the fit. Even if neither of those things work out its a great little dress up frock still.

Also you might notice Lukah is wearing a suit, he asked my brother to buy him a suit for Christmas so he can "dress up nice" when they go out to dinner. When I spoke to him on Christmas I told him next time he comes to visit he should bring his suit and we can have a fancy dinner, his response? "Do you think I should bring the tie or the bow tie when I come, because Dad bought me both to wear with my suit" - I love that kid, he's so cute.

Christmas Decoration Swap 2015

If you've been following my blog for a while you may remember the Christmas decoration swap  I did with some of my friends last year, we decided to do the same swap again this year but kept it low key - rather than making decorations for everyone we each made one decoration for one person.

My friend Joy was kind enough to arrange swap partners and my partner was Shell. As you guys all know I love to cross-stitch and decided to make Shell a cross-stitch decoration. I was only meant to make a small decoration, but when I found this design  by Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery I knew I was making a hoopla.

The pattern is called "Here comes Santa Claus" and it basically killed me with cute - I think Shell was pretty into it too.

Next up is Joy's decoration, made by Shell. It's pretty amazing - a measuring tape, turned into a festive bow, to hang on the tree. For bonus recycling points Shell told us she got the measuring tape in a Christmas cracker the previous year.

Ria's decoration is up next and it was made by Joy who has this amazing paper cutting computer thing that I don't understand at all, but she makes so amazing stuff with it!

The flower is the Pohutukawa which is also called New Zealand's Christmas tree and they are in full bloom at the moment as it is summer time. Joy also gave us all some of he off cuts from her creative process - we all got a mini Pohutukawa.

Finally, my decoration! I was lucky enough to have Ria as my partner and she gave me something perfect.

Last year Ria made me a Jack Skellington as my favourite Christmas movie is The Nightmare Before Christmas (I know you're all really surprised by that). This year she totally hit the nail on the head with my decoration again.

In Nightmare, Christmas and Halloween merge and all of the Christmas icons end up being creepy (basically my dream for Christmas) including the humble Christmas wreath. I don't think the wreath actually has a name in the movie, so we decided "Keith the Wreath" was appropriate. I love it so much.

So that was this years swap - I hope this can be an annual event with this bunch of friends. Here are a few more photos we took on the day just for fun.

I hope you've all been having a wonderful Christmas whatever you have been up to, ours has been very quiet but we have been enjoying lots of sunshine.