My favourite smoothie recipe (... or good stuff by stealth)

I've been trying to eat a bit more healthy recently. Since I got a new job a few months ago where I'm getting up at 5am everyday, I've been really lacking in energy - never mind concentration after being bombarded with peoples complaints all day long! I've also been hoping a healthier diet might help improve the condition of my skin a bit, something I'm always fighting against. 

Two things I'm trying out are Matcha tea and more leafy greens. Matcha tea is a fine powder of whole ground green tea leaves, supposedly containing a high boost of antioxidants. The brand I bought, from Holland and Barrett, claims it contains 137 x the antioxidants of other green teas! The benefits are said to range from weight loss and anti-aging properties to improving concentration and boosting your mood. Unfortunately it tastes the same as green tea, which I don't enjoy at all. Being a powder, though, it's quite easy to mix in to other things. I've been putting it into fruit teas until now, but I thought I'd experiment with adding it to smoothies. Kale, too, is thought to be a 'super food' packed full of nutrients - it does, however, have quite a strong flavour and it's one of those things I just don't know what to do with, so I thought I'd have a go at chucking a handful of that in too.

My ingredients are banana, berries (I use frozen - cheap and just as good!), a handful of kale and a teaspoon of matcha powder. I also add a little bit of liquid in the form of fruit squash - I don't like milk in smoothies, and while fruit juice is great it does add a lot of unnecessary sugar which will already be in the fruit. Squash adds a little bit of flavour without being sugary - about half a glass is enough. 

I used my hand blender I normally use for soup making and blended it all together. It doesn't come out super thick, more like a juice.

That's the result right there... I'm not going to lie, the kale and matcha makes it come out a bit of a sludgy pink-brown colour, but don't let that put you off. The good news is it tastes much better than the colour!

...Nope, not even putting it into a cute milk bottle with a polka dot straw can help the look of this one, sorry! However, the matcha and kale, as I hoped, are entirely disguised - what you've essentially got is a nice sweet berry and banana juice with bits. Hurrah! 

Making healthy stuff taste good since 2014...

Vintage and Retro #dicraftswap

The theme of last months #dicraftswap was vintage/retro, a theme I thought would be super easy - turns out it wasn't, as there were just too many possibilities. I was sending to Jenny from the blog Pretty Column, who it turns out is actually not far away from me up north. She listed as her vintage interests the campaign of knitting for soldiers during the wars as well as war posters and propaganda (which made me happy because I'm a bit of a fan too!). I decided to embellish a wooden photo frame with buttons for Jenny to put her own 'retro' memories in, although I did include a 'make do and mend' postcard from the Imperial War Museum.

...Which is what gave me the idea for my bought gift. I sent a copy of the 1943 make do and mend guide produced by the government to advise people how to patch things up and reuse scraps. As Jenny is a knitter too I thought some of it was particularly appropriate...

I put in a few extra treats as well. The post office man laughed at my doily-decorated envelope!

Jenny wrote a post about what she sent to her own recipient here. Her crocheted bunch of flowers are just fantastic!

My parcel arrived from Jess at Dear Wildflower. I had said I loved the 1920's era, and so Jess sent me this beautiful notebook that made me instantly think of The Great Gatsby...

...so when I opened up the rest of the beautifully packaged items I wasn't surprised too see Jess had included a little page cut out from the book itself! She had also included an array of vintage floral patterned and polka dot craft papers and some lovely card blanks and envelopes, as well as a little hedgehog cross stitch kit. I think I'll incorporate the Great Gatsby passage into a card design using some of the flowers from the craft paper sometime. 

 Thank you so much Jess, and thank you as always to Hannah at Dainty and Ivory for organising the swaps. The next theme is Christmas, but is a little more general to allow people to incorporate other ideas too. If you want to sign up get in touch with Hannah by the 15th of November - I promise it's great fun! 

DIY Chalkboard Frame

For this project I used:

- A picture frame. I got mine from poundland - they actually have a really good range of decorative ones.

- A glue gun (or a bit of strong superglue will do fine).

- Black paint.

- A strong fridge magnet - I had a big ugly advertisement one on the fridge already, so used that.

It's so super simple it doesn't really need much of an explanation, but here goes...

I took the back off the frame and took out the glass... (is there a craft use for a spare piece of glass? Let me know if there is, I never like throwing things away if there might be a use for them)

Then I painted the wooden back of the frame with a couple of layers of black paint (I just used a cheap tester pot from Wilko)...

Pancake was keen to assist, as always...

After I put the wooden bit back into the frame, I got out my trusty glue gun (seriously, the best thing ever) and stuck my magnet on the back.

Ta-da! A chalkboard on your fridge, for shopping lists or cute notes. The DIY button magnets can be found right here too, if you're interested.

Simple and quick crafting is where it's at when I've got a 15,000 word dissertation due in, eeek!

Facemask Friday

I used to have a favourite Lush fresh face mask, called Oatifix, but as much as I love Lush products, they are pretty pricey and are only an occasional treat. However, a while ago I received this book as a gift, Carla Oates' Feeding Your Skin, a collection of DIY natural chemical-free recipes for every type of  beauty product possible, from masks and scrubs to the more unexpected hair dyes and nail polish, using things in your kitchen cupboards.

Being on a budget at the moment, I decided to forgo the expensive Lush products for my poor dry skin, and instead raided the cupboards to see what I could make myself. As it turned out, I had everything I needed for the Lemon Tea Mask recipe.. 

Whittards finest English Breakfast, some might say, is a bit too fancy for slapping on your face, but as I've worked there for years it seems I have acquired a lot of loose leaf tea in my house that doesn't get used nearly often enough, so a use might as well be found for it. The book actually uses tea in a lot of the recipes - there's a black tea and apple cider vinegar tint for dark hair I'm keen to try out! Oats, as it happens, weren't actually in the mask recipe above, but in the name of experimentation and trying to replicate my Lush favourite, I chucked a handful in anyway. It actually made the rather sloppy mixture much thicker and easier to use as a mask. 

What I effectively ended up with was a sort of tea-and-lemon-flavoured porridge mix. On the face it went, and it wasn't a half bad replica actually - after 20 minutes my dry skin is looking a bit less hopeless. I'd love to share a picture of the mask in action, but unfortunately -  in the style of Mrs Doubtfire - great lumps kept falling off if I dared to move. I think this could be rectified by perhaps more milk powder or oats to thicken it up, but I think the recipe, and others in the book, are a great starting point to adapt and add to. I'll certainly be making up batches of my own products regularly and testing them out! 

Any great facemask recipes I should try out?

A Sequinned Beach Bag DIY

This DIY was inspired by a recent post over at The Things She Makes, turning a plain old canvas shopper into something much more golden and sparkly. I liked it so much, I dug out a canvas shopper I had already and my glue, and headed to the sewing shop for a sequin-themed shopping spree. The result was pretty similar to the original, but also inspired by the speech bubble noticeboard tutorial on the same blog - find it here! This was my version:

As I had also picked up plenty of blue strung sequins as well, I decided to make another bag to use them on. I had bought a dress in the Primark sale last year for a bargain £3, because I loved the cute boat print on it. It was clearly never going to be worn (I am certainly not a size 6, unfortunately!), so it has been in my pile of 'scrap fabrics' to use for ages. I dug it out to see what could be done with it...

Now, I could have just drawn around the above canvas bag on the fabric and had a nice rectangle. But being lazy, I looked at the elasticated waist and thought, hey, that's the top of a bag ready made right there!

So I chopped it off just above where the elastic was sewn in, turned the excess down on the inside and made a hem. This also meant that the sides of the bag were already done for me, being, as they were, the sides of the dress. All I had to do then was chop off the bottom to vaguely resemble a square and sew it up. Hurrah for laziness! Of course, it couldn't all go so perfectly - I wanted to recycle the straps of the dress as handles, but they were too short, so I made some handles out of the bit of fabric cut off the bottom... (even THAT had one side already sewn from the dress hem, so only seconds work!) I did manage to recycle the buttons and used them for where the handles were sewn to the bag.

Taking a grand total of 20 minutes, with precisely zero measuring, pinning or effort, I had a pretty decent gathered beach bag. OK, it isn't perfect - yes, it does feature 2 different colour threads because I didn't stop to check  - but it proves quick crafting is certainly possible, and sometimes lazy ideas even work! And who cares on the beach anyway?!

Then came the fun bit - I glued on my sparkly blue sequins in an anchor shape on the front, and.. ta-da!

Loving my 2 new bags... Now, what can I use the large amount of leftover sequins for?!

Golden Syrup Goodness

The last few weeks have been crazy busy getting all of my university work in - the deadline was today and I finally submitted everything! I'm not completely free now - I still have to write my 15,000 word dissertation over the summer. But I have a bit more time for all the things I've been wanting to do.

The first thing I did after handing in all my work today? Made a TREACLE TART!

I've never made one before and the last time I made pastry instead of buying it was when I was at school, so I'm pretty pleased it turned out so well.

I used a recipe from the BBC Food website here. It doesn't require many ingredients at all really.

For the pastry:
225g Plain Flour
110g Butter
1 Egg

Rub in the butter and flour and add the egg, and knead into dough. Blind bake in the oven first for 15 minutes in the tin.

For the filling:
450g Golden Syrup
85g Fresh Breadcrumbs
Pinch of Ground Ginger
2 tbsp Lemon Juice

Just chuck them all in a bowl and mix! Pour in and bake for 30 minutes.

The trickiest bit was the breadcrumbs - I spent ages trying to grate bread to make them until I realised I could put them in a blender. I think next time I might add something else to it to make it more interesting - maybe some walnuts. But for now, super sweet deliciousness is perfect, just what I needed after all the work!

Valentine's Gift Bag Tutorial

Happy Valentine's! Well, almost..

We don't really celebrate in a big way, but I do have a small gift to give, so I thought I'd make it a bit more personal by making a gift bag to give it in. There are LOADS of gift bag/box tutorials online, and mine here is pretty simple, so I've also included some of my favourites for something more fancy :)

First, find some pretty paper. Scrapbook paper or card would work well. I used some pretty hot air balloon pattern wrapping paper (he's a bit of a balloon fan) - luckily this paper is quite sturdy, this might be a bit trickier with thinner type wrapping paper though. 

Next, measure your gift onto the paper. Draw your pattern around this, so you get a larger size than your item. This is just a really simple template - 4 sides, slits along the bottom so you can glue it all together, and a tab at the side to join. I also folded over the top to make it look a bit more neat when it is together. 

This is what happens when you glue it all together... 

I pinched in the sides and punched a couple of holes at the top. After putting in the gift, tie a bow with string or ribbon.. and that's it! 

Well, I did say it was simple...

Here's my Valentine's offerings, with my gift being accompanied by a jar of treats - in this case LOTS of jellybeans. I hope he shares! 

And take a look at my DIY Fox Box tutorial for more gift-giving inspiration!

If these aren't your bag, here's a few of my favourite tutorials to give a go.

Awesome DIY gift box for Cookies and other treats - find the tutorial here

Recycled newspaper gift bags - find the tutorial here

A super colourful variety of the easy square origami boxes we have all made before - make it here

...Or how about these recycled cardboard pillow boxes? Perfect for small things - here

<3

Crafty Creatives and Christmas

So this week my Crafty Creatives Christmas box arrived.. and there was so much packed into this little box! 3 kits (to make fancy beaded baubles, honey lip scrub and felt tree decorations), as well as ribbon, wooden rings for wreaths, all sorts of different beads and decorations, gift boxes and craft papers and card blanks..

Some of my favourite things inside - wooden snowflakes (these just need a bit of thread on them and they can hang on the tree), tiny silver snowflake charms and JINGLE BELLS! There was also some cute chunky wooden tree beads, some of which I've already used to make...

... A Christmas wreath! Just a mini one so far, but it was fun to make and now I want to make a much bigger one for the front door. Ahh, so excited for putting the tree and decorations up!

I was very impressed with the special edition Crafty Creatives box, certainly worth the slightly higher price this time. I'm going to have a go making the lip scrubs next :)

Christmas Wreath DIYs

I really want to make a Christmas wreath for our front door this year, as there wasn't much festive decoration in our flat last year.. We had a tree with nothing on it! I'd like to do something a bit different though, so have been looking put for ideas. These are some of my favourites..

1. Christmas card wreath - tutorial

2. Paper doily wreath - tutorial

(These Paperchase pegs would be perfect for the first one..)

3. Ribbon bow wreath - tutorial

4. Scrap paper and button wreath - found here

5. Photo frame wreath - tutorial

I'll definitely do a variation on the first one, as it is a nice way to display Christmas cards too (although I'll have to wait until I receive any first!) I think a button wreath would be a great idea too, in red and gold colours, and as I haven't managed to find any like that from a quick look I'll hopefully give it a try and perhaps have a tutorial on it!

...any other great DIY Christmas wreath ideas?