Dipping into my stash

I have a sister-in-law who likes to travel, she has gone to Italy twice, traveled through the rest of Europe, England and late last year went to America, Argentina & Brazil. And she usually brings back something chocolate for me, I have chocolate pasta and quite a few packets of hot chocolate mix.

For ages I have just stored all these hot chocolates in our pantry. But not this year. I have been trying the international hot chocolates (someone has to do it).

Hot Chocolate with candy cane mixed in. To be honest sounded better than it tasted. Loved the smell, brings about memories of Christmas. After a read of the ingredients I found the reason why I didn't like the taste, milk powder. According to the packet instructions you just have to add hot water, I don't like to add just hot water. Personally think that hot chocolate made from just water tastes watery and not too nice, also don't like the taste of milk powder so I thought that I would mask the taste of the milk powder with real milk. Nope....didn't work.

Overall not a great success (loved the packet graphic!), oh well.

I had a couple of packets of this hot chocolate, my WH (wonderful husband) made one a couple of winters ago but didn't read the instructions, which I will point of now are in Italian. So though it tasted great it wasn't any different from the hot chocolate mixture I buy at the store. This time I decided to try to figure of the instructions (how hard could it be?). Pretty hard. I could only figure out one instruction and that was the amount of milk that was needed 125 and I guessed it was ml.

So I poured the milk into the pan and when it was starting to warm up added the contents of the packets and gave it a good whisk. I left the pan for a few seconds to get something for my WH and when I returned, oh yum! The mixture had become all thick and smelled wonderful. I poured it into a soup cup and this is what I needed up with.

Thick, rich and oh so yummy. Had to be eaten with a spoon and I was so said when I had eaten it all. Yummy, yummy, yummy.

Can't wait to see if my sister-in-law goes overseas again and brings me back some more hot chocolate.

Newest creation

A good friend of ours had her birthday recently and I made her this card

I love the result

The image I found on Martha Stewart's website, it was meant for a Mother's Day card, which I had every intention of making. But when I sat down to do it the image just didn't seem right for either of our Mother's (mine or my WH's (Wonderful Husband)). But then our friend T had her birthday, T is vintagey hippy type of girl. She lives in a small converted dairy on her parents property, and it is filled with furniture and decor that she has found on the road side or at Op Shops. So the image would suit her perfectly.

On Martha Stewart's website the image was designed to have the buttons sew on, I glued them on (laziness, mostly), and that was it. Which looked great but to me wasn't finished. So I cut a couple of slits into the card and threaded a piece of ribbon, alittle folding and tada! A scarf! The image to me had a windswept feel and the scarf ribbon gives that feel perfectly.

I am considering adding similar cards to my Etsy shop SuJoh, using vintage photo's and postcards. But I am still playing with the idea.

Hey! That's me!

My first reaction when I was checking out my cousin Talia's blog this evening, she has done a great video blog about her favourite crafting tools. Check it out!

Thanks for the plug Talia, I have a slight obession with tags and chipboard letters.

Score!

On Friday I took myself to my favourite charity store to have a search around for some storage containers for our house and also some fabric that I can use to make items for my ETSY shop SuJoh.

No luck on the fabric hunt, so nice printed skirts and a really nice blue set of curtains, but nothing really grabbed me. I also found two really nice silk scarfs but couldn't think of what to do with them so left them where they were. Then right at the back of the store I spotted these....





Great condition, hardly any wear and no rust as far as I can tell. Fell in love! They cost me $3 each, which was all my budget that I had brought with me. The blue basket is alittle smaller than the black one I am planning on storing my veranda garden supplies in it on top of the fridge, and use it when I am picking fruit from our fruit tree down the backyard. Particularly good size for bringing up to the house a large amount of lemons which I use in cleaning around the house (a good substitute for bleach in most situations and no awful bleach smell!).

The larger black basket in currently in use in our lounge room, it is sitting in our TV unit we got from Ikea a few months back (click here). It holds the blankets that we use during those very cold nights when our heater just isn't enough (also love curling up under a blanket with a good book and a hot chocolate). I am just so happy with this find, totally useful and just what I had been looking for.

Open for business!

YEAH!

I have listed my first three items for sale on my Etsy shop SuJoh.

Please pop over and have a look, let me know what you think!

I am also developing an idea for my shop that will allow me to share my love of scrapbooking, and my obsessive love of going to scrapbooking store.

It is called;

Customisable Scrapbooking Pages

Basically I will be designing scrapbook pages and people would send me photo's and I would place those photo's on the layout and send the now completely layout to the person who sent me the photo's.

Still working out all the details, stay tuned for more.

So in love!

I found this background and just had to use it, I think that I am alittle ADHD when it comes to this blog. I just find it fun to play with the look and the feel. I have been very good not to change the name lately, I really like my blog name. It is quite simple but speaks volumes (I think) about me. Take me as I am cause that is all I am. I really feel that God has been working on making me happy with who I am and seeing the value in that person.

Going with my ADHDness I have changed the name of my ETSY shop, it is now SuJoh and combination of my first and last name. I really like the new name and think that it says that this is my store/brand but I can still stand back from it when I need to. I have seen people start ventures like this and they get caught up and ultimately burnt out. I don't want to do that, because I love making the things that I am going to be selling and I don't want to lose that love. That is one of my greatest fears, I don't want this to become 'work' something I just do and not enjoy.

Two days to go before items go up for sale on my ETSY store! Woohoo!

I have an opening....

Due to the birth of my new baby niece I have had to put back the opening of my Etsy store, can't focus on the store as well as all that comes with a new addition to our family.

But I thought that I would give a little preview of some of the things that I have been working on for the store.

I really like the way that the Journal covers have turned out, particularly like the one with the coordinating flowers, bit more time consuming but love how it turned out. Very tempted to keep it for myself.

My new plan is to start selling end of next week (16th July 2010), so exciting to have an official date!

Got my groove back

Since I did this scrapbooking page I have been trying to get into creating another one. With very little success, life seemed to have gotten in my way abit and I just didn't have the motivation or creative spark. Papers did inspire me and I could like of colours that would look good with photo's I wanted to scrap. Not happy :-(

A couple of weeks ago and great friend of mine had me and another friend over to her place for a scrapping day. We use to do these alot of scrapping days last year but things have gotten so busy that we havn't been able to find any common free time. It was wonderful to sit and chat and slowly bring a page together. I didn't finish the page at the scrapping day but that really wasn't the point, I had got things moving though.

Today is my WH (wonderful husbands) day off and we descided to have a TV free day, which has been great definatly recommend giving a TV free day a try. So this morning I put away my scrapbooking supplies away from that scrapping day with my friend (they had been sitting all packed up for weeks!) and cleaned my scrapping desk up abit. Then I got out the half finished page and set about finishing it off, it took me all day of on and off scrapping but I am so proud to say that I finished it! Woohoo!

And I am also happy to report that I now want to go and start another page, but it is almost dinner time so I am joining my WH in the lounge, he is cooking and I am blogging and checking emails. Scrapping time is over for today, maybe Wednesday.

Our family is growing

Friday marked the addition of a new family member, my WH's (wonderful husband) brother and his wife have welcomed a new little baby.

She is sooooo small, hard to believe that her bigger brother who we spend alot of time with and love very much was that small about two years ago. Me and my WH are also little Isabella's Godparents, which was a total surprise and honor when we were asked. Honestly I am not sure about the roles of a Godparent, I have Godparents myself but I only really have a vague memory of them. My sister on the other hand has wonderful people as Godparents, they are cousins of my Mother and live in England. When we were children they would visit once a year or so and always brought amazing gifts and were incredibly generous. When my sister went to England a year and a bit ago she stayed with her Godparents and they treated her as if she was their own daughter. Though I don't really know the offical job of a Godparent I hope and pray that me and my WH can be as important and special to our Goddaughter Isabella as my sisters Godparents are to her and the rest of my family.