Anyway, I signed up to the UK Craft swap on Craftster a few weeks ago and then was struck with complete panic over what to make. The premis of this swap was that we’d make something that reflected where we live and I was completely stuck for inspiration until I remembered how much I lurrrve tablet and so I gave it a go. My swap partner hasn’t received her parcel yet but I shall feed back what she thinks once she’s opened it.

I have to say that I’m raging I waited this long to try and make it because it was dead easy. So! Here I shall walk you through it. PLEASE don’t make this if there are kids around you, leave it until they’ve gone to bed. Also – in case I don’t remind you enough during the instructions do NOT stop stirring.

Ingredients
1kg white sugar (caster or granulated is fine)
120ml (1/2 cup) milk
100g unsalted butter
1 can (approx 400g) condensed milk (I found a non-Nestle version by a company called Farmlea in Sainsburys)

You will also need:
The largest pan you own (stock-pot kind of size)
a cup of cold water
a teaspoon
one square baking tray, lined with greaseproof paper
Wooden spoon

1. Make sure you have everything in the above list because if you have to stop stirring your tablet, you’ll ruin the whole lot and you’ll be furious at yourself. Trust me on this.
2. Put the sugar into the pan and pour the milk evenly over the top. Cut your butter into slices and put it in the pan with the condensed milk. Lick the condensed milk spoon (this stuff has 1300 calories per can. Relish it.) Turn the heat on the lowest setting and start stirring.
3. Once the sugar melts and the mixture becomes more liquid, turn the heat up to a medium level. Keep stirring until the mixture comes to the boil, making sure you regularly run the spoon around the bottom of the pan. You’ll notice that the mixture changes colour suddenly – keep stirring until you feel the mixture become more viscous. It took me about 45 minutes to get to this stage.
4. Turn the heat off, quickly take your teaspoon and scoop a little of the mixture out and dunk it into the cold water. You are looking for your mixture to ooze off the spoon slowly. If you feel it – carefully! it’s still hot! – it should be quite hard. Pour your tablet mixture into your pre-prepared lined tin.
5. Leave for 10-15 minutes then take a sharp knife and quickly mark your tablet into small bite-sized pieces. Leave your tablet to cool completely – or better still, overnight – before turning out of the pan and breaking up.
6. Give to anyone you wish to be your bestestest friend. Hide from the children.

Let me know how you get on if you make this!

Looking forward to seeing what everyone has made!

It’s not that I don’t want to be creative – Lord knows I do – but I am just so busy right now. I genuinely don’t know how certain other blogging, homeschooling mothers-of-many manage without liberal applications of prozac, coffee and w(h)ine. So I’ve decided that since the important thing is to write, I shall do so even if it isn’t much to do with crafting or parenting. So today’s topic du choix is “Keeping up appearances“.

I found this photo in one of the many flickr groups I’m a member of:

and I was instantly drawn in to the clean, calm and serene aura given off. This is what I aspire to! A bit of nosying around helped me find that the photographer also writes a blog. I think it’s testament to her fabulous eye for photographs and beautiful subject matter that I’ve spent the last hour gazing at this blog despite it being written in Swedish. I could whinge and whine about my lack of photography talent, but I shan’t because if I put the effort in to learn how to use our fancy camera then I’d improve my own pictures greatly. Time, alas, is not my friend. So instead I shall whinge and whine about my messy house.

The reason I even found that photograph is because my bedroom is tidy and I was inspired to go rooting through flickr to look at other people’s home space. The tidy bedroom may not seem like a big deal to you Amanda Soule/Nigella Lawson types with the perfect houses (Manda McGrory I’m looking at you) but we have lived here for 3y8m and my house is the tidiest it has ever been. If I can just get the quail out of my hall and encourage my children to stop drawing on any wall they choose, I might be able to post similar pictures of my beautiful home.
Admission time:
1) It took two days of almost non-stop tidying supplemented with Season 5 of The West Wing, many cups of tea and cake to gain access to my desk.
2) The kids have watched a lot of TV this week.
3) After we kept buying socks because we had no clean pairs, I bullied Bob into sorting out our long-neglected sock mountain. About 80 pairs, we estimate.
4) We finally unpacked some boxes that we had abandoned since we moved here. Oops?
5) I convinced our supermarket delivery driver to leave the crates so that I could unpack them at my leisure. Whether it was sympathy (we had 12 crates of shopping!!) or fear (I think the kids were all naked when he arrived) he acquiesced and honestly these crates are the best storage ever. I have six in my bedroom now neatly organised with my craft supplies.
6) I’m seriously considering making slipcovers for the aforementioned half-inched delivery crates, partly because green doesn’t go with my room and partly because it’ll hide my guilt

I honestly want to know how other parents manage it. I turned my back for two minutes yesterday and Nairn & Erica had the floor covered in bits from their “Decorate your own Easter bonnet” kits including various brightly coloured feathers, sequins and other toddler-oriented craft crap. We were 100% sure we’d hidden all the pens away from Erica only for her to have actually deliberately stashed some and used them to draw on the sofa AGAIN. Should I post a photograph of our reality? I think not, that is how to lose friends methinks. Tell me, friends: How do you do it?!

Please note, due to slow questionnaire returns the Little and Large swap sign-up has been extended and swap partners will be allocated ASAP!

The little and large swap of 2010
Okay, so! The premis of this swap is that we can do some crafting with our kids and get to know some similarly crafty families in the process. You don’t need to be a parent to participate but you do need to acquire a child to craft with – Aunties and Uncles or even childminders can get in on the action here – and it’s all in the name of fun. Participants will be matched as closely as possible on the number of children and their ages.

The Rules
1) Swap partners will be allocated on a build-a-relationship basis – that is to say, you will be given the email address of your partner and heartily encouraged to converse before sending your parcel.
2) Participants will encourage and assist their child(ren) to make something for their child(ren) counterpart and will themselves make something for the child(ren). Additionally, the adult participants should send a treat to their counterpart – a nice bar of chocolate, a magazine or suchlike. I would like to see letters being exchanged between the children but I appreciate that some of them may not be at a letter-writing stage.
3) Sign-ups open today and close in one week on Wednesday April 7th 2010 at midnight. Participants will receive their partner’s questionnaire by midnight on Thursday April 8th 2010 and have until Thursday May 6th 2010 to post their parcel. This date has been picked so that even UK second class post should have arrived by the weekend but international participants are also encouraged.
4) I cannot stress this enough: This is a swap to benefit the kids, if you don’t think you can send out your parcel in time then don’t join in. The idea of a child who has worked really hard on their present waiting for a late parcel makes me cry.
5) Participants should email me with the answers to this questionnaire:

Your name:
Name(s) & age(s) of the child(ren) participating:
Address:
Your blog/twitter/website/shop address:
What constitutes a treat for you:
Are sweets allowed for the little participant(s):
What is your craft discipline:
Some info about the little participant(s) – likes, dislikes, allergies etc

I’ll get to work on a swap button and a flickr group. I can’t wait to hear from you!

Anyway, one of the subjects we explored was business promotion and the topic of swaps came up – now I do enjoy a good swap and I like to think that I have organised some enjoyable ones but as an aside to getting to know other crafters better, it’s a superb way to drive new traffic to your blog and therefore your business. Here are my tips for a great swap.

Come up with an idea
If you’ve been around the crafting community for any length of time you’ll know that there are fashions and trends which are in vogue at any given time. To make a good swap, you want a theme that complements those trends whilst being a subject that inspires you. Try not to overegg the pudding as it were, go for an original twist on a popular concept.

Decide on the format for your swap
Are you going to have your swappers anonymous so that they receive a package with no idea who it’s from? Are you planning a direct swap where you pair up crafters and they can converse before sending their swap goodies? Are you having a more tiered swap where person a makes for person b who makes for person c ad finitum? Consider the pros and cons to each and go from there.

Set an achievable deadline by knowing your target audience
I couldn’t sign up to a swap with a two week deadline – I have four children, a husband, a business and various commitments that restrict my time – so knowing who is likely to join your swap is a great tool. Ask your blog readers/twitter followers/facebook friends for their opinion. I generally go for 4-6 weeks after sign-ups have finished to give participants a bit of headspace.

Make your participants send you a questionnaire that you can send onto their swap partner
It doesn’t need to be War and Peace, but a questionnaire will not only help you to allocate partners it’ll give your participants something to go on which is especially useful if they have a less than chatty partner to craft for. Generally my questionnaires ask for:
Name:
Address:
Blog/shop/twitter address:
Likes/Dislikes (including allergies!):

Give consideration to your participants and their crafts
Generally speaking, I try to match crafters from different disciplines rather than pairing a knitter with another knitter or a resin artist with another resin artist. Let’s be honest here, if I want to knit something for myself then I will but I’m not good at jewellery making and I’m less likely to make my own things. If in doubt, ask your participants to specify in their questionnaire which craft disciplines they’re most interested in receiving from.

Keep records
I particularly like gmail’s email system because of the way it stores emails and the ability to ‘star’ emails to find easily later. Keep a spreadsheet to remind you who you have partnered up because there will always be a participant who deletes their email!

Promote! Promote! Promote!

Social networking is your friend. Post about your swap on twitter, create a facebook page affiliated to your blog and post about it there, make sure you are regularly commenting on blogs you like because if you leave a well-considered and thoughtful comment you will get traffic back from that blog’s other readers. Join and participate on craft forums that appeal to your ethics – like everyone I enjoy Craftster but it’s so big that I feel intimidated posting there. My favourite UK-based craft forum is Crafteroo. If there are others that you enjoy tell me in the comments and I’ll add them here.

Share your swap
Make an image that your participants can post on their blog (“I am participating in Vonnie’s sleep swap!”) which can link back to you. Create a flickr group where participants can post photos of their given and received goodies. Encourage your participants to talk about the swap by doing it yourself – blog about it, tweet about it and mention it so often that you worry your sole topic of conversation is your swap. The internet as an entity has a short memory span, remind people about how awesome you – and by default your swap – are.

Enjoy it!
The day you have to allocate your swap participants you’ll wish you’d never bothered, that should be the only point where it feels like hard work

So I hope this is helpful to those of you who have considered your own swaps but not known how to go about it. I promise you, if I can organise one so can any of you. Good luck!

So! I have a swap idea – it’s a parent and child(ren) collaboration, the kids make something for each other and send it along with a letter and the parents make something for the children and send a treat for the other parent. Does that make sense? This way, hopefully we can foster penpal-type relationships between our increasingly computerised spawn whilst making friends with another parent?

If you’re interested, please comment so I can get an idea of how successful this would be. A lengthy prep time before sending would make sense, so final posting in early May? What do you think?

The fabulous Claire Payne is hosting a pincushion swap over on her blog and sign ups close on Sunday (14th March). You get a whole month to make your pincushion and send it to your swap partner so why not go for it? I’ve just signed up to try and get me back into the swing of crafting regularly and even I can cope with a month-long deadline

Unfortunately, being as far North as we are I’m struggling to get good photographs these days so you’ll have to make do with this. Time to dig out the lightbox again perhaps!

On the left there are two brooches, in the middle there are two hair bobbles, a keyring, a ring and a necklace. I had initially made a bracelet and decided I hated it so had to start afresh. I packaged these up with a FQ of Japanese fabric and a little pouch of Daim sweeties so hopefully Laura is happy.

I will get a photo of what she sent me later in the week Thanks to Sam for hosting this swap!

I’ve also joined in Apryl’s Fantasy Movie swap which I’m massively excited about. I’ve been partnered with Christa who shares the same favourite film as me (The Labyrinth) so I need to get cracking on with my crafting for her

Also! I didn’t want to post about this until after the fact, but I have been crafting again! My lovely friend Fiona got married on Saturday and she mentioned a few months ago that she had loads to do but no time to do it. I asked if I could help and she asked me to make the ties for her groomsmen (the pink ones). This of course gives me an opportunity to share a photo of the gorgeous bride and her handsome new husband.

Aren’t they gorgeous? I’m so thrilled for them and it was an honour to share their day, they are such a fantastic couple and I just know they’re going to make one another so happy.

I’ll leave you with a bit more pink. I am a bad Mummy.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that my children (Nairn in particular) are obsessed with starbucks and in particular with their ooey gooey marshmallow twizzlers? Now I’m not a skinflint by any stretch of the imagination but £1.50 for three marshmallows and a bit of chocolate is extortion in my book and definitely comes under the veil of, “Things wot I could do myself for cheaper”. I should mention as Apryl reminded me that you can do this with bananas too, I usually skewer the banana and stick it in the freezer for about an hour so that it’s easier and more solid to work with.

So! Stick a few marshmallows on a skewer like so. Melt your 100g bar of chocolate in the microwave or in a double broiler, and dip the skewer into the melted chocolate, lift and tap the skewer on the side of the bowl to let any big drips fall off.

Holding your skewer over a bowl, shake some hundreds and thousands over your skewer. Dip the end into the bowl to make sure it’s coated.

Place your skewer into a glass and put in the fridge to let the chocolate set

Hand to 8 year old child for a verdict.