Happy 1st December

Its officially December which means we are well and truly in the run up to Christmas! My mum went to a quilt exhibition recently at a local community centre and told me about these fabric Christmas trees she had seen there. After googling it to find out how they were done we found a tutorial on The Pursuit of Happiness.
I found some festive holly fabric at Boyes for 4.59 a metre and bought half a metre to try it out! The result is a cute Christmas tree that was very easy to make - the most time consuming but was sewing up the bottom after stuffing it but if you put Love Actually on in the background it doesn't seem to take that long! The tutorial is great, the only thing I did was print the half of the template on one A4 page and the other half on another to get the right size tree.

Christmas Tree

I also made a second tree for my friend Tori who came over yesterday. Last year we made gingerbread men before Christmas, this year we took it one step further and made mini gingerbread houses. I have not have much luck in the past with gingerbread houses - although very delicious, I could never get the roof to stay on! I hoped that making them on a smaller scale might help - and whatever it was, these houses worked!

Gingerbread Creations

 I made the gingerbread dough using this recipe from Art of Dessert so that my housemate Holly (who is allergic to egg) could still eat them. The only changes I made was using brown sugar instead of white and golden syrup (I live in England and have no idea where to get corn syrup!). One batch made enough for two small houses, 5 trees, 2 snowmen, 4 rocking horses, 3 stars, 2 hearts and a moon. Tori was in charge of decoration supplies and turned up with chocolate buttons, mini marshmallows, jelly diamonds, purple glitter and pink sprinkles!
We also made the egg free royal icing suggested with the gingerbread recipe which worked well as glue. My house has a cheeky Oreo in the middle which was there to support the walls! We spent a great couple of hours listening to Christmas tunes whilst we made our houses. These are SO much fun seriously -give it a go!

My House

Tori's House

Love Rebecca