A salty, sandy Christmas in Sydney

I hope everyone had a magical Christmas!  I will be along to visit you all soon.  In the meantime,  here are some photos of our Christmas in Sydney:

Decorations hanging from my beloved rusty lobster pot.

The Captain King and his favourite gift from Santa!

A Snow Sandman

Wishing you all health and happiness for the New Year!

Christmas Lolly jars

This post originally appeared on an old blog called The Brothers Trimm - I just wanted to add them to my personal blog in order to store the memory!

Christmas Lolly Jars

Materials:

old jars

buttons

glue gun

poms poms in white and red

glasses

eyes

pipe cleaners

(all of these items can be found at Spotlight or similar craft shops)

Making the lolly jars:

Get the glue gun out and start glueing!  Make sure you supervise closely as the glue gun gets super hot.

Lastly fill with lollies or shortbread, ours are to decorate the kids Christmas table with, but they would also make great home made Christmas gifts!

It's been 6 years... and best wishes to the lovely Jane.

Recently I celebrated my sixth wedding annniversary.    In this relatively short time, together we have experienced the truly magnificent and also the one rather random and unexpected shock, it has almost all been magnificent though and I am truly grateful to my wonderful husband for the last six years.

It hardly seems possible that it was six years ago that we gathered all our friends and family together to celebrate our marriage:

and drank copious amounts of champagne and watched fireworks and celebrated till early the next morning:

at my favourite place in the world:

A special day, but it all seems rather insignificant though in the scheme of things when I think that today the lovely, dignified and courageous Jane undergoes surgery.   Best wishes for a speedy recovery Jane.

Christmas button ornaments

This post originally appeared on an old blog called The Brother's Trimm - I just wanted to add it to my personal blog in order to preserve the memory!

Christmas Button Ornaments

Button Christmas ornaments are a fabulous Make and Do Project as almost all the necessary supplies are readily available and very cheap.  I had a big jar of buttons that didn't seem to belong to anything and combined with a pack of pipe cleaners we were all ready to go with a great Christmas craft activity.  This is an activity that can be done by children as young as two, Baby Pirate is two and a half and with a little help every now and again he loved it.  Threading the pipe cleaners through the button holes was great for improving his eye hand coordination and the organising of the buttons was great for sorting skill development.  All in all, a great Make and Do project!

Materials:

Buttons
Pipe Cleaners
Scissors
Ribbon

Making "wreath" button ornaments:

Select a pipe cleaner and start threading!
When they have decided that there are enough buttons on their wreath, loop the pipe cleaner ends together and wind closed.  Trim off any excess and then tie a ribbon on to the bare spot of the wreath  making a loop.  The loop can now be used to hang the ornament.

Making a "tree" button ornament:

Select a pipe cleaner and make a little dent in one end to stop the buttons sliding off the end of the pipe cleaner.  Then sort out the buttons into large to small size order and thread onto the pipe cleaner starting with the largest on the bottom.  We topped ours off with a little red star found at Spotlight.  Then wind a little loop into the excess pipe cleaner and thread some ribbon through!

Getting ready for Christmas!

This year for the first time I am hosting the family Christmas.  Admittedly not the entire extended family is attending, however there will still be 10 adults and 5 children and I feel a little overwhelmed by it all!  So far, all I have done is dress the tree and put up some of the decorations around the house.

Not these ones though!  My beloved vintage Shiny Brites are well and truly out of reach for the time being and I am currently undecided as to where the safest place to display them is.  Obviously somewhere high though!  Very high, as I am afraid I can't trust my two mountaineers not to attempt an expedition to retrieve them.

The rest however are fairly hardy and have been hung by the boys on the tree, with a little tweaking by me afterwards!  I am loving the baby's tongue poking out in concentration here!

And his tippy-toe stretch here!

We have been reading Christmas stories every evening before bed.  We only have this small selection, some of which date back to my childhood and I would love to get some more, does anybody have any good recommendations? 

And if anyone has any ideas about what Dragon Island might be, I would be even more grateful!

My close encounter with Oprah...

On the weekend we flew down to Melbourne for a Christmas Party and look who I ran into outside our hotel:

I know!!!  I can't believe it either!!!  I had taken the boys downstairs to go for a quick scooter along the river before the babysitter arrived and had noticed the police cars/boats/helicopters as the boys were scootering about.  About 10 minutes later Oprah sauntered past us chatting with the Prime Minister!  Apparently not long before she had made an appearance in Federation Square with 26 000 fans... there were maybe 50 people outside when we saw her!

This is how close she was to us! 

A trip down South to Milton

 We have just returned from a weekend away on the south coast of New South Wales.  The highlight of which for me was a trip to nearby Milton, a tiny little village up on a hill loooking over the coast.  It is a lovely little spot full of charming cottages, cafes, boutique homewares shops and best of all some great  antique shops.  I have been visiting Milton for years, (although as a kid I was more into the Scarecrow Festival they have annually than the antique shops), and have watched the gentrification of the town with interest.  At the moment I think it is just about perfect and definitely not too touristy like Berry is nowadays.  

A lovely cottage in the main street of town:

The view from where I parked the car:

 I spent Friday morning exporing several antique shops and there were numerous items I desperately wanted to bring home with me but considering the amount of luggage that our car was literally stuffed with I was obliged to "look and not touch" (as I warn the children every time we enter a shop in a steely voice). 

How I would have loved this old lobster pot to decorate our back deck with.

I can't stop thinking about this rustic meat safe, with it's crackled old blue paint.

I already have way too many of these old suitcases, but I still adore them!

I don't have any of these old trunks however and surely they would make great storage for something...

Lots of divine items here...

and here!

Tretchikoff prints can look amzing in the right houses and this one of the "blue lady" against the wall paper looked fabulous.

Looking forward to my next visit and this time I will make sure that there is some room in the car!