Hand Made Christmas Year Two

I know I'm super late with this. My blog has really been going to the dogs lately and I'm getting kind of sick with starting every post with an apology so I'm not going to anymore. I'll post when I post, no apologies. Anyway, remember how last year I tried to have an 'ethical' christmas? If not read about it here, here, and here. This year I did buy alot of my presents (yes, I tend to be more 'ethical' when I am sort of cash) but I still decided to hand make or bake presents for some of my friends and family.

The necklace below was a gift for a friend. I think my jewellery making has come a long way from sticking bits of puzzle together last year.

I also made necklaces for three other friends and my nanny (grandmother) but I didn't actually finish them all or have any wrapped until New Years Eve when I was due to hand them over and in the rush I forgot to take pictures. The necklace I made for one of my best friends was a shorter version of this one because we are like peas in a pod :) Another was a version of this necklace using a heart charm instead of a locket. For the third friend I made a version of this necklace minus the bow using bronze chain and the bronze coloured pearls from a necklace in this post and it was much shorter, so totally different really. For my nanny I made her a long gold necklace with this charm from the bead shop. She had a stroke around a year ago and lost the feeling in her fingers so she can no longer work the clasps on necklaces and can only wear ones that she can put over her head.

My aunts, uncles and cousin were again 'treated' to my home baking. This year I made oat cookies (though they came out hard more like biscuits) in plain, raisin and dark chocolate chip.

Christmas e-mail Year Two

Time for my second annual Christmas e-mail. I've edited a few bits of out this as just I don't want to publish which company I work for here on the internet.

Dear Everyone

Merry Christmas! (Or ‘Season’s Greetings!’ to my non-Christian friends) It’s that time of year again and time for my annual Christmas e-mail. Yes, I am still too lazy to collect your addresses and send cards. For those of you who really aren’t interested please find a summary of my year below.

I got a job. I lost my job. I got another job.

Intrigued? Read on below.

Anyone still reading? Okay then, let’s get started. Casting my mind back to January 2010 I was working part time and was right in the middle of the graduate job hunt facing the same experience as so many others of watching the rejections pile up and my options dwindle. Things began to look up in February after what felt like a good performance at the Audit Commission assessment centre. By March I had been offered a job starting in September. I breathed a sigh of relief and decided to enjoy what would be my last summer of freedom without the responsibility of a ‘gown up’ job.

That whole idea came crashing spectacularly down on Friday 13^th August. ‘Have you seen the news today?’ my Step Dad asked as he came in the door that evening. ‘No, oh god, has my holiday company gone bust?’ I asked. ‘No, the Audit Commission has been abolished’. A week of anxiety followed as the Audit Commission debated their future and decided what to do with the 80 odd graduates they had starting in September. The call finally came while I was lying on a beach in Ibiza. They had decided that they were not going to be able to honour our offers of employment. I was obviously pretty upset about this and found myself in tears while an impromptu party erupted around me on our boat back from the beach complete with a CD on repeat, a man playing a conch shell and containers of sangria that would have looked more at home in a chemistry lab.

So it was back to the graduate job hunt for me. Having once secured a graduate job in audit I decided to stick with the same theme. I was pretty dismayed when the rejections started coming in again. I was starting to run out of options when an invitation came through to attend an assessment centre with *. Having already been rejected by some much less prestigious accountancy firms I was not feeling all that confident about it but off I headed to London anyway. I had my assessment centre on the Wednesday, I was offered a job in Public Sector Audit on the Friday and I started on the following Monday. I needed somewhere to live quick sharp so my Grand Mother who lives in a commuter area found herself with a lodger. I’ve not really done that much work yet having spent a large amount of time studying for my first round of exams but I have enjoyed the work I have done so far.

It’s funny how some of the seemingly most important decisions in life happen almost entirely by accident but somehow it works out. If you believe in that kind of thing you could call it fate. I had the time of my life at Essex University. Yet up until June of that year I was bound for Nottingham until a sudden late night realisation that my future did not lie in Biological Science and many frantic calls to UCAS ended with me picking at random from the few universities that still had spaces for politics, it was an election year, and rolling up in October to a place I had never even visited. And so it is with my career. I certainly never saw myself training as an accountant or a calculator becoming a permanent feature in my handbag! I was sure that my career path would start in a public sector organisation. Instead I find myself working in London in something of a corporate suit environment albeit with public sector clients. But that is the way it has turned out and I’m enjoying it so far. I’ve not been there long but I feel * is a good fit for me currently. I finally have a ‘grown up’ job. This was confirmed by the arrival of my pension information this morning.

So December sees me training to be an accountant and living with my Grand Mother. Luckily I have never been cool or I might see my life less positively than I currently do. I have little idea what the next year will hold, except a whole load more accountancy exams (providing I passed the last round. If I didn’t I will yet again find myself without a job so please keep your collective fingers crossed for me) but I’ll be sure to tell you about it next year.

Catherine x

p.s. Festive pictures of icy berry and dear in snow were actually taken last December. I am now one of those ‘time poor’ people.

Christmas Gifts and Minor Ethical Christmas Fail

Okay so I failed to have a completely ethical Christmas. I ended up buying a box of chocolates for our Christmas Day hosts, my step brother and his wife. I was going to make them gingerbread as well but I completely forgot about it right up until the day before Christmas Eve and with Mum's present still to finish I decided that I simply didn't have time. Next year.

I did well with everything else though. My e-mail when out (eventually) and I purchased chocolates for my Step Dad and Grand Mother and a Gruffalo puzzle book for my Step Niece (yep my family is super complicated. It gets harder when you factor in that my Mum and Step Dad aren't actually married) all from charity shops and made the rest.

For my friends' gifts I first bought two puzzles from a charity shop and completed one of them. You can't really see it from the picture but this puzzle is a picture of an old fashioned map and is finished with a metallic gold overlay.

Next I chose my favourite parts of the puzzle and separated the pieces from the main body before painting the backs with PVA glue. I then fashioned pendant carriers from beading wire by wrapping it around the end of my paint brush to form a loop and then fixed them to the puzzle pieces using a lot of glue and felt backing. I was inspired by this how to on Cut Out and Keep. The second puzzle formed a picture of a completed crossword when finished. Originally I was going to complete this one too and use pieces of the puzzle that originally all fitted together to make the necklaces but then I realised that it made alot more sense to give people pieces with the first letter of their name on. I used pieces of thin black ribbon to hang the necklaces figuring that my friends could put them on their own chains if they wished.

I have now made a tutorial for my version of the puzzle necklace which you can find here on Cut Out and Keep.

I made rather a lot of them for myself too using various different pieces. I have a lot of wire and puzzle pieces left and am considering trying to sell these necklaces on Etsy. What do you think? Would people buy these?

I also made these rose brooches for a few people. There are so many tutorials for making these all of which are pretty much the same, here is one of them. I used wide ribbons to make mine and cut the ends into a curve so that they wouldn't show. The purple one is a present. The tartan and silver one I made for myself. I also made a black and a silver one as presents but forgot to take picures of them before they were wrapped.

I finished the backs with a brooch back sewn onto a piece of black felt which I then stuck on using craft glue to cover the stitching. Went a bit over the top with the glue on the tartan one.

This was the first failed attempt before I found out how much better they looked when the ribbon is folded in half before ruffling. I kept it for myself though.

For my mum I made a box that doesn't close properly! Lol. She has since fixed this by drilling a hole in the front to pull the bottom ribbon through so that it ties further down. I used a cardboard packing box for the basic shape. I cut the lid off this and cut a new slightly bigger one that would overlap the box edges from some more cardboard. I then covered the outside with fabric and the inside with matching felt. After coming back from the pub on Christmas Eve I made and fixed the little bow to the top as a finishing touch.

Finally I wrapped the whole lot with left over wallpaper. All these are wrapped without the aid of tape as it turns out that it won't stick to wallpaper. It is only the gold ribbon that is holding the whole lot together.

For the more delicate gifts like the rose brooches I made these little gift bags. I have since found like a million proper tutorials online for making these (just google 'gift bag tutorial') but at the time I simply made these by wrapping the paper around a appropriately sized box and then doing up one end. I then removed the box, folded the other end flat and puched holes in it to thread the gold gift ribbon through. These were fixed with lots of glue and tape on the inside of the paper.

Christmas Gift

A gift from my Dad's wife.
I would never have chosen this dress for myself but now I've got it I kind of love it. I thought I would look awful in this kind of thing but I think it's actually okay? It has inspired me to have a go a sewing some tight fitting jersey dresses for myself; Once I get through my stash that is and a whole host of other planned projects. This may well be my New Years Eve outfit. Waiting for best friend approval!

Merry Christmas e-mail

I finally got around to sending my Christmas e-mail yesterday (part of the whole ethical Christmas drive) and thought that my readers might like to see it too.

Dear Everyone

Back in November I had the most brilliant idea. e-mail Christmas cards. So here we are. You are the lucky recipient of one of my e-Christmas cards. There are a number of reasons why this is a brilliant idea which I shall now share with you. One, in this age where you are more likely to get a friend request from someone on facebook than their phone number and recent graduates will insist on keep moving around the country/world instead of marrying and settling down, keeping a record of all your postal addresses is near impossible. e-mail addresses however I do have and if not certainly facebook. Two, it’s good for the environment. Less Christmas cards being needlessly produced and thrown away. Even if you recycle yours, well that still uses energy doesn’t it? If you feel that I’m cheating you out of the pretty picture you get on real cards fear not you will find one in the attachments. Three, it’s cheap and I am quite poor. Four, my favourite of the cards that my family receive at Christmas are always those ones where the sender includes a letter detailing their life over the past year and bragging about their kids’, and occasionally pets’, achievements. I have no kids to brag about but an e-mail is the perfect medium to update you all about my past year.

January 2009, I was working with the lovely ladies of Pre-Bookings at Center Parcs. I couldn’t have wished for a funnier or friendlier to team to see me through those endless hours without natural light in that office, thanks ladies. I left Center Parcs in February to relax a little and prepare for my travels. This involved visiting all the super people at Essex University and the wonderful Amy in Oxford (I hadn’t been to Oxford before, nice city, looks a lot like Cambridge), panicking about how to fit six months worth of outfits into one suitcase and having a very long conversation with a young man in Millets about various backpacks and suitcases. Oh, and buying loads of water purification stuff that I didn’t need.

Once March 19^th rolled around and I found myself boarding a train to Stratford upon Avon dragging my now very heavy Millets suitcase behind me. I’ll try not to say too much about Global Xchange as I wrote daily about my experiences in my diary which I then transferred to my blog; edited of course. If you are interested or extremely bored you can read it here just skip past all the baking and amateur sewing projects that I have been writing about lately.

Here is a brief summary for those of you that weren’t there and can’t be bothered to trawl through my entire blog. After our initial training at Stratford upon Avon where we met the whole team for the first time we travelled down to Harlow and Bishops Stortford by coach. In Harlow my Kazakhstani counterpart Gulnara and I lived with Ilma, a woman originally from the Caribbean. I’m still missing her cooking! The highlights of the UK phase for me were my volunteer placement at Catch 22 and stewarding at the Bishops Stortford Music Festival for one of our Community Action Days (although I wasn’t too keen on litter clearing duty). At Catch 22 my work counterpart Olga and I worked on their Entry to Employment course as teaching assistants. Entry to Employment is an educational course designed to provide the young people that take it with basic numeracy and literacy qualifications and then help them to move on into further education, training or employment. Obviously some of the learners were challenging at times but I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed working there. There was never a day when I didn’t want to go in, except maybe the one where I had been sick at my manager’s house the day before, long story. I relished the opportunity to teach some of my own short lessons, even when I turned around and found the whole class were missing! I even begun to think about teaching as a career move although that didn’t work out too well as you shall see later. I felt that I got to know some of the learners quite well and felt pretty invested in their futures. So many great characters that I won’t forget in a hurry.

The UK phase came to an end in early June and our whole team boarded a plane bound for Kazakhstan. We spent a few days sightseeing and training in the former capital Almaty before we headed south on an overnight train for the city of Shymkent which would be our home for the next three months. In Shymkent Gulnara and I lived in an apartment with a Russian woman named Nassima. She couldn’t speak any English and my Russian is very basic at best but we managed to get along most of the time. My volunteer placement in Shymkent was a treatment centre for children with HIV and their families where I and my work counterpart Nina launched a playgroup. We met a lot of challenges, from lacking basic materials to obstructive nursing staff, but we managed to overcome most of them and by the end the children seemed so much more confident in themselves and happy to be around us, though that also made them naughtier! So much of the good work we did there was down to the efforts of Nina. I am so grateful to her. My contribution was limited due to the language barrier and the fact that I’m pretty useless with small children but I hope I helped a bit even if just by collecting loads of plastic bottles! One of the most disappointing things about the second phase was being told by our supervisor when we left that the hospital didn’t have the staff to carry on our sessions. We left all the materials we had managed to gather and only hope that the parents or other volunteers will soon put them back to good use. The highlight of Kazakhstan for me was just exploring Shymkent and the surrounding area either alone or with others in the team. It feel like such an achievement the first time I took a bus alone or understood the price of something in the bazaar then managed to haggle and actually buy it. On September 4^th we said an emotional goodbye to our friends and flew back to the UK, though not before being delayed at Almaty airport for 13 hours!

Back in the UK I reunited with friends and family and faced the inevitable ‘So, what was Kazakhstan like?’ question. The best answer anyone got was ‘Yer, it’s okay.’ I’ve found it incredibly hard to sum up the entire experience and a whole country, of which I only saw a fraction, in the answer to one question. Thankfully I have found that those people who are genuinely interested have then asked more specific questions such as ‘what kind of houses to they have?’, ‘How developed is it?’ etc. I also found myself facing the daunting graduate job hunt. Inspired by my placement at Catch 22 I had applied to the Teach First programme, where I would get a job teaching in a ‘challenging school’ for two years, and got through to an assessment centre held a couple of weeks after I returned. I dedicated myself to preparing for the interview and the sample lesson, reading their website effectively cover to cover and every lesson plan I could find for teaching human rights yet I found out a couple of days later that I had been unsuccessful. I waited over a month for my feedback which when I got it really wasn’t that bad. I guess the other candidates were just impossibly brilliant. I suppose that is what you get when over half the people you are up against are Oxbridge alumni.

So here I am in December 2009. I am working part time at my step dads letting agency (so I have enough cash to cover my frequent jaunts back to Essex University) and applying for every job that catches my eye. As my step dad said last night, if you throw enough mud at the wall some of it will stick. For the time being at least I am actually quite enjoying all the free time and the slower pace of life here, when I’m not trying to master verbal and numerical reasoning that is. Though don’t expect that to be the same story if I am still here next year!

Merry Christmas to all of you

Love Catherine x

OMG 1 mintue to Christmas! Still need to finish mum's present!

Christmas Crafting Update

Here's a picture of the ginger bread men (and women) that I made as gifts for family members. The first batch burnt but these lot came out good. Only problem was that they would be no good by Christmas so had to persuade everyone to open them up when we met last weekend.


If anyone is interested in the recipe please let me know and I will try and post it. They are decorated with butter icing, dark chocolate drops and raisins. I made two for each person, a man and a woman, and each one was decorated slightly differently. There were more but I couldn’t fit them all in the photo. I even made little gift bags to wrap them in from the wallpaper I had. It turns out that sellotape doesn’t stick to wallpaper which was something of a problem but the whole lot seemed to be holding together with the application of large amounts of glue, gold ribbon and sellotape on the inside of the paper, to which it does stick. I actually ended up wrapping a couple of presents with the paper turned inside out. It’s a shame that I forgot to take pictures of the gift bags because they were really pretty; will have to remember to take one of the last one that I have to make. I have made presents for four friends with one left to do. They are all getting variations of the same thing as it was easier (and cheaper) from a materials point of view and meant that I didn’t need to experiment with loads of new techniques. There were a few failures before I got to the finally product and even then to be honest I could have bought something better from a shop so I hope they are not expecting great things but it is the thought that counts. It is the present for my mother that is proving the biggest headache. I thought that I would be able to buy what I have in mind from a charity shop but no such luck so I resigned myself to making it. I have quite a good idea of how to do it but then things never turn out quite how you imagine them in your head and more often that not a total disappointment. Another problem was that I can’t get the materials I need locally and haven’t been able to travel further afield recently due to doing loads of job applications and snow blocking the roads. I should be going Wednesday which will give me err… one day! Will post pictures of my creations, success or failure, after Christmas when all the presents have been opened.

Christmas Crafting

Christmas crafting not going brillantly so far. I feel I may need to invest in some super glue. I have found that super glue solves most problems. Also had a bit of an accident with a bottle of bleach and a pair of jeans. I will post photos tomorrow when I get to the office. All my photo posts are done from the office now as the net there is so much quicker and I have convinced myself that the reason we go over our download limit every month that I am home is not because of any television I watch online but due to uploading photos to this blog, obviously!

Christmas Update

I did it. I actually managed to buy gold ribbon in a charity shop. Thank you Save The Children. I was disappointed though to find that the Oxfam store has moved premises and won't be reopening until December 20th. Seriously? I've never encountered worse business sense. 'Oh lets shut the shop for the entire month before Christmas'! I know that charity shops won't get as busy as other retail outlets around Christmas but surely they must get extra business from people looking for something a bit different/cheap/ethical; Even just from selling Christmas cards. I had Oxfam mentally noted as my shop of choice to get a number of gifts for my family, who I'm seeing on the 13th, as the shop usually has a lot of new recycled and/or fair trade items. Those that I had earmarked for fair trade chocolates will now have to make do my home baking. I also managed to get all the materials to make my friends gifts. I shall have to post the results after Christmas as they all have access to this blog. I am going to have loads of materials left over so I'm considering starting up a etsy shop though I'm not sure it's worth it. Only present that I have yet to sort out is my mother's.

An Ethical Christmas

So this year I want to go ethical for Christmas. I’m not talking about buying a goat for an African family on someone’s behalf from Oxfam as lets be honest you never really know if someone is going to appreciate it, even if they do say there is nothing they want. I would only do that if someone asked for it as a present or if they told me not to buy them anything. I don’t know anyone like that but if you do check out the Oxfam website, it is a brilliant idea. I still want to give people something special but without buying into the whole commercialism. So what I am aiming to do is hand make or buy my presents from charity, this could be new items or second hand ones. I already have some recycled wrapping paper in the form of the left over wall paper from our house. It will look gorgeous with a bit of gold ribbon. Not sure where I am going to get that yet; it may be the one thing I buy. And here is my most fantastic mind blowing idea, e-Christmas cards! Since leaving university keeping tabs on everyone’s postal addresses has proved impossible, not that in the age of social networking I have even tried. I have plenty of friends whose mobile phone numbers I don’t even know. All this will require is the collection of a few e-mail addresses and will be significantly easier, cheaper and more environmentally friendly than sending cards. I even intend to draw a couple of pretty pictures to scan in and attach to the e-mail so that people don’t feel cheated out of a pretty card. Brilliant idea. The hardest thing is going to be deciding who gets on to my Christmas card list.

I Have A Headache

Well, I’ve not updated for a while. I’ve been busy and tired. This having a full time job lark takes its toll.

I spent Christmas Day at Grandmas with mother’s side of the family and the dog. Then spent a good part of Boxing Day, as a favour to my sick mother, in a cold windswept field picking up horse poo and trying to avoid getting killed by afore mentioned horses. My life isn’t all glamour you know!

I’ll be spending New Years with friends from my hometown, probably with my video camera in tow just like last year. I’m going to make it a tradition! In terms of resolutions I’m going to keep it simple. I actually kept last years which filled me with a great sense of achievement so I’ve decided to stick to easy ones this year so I can do it again! More on those in the New Year. I haven’t decided what I’ll be wearing yet, if it’s anything good I may take a quick snap.

No one thought to get the dog a present

Christmas Decorations

Who couldn't help but feel christmassy wehn their work place is decorated like this?

Christmas Party

A picture of my outfit...

I picked up this dress over the summer in the oasis sale (£100 down to £30!) though I had no idea what I was going to wear it for at the time. The dress had a small rip in the fabric by the zip, but I patched it up and now it hardly notices. p.s. I am not a giant, we just have a small tree this year and I am wearing huge heels!

... and the joke from my cracker

Q: Why did the jelly baby go to school

A: Because it wanted to be a smartie

It was lovely to see all the girls dressed up. Congrats to those girls who managed to coax their partners into suits! Everyone enjoyed the 'this is your life' themed slide show of the life of the pre-bookings department, I was glad they had used one of the better pictures of me from facebook and that I haven't been there long enough for them to have learnt any dirty secrets to spill. Tanya and Sharon put loads of effort into it, Kerry was right when she said they are the best manager and assitant manager ever. Its a great team to work in and I wish them all the best for July when the future of the pre-bookings department should become known, afterall I need somewhere to send my postcard after March!

Christmas Tree Trauma

This morning when I woke at the late hour of 11am we had a real cut off christmas tree, a bucket, a pile of mud and a box to stand the whole cabobble on. By 1 o'clock we had a very unstable tree sitting in a bucket of mud on top of a box straining under the weight. Mother and I accepted defeat and drove into town. Now we have a christmas tree stand by the window where the tree should be, a bound up christmas tree sitting outside and a new box of fairy lights. It is too dark to do anything more now so the christmas decorations shall have to wait for another day.

Christmas Shopping

I've got it done, whoop! Just waiting for a few deliveries from Amazon. Had a couple of issues though. Mother wants the Mamma Mia dvd which she informed me was selling in tesco for £7. Lies! It was nearly £15. It was the same story in the rest of town except in Woolworths who were selling it for £10 but had run out of stock. I ended up purchasing it from Amazon for about £12 which went somewhat over my buget but I saved on a couple of books that I would have otherwise bought in town. I found it harder to buy for friends as well this year, probably because I haven't seen them in a while I seem to have forgotten the things they like, but I hope I got it right in the end.

MySpace Archive - Christmas Trees

It really is a very strange tradition when you think about it. To bring a live plant (or get a fake plastic tree out of the attic/cupboard etc.) and then decorate it with tiny lights, and cheap bits of coloured plastic. Don't get me wrong I love it, but it really is a very strange thing to do. I know it originates from the pagan winter celebration, which the Christians conveniently tried to cover up by deciding that Jesus was born in December. I'm totally up for celebrating my pagan roots, at least it provides a counter argument to those people who say you shouldn't celebrate Christmas if you don't believe in Christ; they shouldn't have a tree.

I'm not sure where this blog is going anymore. It started off just to point out the strangeness of decorating a tree, now I don't know where I'm going with it. Another strange thing is how if you ever get a Christmas card with a nativity scene on it (in fact these are very rare how, we haven't received a card with anything vaguely Christian on it) it will depict a stable covered in snow, how often does it snow in the Middle East??

One last observation about Christmas this year, is the lack of big light displays being put on people's homes, Mother and I decided that this is a product of the economic downturn we are experiencing (this continued with reasoning from me about why labour probably won't win the next election, if it continues, but that's another subject) people are feeling the pinch. I'm sure this isn't helped by the ridiculously expensive toys on the market that I'm sure children everywhere are demanding. I remember when the biggest thing children asked for was a bicycle (lol, sounds like 'an in my day' moment, I'm not that old, amazing how much things can change, think of computer when I was at primary school, there were about 5 running MSDOS, now there is more than one in every home. Plus the Soviet Union collapsed in our life time, yes a lot has changed without us really noticing), anyway now kids can have a £250 robotic dinosaur that develops its own personality! I do think that this is a case where the commercialisation of Christmas has gone too far. People spending money they haven't got on stuff they don't need. I've ever understood why people would spend money they haven't got; mind you I'm good with money. Christmas can be done quite cheaply with a bit of effort, but then I share a talent with my mother for being able to choose cheap things that look expensive.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE! Decorate a tree, spend less and have a better time!