Sundae Best

I think we've all been on diets that have left us feeling like this! Mind you, if she's been tucking into strawberry and chocolate ice cream sundaes on the quiet, it's hardly surprising is it?

The stamps I used for the topper are a Studio G mini set and the background is made with a ruler stamp that lives in my stash but I've no idea where it came from, and a sundae stamp that came in a Viva Las Vegas stamps grab bag many years ago.

I made this for the latest Naughty or Nice challenge which is Food and Drink  - but is it naughty or nice? I think that depends on whether or not the recipient is on a successful diet at the time!
But then I realised that all those numbers meant I can also join in with
Alphabet Challenge - N for Numbers
Crafty Creations Challenge - Use a Number

Recipe: Eggs in tomato curry sauce.

If you read Mark's blog, you will know that at the moment we have tomatoes. We have a LOT of tomatoes. In fact we have a glut of them - not that we are complaining, as they are delicious. And they mean that a tomato-heavy sauce like this costs practically nothing to make. However if you aren't lucky enough to have a glut of tomatoes, you could use a tin of chopped tomatoes instead - it would still make a very cheap meal. It's a sort of cross between a curry and a shashouka (which I can neither spell nor pronounce) - anything involving eggs and spices is a guaranteed hit with me!

You will need (for two generous helpings)

500g ish of roughly chopped tomatoes (or a large tin)
1 small onion, chopped
1 dessertspoon of curry powder
1 dessertspoon sunflower or rapeseed oil
4 free range eggs
seasoning

Ideally, cook this in a shallow, wide pan with a lid.

Chop the onion and fry gently in the oil until soft. Stir in the curry powder and cook for 2 minutes. Mix in the tomatoes, reduce the heat to very low, cover and cook for about 30 minutes until the tomatoes have collapsed into a thick sauce. Check from time to time to make sure the sauce isn't boiling dry, and add a little hot water if necessary.

Taste and season, then make four depressions in the sauce (you'll need to do it one at a time or they'll fill up again) and break an egg into each. Cover and cook until the eggs are done to your preference.

Serve with rice or bread to mop up the juices.

Being an absolute bargain to make, I'm sharing this with Credit Crunch Munch at Utterly Scrummy and Fuss Free Flavours

Krafty Butterflies

For this card I've dug out a very, very old stamp, one of the first unmounted stamps I ever bought. It's a Crafty Individuals stamp called "Four Beautiful Butterflies" and it is a testament to what a lovely stamp it is that it is still available today. A true classic, it can be used as a single large image or a set of smaller ones.

Today I've used it as a single one, stamping onto Kraft card and then using a white gel pen to highlight parts of the butterflies. I added a border of white dots and enclosed it in a square ruled with a black fine liner. I managed to find some Candi in kraft with white dots too, as an embellishment.

I am sharing this with:
Crafty Individuals - Clean and Simple 
Butterfly Challenge - Kraft Card or Kaleidoscope (just kraft)
Retro Rubber - Critter time (I hope my butterflies count as critters!)
Loves to Craft - Anything Goes

Regal peacock

There are a couple of challenges around at the moment that ask us to use a technique we've not tried before. Oh dear, I didn't think I was going to be able to enter, because being a bit of a dabbler, I thought I'd tried just about everything.

Then this morning when I was reading this week's "Friday Die Day" post at Creativity Continues, I saw that Christine had used a die to emboss without cutting - something I'd never tried before! So I used her idea of using the embossed die to create a background. I used a large Spellbinders medallion die (sorry, I can't remember the name) with the centre section removed, and made up my embossing sandwich just as I would have done if I'd already cut it, and then ran it through the Grand Calibur.

As a topper, I sponged ink (from several different Kaleidacolour pads, as they happened to be the shades I wanted) over a scrap of white card and then die cut the peacock which was a magazine freebie die a few months ago.

A hint of matting and some liquid pearls added the finishing touches.

I am sharing this with:

AAA Cards - New to you technique

Shopping Our Stash - Learn Something New
House of Cards - add a bird or colour challenge

Christmas Music

Just as I like to make Christmas cards all through the year, I like to sing Christmas songs all year round too - you can often hear me belting out "Frosty the snowman" on a scorching hot July day (or at least you would if we ever had any).

So here is a card that pays tribute to my love of Christmas music. The musical panel is embossed with a Darice folder and then brayered with blue ink (the large smooth areas picked up ink too - this wasn't the best choice of folder for brayering but it gives the card more colour!). I don't know whether it is a Christmas tune or not - 40 years ago I could sight sing and would have been able to work out the tune in my head, but I'm so out of practice now I would need to pick it out one note at a time on a keyboard to have any idea of the tune.

The sentiment is an Anna Griffin one and the background layer made by stamping musical notes and treble clefs from a Kanban set randomly over the card. Each layer has been matted with matching card, then arranged with a few die cut snowflakes. The snowflake has a rather odd looking open centre that I like to fill rather like a flower centre. I wanted the card to be quite a masculine one so I decided to use Candi instead of pearls or gems - but I didn't have any the right colour, so I used my Promarkers to colour some white Candi.

I am sharing this with
Crafty Hazelnut's Christmas Challenge - use a sentiment 
Inkspirational - Primary Colours
Jingle Belles - Music 
The Male Room - Music
C.R.A.F.T - Embossing

Angels or Fairies at Sparkles Christmas

It's the first of the month, the nights are drawing in and even if you've not been making Christmas cards all through the year, you may be starting to think about it now. So why not pop over to Sparkles Christmas Challenge and join in this month's challenge, which is Angels or Fairies?

This month our sponsor is our very own Sandra, who is giving our winner this gorgeous House Mouse stamp sheet

 

For my card, I've used a digi called Winter's Fairy, which I *think* came from DeDe's Digis, coloured with Promarkers and Stickles. The pale blue heart paper is from a Craft Asylum "Candy" pad and the darker blue foiled hearts paper from a new and very useful Trimcraft pad called "Pick'n'Mix",

I am sharing this with
Christmas Card Challenges - Anything Goes
Winter Wonderland - A Little Birdie Told Me
Crafty Gals Corner - Anything Goes

Did you miss me?

I've been away for a week, visiting my Mum up in the North of England. I left several scheduled posts for while I was away, and lovely Di from the Snippets Playground even linked some of them to challenges for me, so if you're reading this in the hope of finding a good time to burgle my house, sorry, mate, but you've been foiled! I've tried to do a little commenting while I was away, but eventually I gave up because the internet connection I was getting through my phone was so bad.

Mum is 90 and very arthritic, so she is effectively housebound, but the weather was good and we managed to get her out and about in her wheelchair a bit, for a couple of country walks and shopping trips and a meal at a local farm, and we've left her fridge stocked with goodies (although I suspect she's ignoring the 'real' food we left and guzzling all the chocolates first!) so all in all I think she really enjoyed our visit.

While I was away, I managed a quick visit to the Simply Yours Papercraft Show in Leigh, thanks to the help of Jean from BJ Crafts so I had chance to enjoy all the inspiration and stock up on a few crafting goodies, which went a little way towards making up for a week of no crafting!  It was a week of little or no cooking too, as Mum's kitchen is very cramped and grubby, so Mark and I are battling for kitchen space now. At the moment he's cooking up a vat of tomato sauce, so I'm back in blogland for a while, until it's my turn to go and have a bash at pickling cucamalons. Have any of you ever tried doing that?

I've eased myself back into crafting with a very quick and CAS card. It was going to have been a Christmas card, until I realised that the double sided peel off I'd always assumed was a poinsettia was actually a sunflower! It is from an NBUS sheet of double sided peel offs that I bought from QVC about 750 years ago and stored in my Christmas stash, so I've had to relocate it! I stuck it to a snippet of white card, cut to fit inside the edges of a snippet of gold, cut into a "postage stamp" square using an old Cuttlebug die. I foiled the peel off with gold, but maybe because it was so old, the foil didn't take very well so I also sprinkled it with gold glitter, giving it a nice dual texture finish.

The sentiment is that magazine freebie stamp that everyone loves so much, and I cut the outer layer of gold using scallop-edged scissors held upside down to give a bigger version of the postage stamp effect.

I am sharing this with
Less is More - Sticker, Sticky Label or Peel off
Sweet Stampin - No designer paper
Addicted to stamps and more - CAS
Pixie's Snippets Playground - week 244
DJ KardKreations - NBUS #7