Party bunting

Made this bunting for the party.

Something summery, something fun
Something sunny, we’ll all dance!

I think I’ll hang it across the kids’ room when summer’s over 🙂

Birthday cake

It was a hive of activities at the house for the last few days culminating in my elder kid’s birthday party yesterday. I’m so glad life regains some normalcy after running around like a headless chicken. Finally finished wallpapering the last wall in the entryway and moved furniture to their rightful places (more or less) and put up a couple of pictures. And for the rest of the stuff yet to be hung or installed, they have been conveniently swept under the sofa, stuffed into boxes or just put behind sliding doors. Lol!!

Anyhow for this year’s birthday cake, I decided I’d make a beehive. After all, it’s summer 😉

Day -2
Lemon madeira cakes are baked.

Day -1
Assembling the hive with buttercream & iced with homemade strawberry jam

Day 0
The beehive 😀 I decided to cover the cake with chocolate fondant instead of using half a bottle of brown coloring gel to make a brown hive; it tastes much nicer too. Made 10 bees in all for the 9 kids expected at the party. It was a hit!

Going green with the kids’ room

I am not a fan of permanence. I abhor nails which is why I try to use 3M’s stick-on or Velcro picture hooks whenever I can. In theory, non-woven wallpapers are easy to remove and shouldn’t damage walls; in practice though, I can’t imagine changing my wallpapers every 2 years to change the look of a room. Wall stickers however, are a boon to my fickle-mindedness. Just make sure they are removable without any damage to the wall paint.

I thought the vast expanse of brown in the boys’ room was crying for something. So this morning, I dug out my stash of wall stickers that I have amassed – tree, world map, planes & hot air balloons. Which one? With the rich brown and lime green prevalent in the room, I think it was a foregone conclusion. The forest colours almost dictate that I plant a tree in their room.

I think the tree looks great against the dark chocolate brown wall 🙂 It gives a more rooted (pun intended) feel to the table and chairs.

The kids’ room

It is a long time coming but finally, I deem the kids’ room almost there. A couple of days ago, I put up the pictures on the wall with 3M picture hooks*. Then today, I finished making the cushion inserts for the covers. So just before I had to rush off to get the kids from school, I had time to snap a few pictures.

I made these cushion covers for the boys. The main cover is hardwearing yet soft cotton canvas while the front is quilted giving it a slightly raised feel. I would love to get some feedback from anyone! 🙂

On the other side of the room is an Ikea storage for holding the boys’ trucks, Lego, train set, arts supplies… And a little table with 2 chairs also from Ikea that I had painted in lime green and white to match the colours in the room. In the center of the room is a washable plush carpet in a light shade of green.

However, the brown wall looks a little bare imo.

* I swear by these 3M hooks. No nails for pictures anymore and removing the adhesives is a cinch. Great for repositioning pictures without leaving unsightly holes in the wall!

A summer must-have

Summer is well and truly here. Long days, at least. At the southern most tip of Finland, Espoo, where we live, the sun rises at 4:30am and doesn’t see the horizon again until 10:30pm. But that’s about as ‘summery’ as it goes. It has been exceptionally cool and wet this year. We haven’t had many days going past 20C (68F) and the rain, it almost seems to rain every other day! On the plus side, my house doesn’t become a sauna because Finnish houses are so efficient for keeping heat in. Anyhow, notwithstanding the not-so-summery summer, we decided that we need to grace our yard with a grill.

We deliberated for awhile between gas and coal grills but decided that the former wins for convenience. To work around the lack of smokey flavor that coal pundits trash gas grills for, I bought a pack of hickory wood chips along with the grill 🙂 Grilling with wood chips ought to give the food a nice smokey flavor, in theory at least.

Assembling it took a whole afternoon…

…but not before moving it in into the kitchen when it started pouring buckets, then moving it out again half assembled and scratching off the paint on our door frame in the process 😦

Here it is, our Weber Genesis E310, taking pride of place in our yard. Now, if only the rain will just stop!