On our last day of  Craft♥Advent, thank you to everyone who participated either through submitting links or reading along…

I would like to wish you and yours the most joyful of Christmas’ and a healthy, abundant 2012!

My plan, if not acted upon before Christmas (probably not), then after, is to resurrect our little shop “TheNest.ie” as a nest of handmade loveliness, delightful goodies, art and other objects of gorgeousness. It will be small. It will be perfect. It will be like the most perfectly stocked Craft-Fair table imaginable (cue: evil sounding cackle and some Gone with the Wind music erupts into the air)

I also have the most brilliant plan for the Advent season… I’m just putting it together now, and will be back soon to divulge my latest hair-brained act of genius

Firstly: it went really well!! I had my boxed notecards and felted soaps. The felted soaps sold out (yay!) and I sold several boxes of notecards (hurray and yay!) I made little boxes for the notecards from a template I drew up. I made little art pieces for the top and a linen string tie around it. They were very cute.

I have yet to upload these onto Etsy: but I will. Today (mental note)

I’m not sure whether I will continue making boxes for them, or whether I will buy some (sturdier, pre-made) boxes. I’m swinging between liking making the box from scratch and weighing up the time involved…

These photos are all from the day before as I (and my little helpers) did the last minute preparations (I decorated more boxes and they crafted practically on top of me!! There’s no such thing as personal space in our house  )

I forgot to take photos of the fair itself (a complete “duh…” moment…) but Susan who shared a table with me, did, and when she emails me photos I’ll post them here.

Thinking of Harmony, and have a candle lighting for her: she is in labour as I type, so all the best wishes are floating across the ocean to her today!

Oh the hours and hours of delight we had- being second eldest of nine there was always someone to play with you, and the younger ones would be so excited as us older ones would construct houses, palaces and shops (apart from the supermarket, we also had a milliners, where we made all the hats, and a haberdashery that sold tiny balls of yarn and miniature needles-all handmade by ourselves) I often tell my children these stories (I had to stop them from phrasing their asking for stories from “long, long, long ago”) and delight in the detail as much as they do!

A year or so ago, my younger sister gave me a box of different bits and pieces, but as they were predominantly Barbie-pink, our boys shunned them, and our small girl wasn’t old enough to be interested.

But that all changed this week when we  re-found the box…

With utter excitement our smallest emptied the box “Look! Bawbie kitchen!!!”, and at the bottom, lay my supermarket. I’m not quite sure who was more excited to be honest…

So under the cover of darkness, and staying up waaaay to late, Fergal and I made some fruit and vegetables to stock a little shop (oh, the memories of making playdough cabbages!!!) We made them from Stockmar wax sheets (so gorgeous to use) and set up shop to be discovered by our little ones in the morning.

(note that our dollies only drive convertibles and helicopters, we are a very opulent neighbourhood)… 

They spent all morning playing, buying their shopping and restocking the shop, with great plans for entire shopping centres!!! Ooh, I feel about nine again!!

They are also renowned for their exceptional gift-giving (my mother is also a gift-giver-supreme, our visit to my parents home after Christmas is like a second Christmas morning!)

 One of my dearest friends has elevated gift-giving to a veritable art. And no matter how much I try to out-do her, she sweeps in nonchalantly bearing “a” gift like this:

(like, how am I supposed to compete with this??!)

 Her gifts are like a thoughtful group of memories from the previous year. Each part has a funny story, and in this gift selection, it was the large whisk (in use obviously when the photo was taken!!) that we laughed most about:

 A week or two previously, we had been making dinner, and my friend was making a cheese sauce. As she was preparing it, she began to rant orate beautifully about the merits of a large whisk while making sauces, and how a home simply wasn’t a home without it, why! it was a veritable disgrace that any cook worth her salt wouldn’t have a proper one, and might try make do with a teeny piddly useless one…

 Oh, and, would I hand her the whisk as she needed one quickly…

So I did.

I handed her my only whisk: