Birthday Presents

So I have 2 very dear friends and their birthday's surround mine, by a few days. So here are some goodies that I made for them.

For my friend Kerry, a bag made from The Slimline Shopping Bag pattern from Chandlers Cottage.

It's made from a gorgeous print I picked up at Patches
which went well with fabric that I had been hoarding. Now I'm not one to do much hand sewing, as I find that I run out of time, so when after reading the pattern through carefully I discovered that there was alot of hand sewing, my brain went into overdrive to work around it. So I actually machine stitched the edges together and I think it worked pretty well. It made it a feature and was alot faster. I also excluded the template plastic that gives it some body, as I wanted the bag to be fully washable. Altogether I think it turned out pretty great.




And the back :)



Now for my friend Mel - Happy Birthday for Tuesday - we all went along to a fete today at the Everton Park Kindergarten - and I gave her these today, as I've yet to work out a way to post cupcakes, so they don't get all smooshed.



They are my standard vanilla cupcake base, with lemon curd and buttercream frosting - which made them into butterfly cakes!! Generous sprinklings of icing sugar as well.



These are the same cake recipe, with just vanilla buttercream and butterfly sprinkles. I don't think there is anything much better than just vanilla, vanilla, vanilla. I know there are lots of chocolate fans out there - but I'm not really one of them, give me vanilla everytime - though I'm very partial to lemon/lime flavours as well. Or ever raspberry - I like tart flavours, not over sweet.



And here are 3 of the cherub's tucking into the sausages on bread at the Fete - The sausage was nearly as big as Katherine, and she did a mighty job of downing 3/4 of it :)