My first Handmade Monday

This is my first ‘Handmade Monday’ blog post. For anyone who hasn't heard of it, Handmade Monday is run by Wendy at 1st Unique Gifts and is basically a link party – everyone writes a post about something they have made and then they share their links on Wendy’s blog. It’s another way of creating a community in the blog world and I'm looking forward to reading the blogs of the others who join in each week.

This week I’ve got two gadget cases to show. A Union Jack one for an iphone and a more girly one for a Kindle. I’m hoping that the Union Jack design is a more masculine design than my usual ones. I find it much easier designing things for women and children and my sketchbooks are full of pictures for future product ideas but when it comes to men I seem to have a mental block. I’d love to know what sort of designs you think appeal to men! 

As well as fitting in a bit of sewing we’ve also been doing some cooking. I love cooking – I’m not an expert and I don’t really cook anything too complicated but I enjoy it and for the most part I make sure my children are eating home cooked food. Unfortunately, recently my children seem to be going through a fussy stage. It’s so disheartening. I hate going to the effort of cooking and then scraping piles of food into the bin. So I’ve decided to try and get the children more involved in the cooking process and hopefully get them more interested in the food! I was wandering round Lakeland (something I try to resist doing too often as it has a detrimental effect on both my bank balance and my cupboard space) when I came across sale copy of the book which accompanies the Children’s series ‘I Can Cook’. I’m not usually a fan of children’s cooking programmes as mostly they just involve arranging the food in some complex way to look like something (a car, train, teddy bear) but actually just make it look totally unappetising and impossible to eat. This book, however, seems to have quite nice simple recipes, with healthy ingredients, and child friendly instructions. 

 We made the sausage kebabs (swapping the yucky precooked cocktail sausages for proper ones!) and they were actually really tasty. The idea of using rosemary stalks as the skewer was brilliant and I’m planning on using it with vegetable kebabs as an accompaniment next time I have people round for a meal!