My 5 Favourite Christmas Posts.

My 5 Favourite Christmas Posts.

Hello my lovelies and Happy Christmas! It’s been an absolute madhouse for me over the last month, and to be completely honest I’ve not had a chance to write up any new posts for the festive period; one of those reasons is because my older sister is about to have her third baby!

So, today, instead of a new Christmas post today, I’m going to go through my favourite posts I’ve written for the festive season over the past few years! And with that, let’s get into it!

1 . Top 20 Christmas Movies!

Christmas Movies Banner

Let’s face it, with everything that’s been going on in 2020, none of us has been going out, and now is the perfect time to snuggle down and have a movie marathon with all our favourite Christmas movies.

2 . My Christmas Decorations.

My House At Christmas Banner

Who doesn’t love looking at other people’s Christmas decorations?! Each year we decorate my house like mad, and it essentially ends up looking like a Santa’s grotto haha, this year we’ve added loads of lights outside!

3 . Easy Naughty Christmas Elf Ideas.

Elf on the Shelf banner

I haven’t seen many naughty Christmas elves this year but this post still makes me smile, especially the one above with the nutella and peanut butter! It’s the little things at this time of year that add up to making this time period great.

4 . Easy DIY Pine Cone Santas.

Easy DIY Pine Cone Santas Banner

Ok, so I only put this post up a few weeks ago, but I love these simple easy diy Santa gnomes! I’ve now decorated one of our Christmas trees with them and they are a great way to make your tree a little different this year instead of just the usual baubles.

5 . Easy Christmas Nails.

Easy Christmas Nails Banner

I can’t believe I wrote this post about 2 years ago! It really is crazy how time flies. And even though this post is from 2018, I still really love the nail art I did here!

So, those are my favourite Christmas posts from the past few years! I absolutely love this time of year, the decorations, lights, food, giving gifts and the time we get to spend with family! This year will obviously be a little different in terms of being able to spend lots of time with all our families, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun and be grateful for what we have got!

I hope you have a great Christmas everyone! And a very happy new year!

Love,

Victoria Blog Signature
My 5 Favourite Christmas Posts
My Christmas Decorations.

My Christmas Decorations.

Hello my lovelies and a very Happy Christmas to you all! This year, the festive season has been busier than ever before for me, and I can’t wait to tell you why in the new year! (I’m not pregnant, or getting married or moving.. It’s weird how that’s immediately what everyone thinks huh!)

But anyway, even with it being so busy this year, I’m still finding time to enjoy the festivities with family and friends. Some of my favourite things about Christmas are, the food (duh! Who doesn’t love a good roast dinner!), spending time with my loved ones, playing games, getting my loved ones gifts and showing kindness, and of course the decorations!

That brings me onto today’s post, just like last year, it’s that time in December where I get to show you what my house is looking like this year! To see how my house looked last year, click here!

Well, enough of me chatting, I’ll leave you with some photos of my Christmas decorations!

And that’s all from me for today, what’s your favourite Christmas decoration? I personally love all of the lights, they make any room instantly cosier! What’re you doing for Christmas this year? Let me know in the comments!

I wish you all a very happy and peaceful Christmas full of love and fun!

Love,

Victoria Blog Signature
My house at christmas pin
Easy DIY Snowmen.

Easy DIY Snowmen.

Hello my lovelies!! It’s less than two weeks until Santa Claus comes! Woohoo! Who’s excited for Christmas? I know I certainly am! I love the food, being around family and friends and of course the decorations. Which brings me to today’s post, easy DIY snowmen decorations!

I’ve made for several years now as decorations for the festive season and as gifts for the people I care about. These can be used as door stoppers or just as a festive ornament for the wintery season!

Oh, and did I mention how cute they are? Here’s the cuteness we’re dealing with:

See what I mean? A D O R A B L E .

So, onto what you need to make them:

  • White socks (Mens sport socks are great – mine are Tescos basics)
  • Embroidery or thick thread
  • Fabric or socks that you don’t mind cutting up to make a hat and scarf!
  • Buttons
  • Rice or lentils
  • Scissors
  • Hot glue gun (not necessary but faster then sewing by hand!)
  • Any other decorations!

Now that you know what you need, let’s get into the steps to make one!

Step 1 . Fill one of your white socks with rice or lentils. (I did two cereal bowl fulls).

Step 2 . Double up your sock with another and tie the top to keep the rice in. Then cut the excess sock off the top.

Step 3 . Grab some white thread and double it over, and tie it around your snowman’s body to create its neck and tie it off.

Step 5 . Next up is eyes! Grab black thread (or whatever colour you want!) and sew on some eyes, and if you want you can even add buttons or beads for the eyes!

Step 6 . Time to add a nose! Pick an orange bead or thread and sew on the nose.

Step 7 . Guess what? There’s only 3 steps left! Pick a sock that you want for the snowman’s hat, put it on the snowman’s head and decide how tall you want the hat to be and cut off the excess.

Step 8 . Time to sew up the top of the hat! Sew it together however you like and you can add any accessories to it if you want, I’ve added a pom pom to this one!

Step 9 . We’re on the final step! Time to make the scarf. Cut a sock (or whatever fabric you want to use) into a long strip and glue the edges down facing the middle with a hot glue. Next fold the strip in two (horizontally) and wrap them round your snowman. Depending on the scarves length you can either tie it or glue it down.

Step 10 Snowmen

Step 10 . Viola! You have a snowman! Repeat these steps and you’ll have yourselves a family of snowmen in no time!

Here’s all of the snowmen I’ve made over the years for decorations and a few I’ve made recently as gifts!

And those are my snowmen! Featuring a Snowlamb because why not!? What’s your favourite snowman of the bunch? Let me know in the comments! Have you made any Christmas DIY’s? What’s your favourite decoration/gift to make?

And with that, I hope you’re all having a very happy Christmas so far and I’ll see you next week!

Love,

Victoria Blog Signature
Easy Halloween Brownies And Pumpkins.

Easy Halloween Brownies And Pumpkins.

Hello my lovelies! How’s your week been? We’re slowly getting further into October which means we’re beginning to see Halloween decorations everywhere! And it feels like we’ve got ages until it’s actually Halloween, but just like Christmas it’ll creep up on us and before we know it, it’ll be here.

So, I decided I’d show you some quick and easy Halloween decorations, in the form of pumpkin carving and some yummy brownies! And to prove these are actually quick and easy, I did these in the space of 4 hours!

First up we’ve got the brownies. These are something anyone can do when you’re short on time and they’re really easy to do with kids. You can make them from scratch, or just use a box mix from Tesco like I did; it saves time and money! After baking them, the decoration was simple, some melted white chocolate, a bit of chocolate buttercream and decorations you can pick up with the box mix!

One thing I did with my brownies is add some orange zest and extract to give them something a bit extra. Here’s what they look like, basically, just chuck a load of spooky decorations onto the brownies and you’re good to go!

Here’s how I decorated them!

Now, onto the pumpkins!

These were super easy to make; you can do the classic face, cute face or you can use a stencil to do a more intricate design! And of course since stencilling makes it easier to do more complicated designs, I had to do my teacup!

And guess what, I’ve included two stencils for you to download and try for yourself!

Cute huh? Who said Halloween had to be scary anyway?! Here’s how the octopus looks carved!

Octopus Pumpkin

Another very quick way to jazz up your pumpkin is by adding costume accessories to them! Here I added a day of the dead hat and mask and used a melon baller to create eye’s. Top tip, for scooping out the middle of the pumpkin after getting rid of the seeds, I’d definitely recommend a melon baller, I found it surprisingly easier than a spoon! And it’s great for getting perfectly circular eyes!

And voila! You’ve got yourself some cool pumpkins that’ll impress and some yummy spooky brownies! What’s your favourite way to decorate pumpkins? Last year I painted mine! (You can take a look at them here.) Let me know in the comments!

Have a great rest of your weekend my lovelies!

Love,

Victoria Blog Signature
Halloween pumpkins brownies pin
My House At Christmas

My House At Christmas

Christmas is nearly here!! And that means that homes all over the globe are sparkling with fairy lights, tinsel, ornaments and baubles! Ever wanted to look at other people’s homes at Christmas time to see how they decorate?

Well, this year I’m going to give you a little peak of my home and it’s many decorations! Anyone that knows me knows that the Christmas tree has been up since the beginning of November..(We have no shame at all!) and that this is my family’s favourite time of year.

So, before I get started on this little home tour, here’s a gorgeous Pinterest board I’ve made of Christmas decorations, table settings and general festive loveliness!

Now you’ve seen some pretty pictures to get you in an even more festive mood, here’s what my home looks like at this time of year!

Here’s most of my house’s decorations!

Here’s my favourite photos from my Christmas Decorations!

I can’t help but feel like that last photo is a Christmas Card waiting to happen haha!

So that’s my home at this time of year! Believe it or not we usually have even more trees and decorations, but we’ve been having work done on the house and it’s only just finished. What’s your favourite Christmas decoration? I love our Santa and our trees!!

Merry Christmas lovelies!! Love,

Victoria Blog Signature

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Easy Halloween Pumpkins And Snacks

Easy Halloween Pumpkins And Snacks

Hello lovelies! Halloween is fast approaching; which means we’re all thinking of cool decorations and snacks that we don’t see everyday! And this often means searching the depths of Pinterest for hours on end finding some pins which don’t look impossible to do at home.

So I’ve decided that I’ll put together some pumpkin decorating ideas along with two quick and easy things you can do for Halloween snacks!

Let’s get into it!

Snack first; and because it’s Halloween, that means sweet treats! So I decided to make some cute mini shortbread skeletons and mini meringue eyeballs! They’re pretty quick and easy to make and only took me about 30 minutes from start to finish.

Shortbread skeletons

How cute are these am I right?!

On to making them! You can buy a simple shortbread mix from most supermarket nowadays so that’s what I did as I was short on time.

Here’s the steps:

1 . Make the biscuit dough (you can use any biscuits you like).

2 . Roll out the dough out on a lightly floured surface, making the dough roughly 5mm thick.

3 .  Using a cookie cutter the shape of a person (pick whatever size you want!) cut out as many people as you can. You can always use any small pieces of dough left to make an extra biscuit for when you have a cuppa later!

4 . Bake the biscuits for however long your biscuit recipe requires and leave to cool.

5 . Once the biscuits are cool, using whatever colour icing you want, pipe on a smile, or funny face (it is Halloween aft0er all!) and the rest of the skeleton bodies!

6 . Once the icing is dry. Eat!

Shortbread skeletonsFor the meringue eye balls:

1 . Buy some meringue kisses and some googly eye cake decorations.

2 . Make up a slightly on the thicker side icing with just water and icing sugar.

3 . Dip the googly eyes into the icing and stick on top of the meringue peaks! Done! Nice and simple.

Now, when it comes to Halloween, one of the first things we think about is sweets, costumes and of course, pumpkins. And I don’t know about you, but I love picking and carving pumpkins.. however, I’m not a massive fan of the mess that comes with it.

So this year I decided I would look into some other ways I can decorate some pumpkins, without all of the mess from carving huge ones.

Here’s my pumpkin display:

Pumpkins

These didn’t take very long to do which I was quite surprised about! The pumpkins that took the longest were the ones that required paint, but even then they didn’t take very long.

For the painted pumpkins I used cheap Tesco water based paint as a bottle of these are £1 each which is a bargain! I also used a sharpie for the calligraphy on the large pumpkin, that one is my favourite.

Pumpkins

Decorating the painted pumpkins were my favourite to do overall, because I love to paint anyway. The multi coloured pumpkin was decorated by squeezing paint over the top of it, a bit like how you would chocolate drips on a cake, and I simply layered up the different colours until the top of the pumpkin was covered and the paint were dripping down the sides. I suggest doing this over newspaper or some kind of wipeable surface as it gets pretty messy! I left mine to dry over a few days and the paint ran down to the bottom leaving a cool pattern.

Pumpkins

For the biggest pumpkin, I mixed a mint green colour because I wanted the calligraphy to really stand out against the paint. Because pumpkins are pretty shiny, I ended up applying three layers of paint, but it didn’t take very long as I used my hairdryer to speed up the drying process a bit! Once I was happy with the colour of the pumpkin, I lightly drew out the ‘trick or treat’ and then filled it in with a sharpie!

The last pumpkin I painted was a tiny one, and I realised that I like the simple look of the painted pumpkins so I painted this one black and then splattered white paint on it which I think looks pretty elegant.. especially considering it’s a pumpkin!

Pumpkins

I bought a bag of cobwebs and spiders which I used for the only pumpkin I fully carved, and I think it worked quite nicely. I actually carved this pumpkin from the bottom, because I think it looks nicer than the open top, and you can hide your carving marks. I also found a cool tip for making your carved pumpkins last longer, which is by brushing the carved areas with vegetable oil! I also stuck some spiders on the top for eyes, because I hadn’t seen anything like that done before and just thought why not.

Mini Pumpkin with fangs

I will admit, I think I like these two pumpkins nearly as much as the painted ones; not because they’re elegant, because they certainly aren’t that! But they are cute and pretty funny. I recommend that you have a sharp knife for cutting a mouth for these because these small pumpkin/squashes are very hard to cut! I bought some cheap vampire fangs and used peppercorns for eyes on these, all I had to do was cut a section large enough for the fangs and made some indents for the eyes and tadaa! Mini silly pumpkins!

What are your favourite ways to carve and decorate pumpkins? And what are your favourite sweet treats to make at Halloween? Let me know in the comments!

And lastly, Happy Halloween lovelies!

Love,

Victoria Blog Signature

Pumpkins