Strangely quiet

It is strangely quiet around here as poor little Alex has lost his voice. He hasn’t been a very happy camper over the last few days, but has still had fun at nursery and is slowly improving which is good news. He came home from nursery today with a Christmas card he made for us and a decoration for our tree! He is still very much attached to the ambulance we were lent by Abby’s kids, and it is the first toy he asks for in the morning, announced by the word ‘Van’ as he can’t say ambulance yet! Trying to persuade him to put it down when he eats or goes to bed is a little tricky though. He has a number of new words this week including 'glass', 'hammer', 'cot' and 'cook' - this last one is used to tell me to get his food ready!! This lunchtime we had my departments Christmas competition, which this year was sweets (confectionary). I have to say that trying to make fudge was a complete mess...it boiled over, burnt on the bottom of the pan, stuck to the spoon...everything that could go wrong did, but in the end I did produce some reasonable looking pieces of fudge to enter the competition with (see picture above). There were eleven entries to the competition and I have to say that they all looked and tasted very good, with the overwhelming majority being chocolate truffles and only two entries of fudge. Everyone judged it individually scoring the sweets in terms of favourites and giving the top three marks (top one got 3 points, second got 2 points and third got 1 point) and then the marks were added up for each batch of sweets. The resulting chaos was hilarious. Despite all the troubles with my fudge I came third so I was very pleased. Crafting wise I discovered that I needed even more Christmas cards for the local people (work etc) and so had to go on a make some quick Christmas cards spree. All of the ones shown in this post were pretty quick to make...I made the lot in about 40 minutes! I guess that makes them another entry for the Daring cardmakers challenge again. These two used my cuttlebug for the background card and the snowflake and a nestabilities die for the scalloped circle, coupled with basic grey background paper. This one used a Crafty Individuals image, K&Co background paper and a papermania sticker. I do like the vintage feel of this one. My favourite of these cards has to be the one I made for the Cuttlebug Spot challenge this week, which was to make a white card with a black message. I was a bit dubious as to how successful this would be, but was really pleased with the result as the ribbon, the papermania sticker, glitter glue on the background and the clear gem all add to the impact of this mostly white card. I would love to know what you all think of these. Have a great rest of the week.
Love,
Caro
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