Autumn Swap!

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A few weeks ago I took part in a Autumn Swap organised by the lovely Ingrid of Mythologising Me. In previous years Ingrid has organised a Yuletide Swap, which has always been fun! But this year she decided to do it as a Autumn Swap, so we would all have some nice surprise post to come home to on these cold dark nights.

In the swap I got a package from the total cutie Sarah and she got me loads of goodies. I loved it all but especially the Halloween nail stickers and the homemade acorn brooches!

Look how pretty the package was decorated!

I was making my package for Caitlin. Although I have never met Caitlin I was given a list of her interests and some of the things she had mentioned liking were cross stitch, cats and stationery so I decided to make her some cat yarn holders and some envelopes.  

It was so much fun putting this package together and knowing that it was going to brighten up someone's day. I enjoyed it so much that I have now signed up to Oh Comely's Perfect Stranger Project. I have received the information for the person I am putting a box together for this week so I'm excited to get started. 

Do you like receiving surprise post or do you know of any other exciting post swaps?

E

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Cat Donuts

A few weeks ago I spotted a tutorial on how to decorate donuts to look like cats and, being a big fan of both, I instantly wanted to have a go. I found the tutorial on My Paper Crane which is actually one of my favourite websites. Everything Heidi Kenney makes is amazing!

As you can see from her tutorial she has used Peanut Butter Melts to cover her donuts. That sounds like a complete dream, but sadly at the time of making these donuts I didn't know where to buy Peanut Butter Melts. I have now learnt that Hobbycraft stock a whole range of different colours and flavoured Melts, so I will know for next time. As I didn't have Melts I just decided to use melted chocolate instead and I think it worked pretty well.

I would highly recommend making these, it's so easy and they look so cute. If you have any ideas for making your food look cute please let me know!

E
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Kawaii Subscription Box

I signed up for a 3 month subscription to this Kawaii Box and every month I have absolutely loved my surprise package from them. Sadly this box is the last of my subscription, but I feel like it has been the best one yet!

It contained:

• Kabaya Fish Gummies
• Food Stickers
• Moonin Mini Pouch
• Fragrance Beans 
• Animal Greetings Card 
• Toast Squishy Charm
• DIY Bracelet Kit 
• Alpaca Pouch 
• Egg Mini Plush 
• Caplico Mini Ice Candy

I loved everything in this box but I think my favourite thing has to be these foam food stickers. They are such good quality, I can't wait to use them! I'm also a big fan of the addition of more sweets in this month's box compared to my other two boxes. I love all novelty sweets and can't wait to try the fish gummies. I hope they're not actually fish flavoured! The same company also does just a sweet subscription box too, which I have been tempted to try.

The boxes work out about £12 each, which I think is excellent value for the amount of stuff they include and the postage is completely free. Even though this is the last box I will receive for a while I plan on renewing my subscription in the new year. I just can't resist all the Kawaii cuteness!

E

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Halloween Baking

Hello!

I'm a huge of Halloween! Mainly because I absolutely love witches, so it is right up my street. I just can't resist buying all the exciting spooky themed sweets and novelty stuff in the shops.

Over the last few weeks I have been trying to add a bit of the Halloween spirit into my baking. The first thing I made was a butternut squash pie with a pumpkin face. You can make any pie you like and cut what ever pumpkin face you want into the pastry. It's super easy! I cooked the pastry for the top of the pie separately and then just added it as a lid once the rest of it was cooked.

Next I made witches' hat pasties. As with the pie, the filling for these can be whatever you like. I filled mine with feta, spinach and peas. I got the ideas for making these from here but decided to make them look bit more like witches hats by adding a little buckle at the bottom.

Lastly, I made these Bakewell tarts with spiders' web icing. I used this basic Jamie Oliver recipe. Although I just used the leftover pastry from my witches' hats to make the cases instead of using pre-made ones. I need to practice doing the spiders' web effect but I think you can at least get the idea. Here are the instructions from someone who has actually mastered it if you want to give it a go!

I would say I am a little bit obsessed with Halloween themed baking at the moment. I have even made a Pinterest board to pin all the good ideas I have seen on the internet. I'm definitely going to do some more before Saturday.

Have you been baking or have you got any ideas for Halloween themed food?

E
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Do you think I'm spooky?

A few weeks ago we launched a new collection of spooky products. The collection is inspired by one of our all time favourite TV shows the X Files*. The collection consists of some large and mini temporary tattoos and three new embroidered brooches. Both the ghost and alien head have, excitingly, been embroidered using glow in the dark thread to add that extra spooky element to your outfit on these dark winter nights.

You can view the whole collection in our Etsy shop here. What creeps you out and stops you from sleeping at night? For me, it's the weirdo black cat who lives next door.

*we're also making an X Files zine, which is taking a long time to finish, but it will be ready soon!

Long time no blog posts

Hello!
It has been exactly a year and one day since we last wrote a blog post on here, oops! While we haven't been great at keeping this up to date, we have been super busy doing loads of other things. Here is a quick update of what we have been up to:

- Moved house
- Co-organised the first Northwest Zinefest
- Got HLF funding for Salford Zine Library
- Been on a dream holiday to Florida
- Been on holiday to Copenhagen
- and most recently we have launched a completely new spooky collection!

Hopefully we will get a chance to do some recap posts about a few of these things that we didn't get around to writing about at the time.

L x

Crime Zine

As we have probably mentioned on this blog a number of times, we both love murder mysteries. Whether they're books, films or TV series, we lap them all up. To celebrate our passion for detectives and amateur sleuths, we decided to put together a zine full of our favourite TV characters. It's got 16 pages of biographies and illustrations and it's been bound by hand, like all your favourite Young Explorer zines.

It includes:

Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote

Quincy

Agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks (Very topical)

Sherlock Holmes

Poirot

Miss Marple

Dr Mark Sloan from Diagnosis Murder.

You can buy it dead easily from our Big Cartel shop, which has been spruced up a little recently. You can have a look at our other zines while you're there too!

Who's your favourite TV detective? Have we missed out someone obvious? Let us know. It's too late to be included in Crime Zine now, but maybe we can make a Crime Zine Part Two at some point with the best of the rest!

Brussels Fun: Mini Europe

We've recently been to Brussels (by recently I mean well over a month ago now) for a weekend and had a great time. You can see another one of our little holiday videos here, if watching grainy footage of other people's fun is your kind of thing. One of the highlights of the trip was going to Mini Europe, which aims to represent every EU member state in model form.

I've been previously but this was Liz's first opportunity to go on a tour of Europe without having to walk more than half a mile. She was pretty bowled over by the whole thing, I think. The interactive exhibits (watch the video for some examples), the plethora of amazing photo opportunities, not to mention the very friendly EU turtle mascot guy all contributed to a super fun morning. Here's some photos!

We'd definitely recommend going if you happen to find yourselves in Brussels. It's a little bit pricey and you'll probably think 'surely a badly dated miniature representation of Europe isn't worth that much' but you'd be wrong. And when you do go, make sure you have your photo taken with the mascot and buy it in key ring form. And then send us a photo of it.

Raccoon Brooch Custom Etsy Order

Last month we received a custom order request on Etsy from a lovely person in Canada. In case you can't tell, it's a raccoon! I enjoyed making something a bit different to the fox, badger, bear and mountain brooches that are part of the regular Young Explorer 'collection'.

Let me know if you have an idea for a brooch design that you'd like me to make! 

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/YoungExplorerStuff

The Chapess Zine Launch Party

As we may have mentioned loads of times on this blog, we also attempt to run Salford Zine Library when we're not doing other things. This past weekend we were fortunate enough to host the launch of the next issue of the super great Cherry Styles' super great zine The Chapess (buy yours now). 

As part of the launch do, we held a little zine making workshop and here's the scanned in pages for the terrible 8 page zine called 'Hiya' that we put together in about three hours.

Disclaimer: one of us was very tired and the other isn't very good at anything vaguely artistic.

We're going to Brussels for the weekend tomorrow so prepare yourselves for another grainy video type thing documenting the things we get up to while we're away.

Get Crafty #1: Pompom Hair Band

I have been finding it difficult to motivate myself to do crafty things recently, so thought I'd do a few simple tutorials for the blog. Here's the first one!

My motto in life is that everything can be improved if you put some pompoms on it and that’s why I thought I would share this super quick and easy tutorial for making your own pompom hair band, which will brighten up any outfit.

To make a pompom hair band you will need:

1. The first thing you need to do is decide on what order you would like your pom poms to go around your hair band. I decided to just go for a random order but if you are going for a pattern it’s best to check now that you have enough of each colour before you start.

2. Once you have worked out the order you then need to thread your needle with the cotton and tie a knot at the bottom. It is best to double up your cotton to make it stronger. For my cotton I picked black (the same colour as the hair band) to try and hide the stitches as much as possible.

3. You then need to start to sew the pompoms on to the hair band in your prearranged order. For my hair bands I have started by sewing my first pompom on to the hair band about 6cm away from the end to allow space for the hairband to go behind my ears.

4. Decide where you want your first pompom to go and then start by doing one or two stitches just into the hair band to make sure that the cotton is secured.

5. Then put the needle through the middle of your first pompom and secure it in place on to the hair band. To make sure that the pompom will stay in place repeat this process two or three times.

6. Once you are happy that your first pompom is attached to the hairband move on to your next pompom. With the cotton and needle stitch carefully along the hairband until you get to the place you want the next pompom to go. I have placed my pompoms right next to each other but you don’t have to.

7. When you are happy with the positioning of the needle add your next pompom and repeat stage 5.

8. Continue in the same way sewing on each of your pompoms.

9. Then, as you did at the start, stitch into the hairband only a few times to make it more secure and then neatly tie a small knot and cut the end of the thread off. I tried to hide the knot neatly behind.

Then that’s it! Your pompom hair band is ready to wear!

Valletta Shop Fronts

It's been about two months since we went on our holidays in Malta and I'm finally getting around to posting these photos of shop fronts, mainly in Valletta. There were loads more that haven't made the cut! Let us know which ones are your favourites, please. I like Azzopardi Bros, Video Wave and Sporting Clive the best.