Be Excellent To Each Other

I reckon the sauropods would have used their long necks to take it out the water with their mouths. I should have dunked him.

Russell was at the back of the group with all the really easy-going kids.

This is just a little thing, but I got our Christmas cards that I designed for this year back from the printers yesterday.

That's awesome, and how did I miss the dinosaur T Shirts? Best party bag ever!

Aw, thank you. The T-shirts were really well received, and the party was ace. I wish I’d taken pictures of the lunch and personalised gift bags, but I was working on all the little touches right up to the wire so didn’t get chance, but it was a fun day.

Those party packs are amazing, such an effort. Love the tshirts too.

For contrast, for our youngest (he's the third) we did a pure minimum effort - we bought some pizzas and took them to the football fields so him and his mates could eat them after summer football.

We didn't even have a lighter for the candles, so a tradie mate got a blowtorch from his ute to light them.

A really nice memory is that one of the little mates still calls me his 'pizza buddy' after this.

This may be the single most Australian sentence I have ever read.

Note how the cake was also a basic circle, decorated with some circles cut from pre-made icing that I rolled out flat, and then a toy chucked on top

I think we also made a 'paw patrol' badge out of the icing by cutting round a paper template I printed out.

We've decided over the years to scale back a bit, in the past Lady T did some amazing cakes but the effort required (and some tears involved) were broadly speaking unsustainable for us.

"Don't melt the toys"

oh and also,

"Don't burn the kids"

That’s still effort, though. Lots of people buy a cake in, so it’s still superb.

I did a simple cake this year too. Let me see if I can find cake pics.

1 year: Octonauts


2 years: Hey Duggee


3 Years: Grandmaster Glitch from Go Jetters


4 Years: Rainbow, from Sarah & Duck


5 Years: Totoro


6 Years: Animal Crossing (specifically Bob)


This year: astronauts

Those cakes are amazing

Mimi, if those are your idea of simple cakes I'd hate to see what you consider a complex one! They're all absolutely incredible. I love the way you've created the rocky effect on the moons in that last one.

This!

Superb work Mimi. They even look tasty on the screen.

Oh, some of them took a lot of time and effort, but this years was very simple and easy. I took longer researching and making different frostings this year than I did icing the cakes. It was just ermine frosting swirled with the back or handle of a teaspoon. The astronauts were the first pre-made toppers I’ve ever used but as he’s really into space at the moment and has an increasingly space-themed room, I figured they could be used as decorations in his room afterwards.

I really enjoyed making the Grand Master Glitch one and shaping the cake under the icing to create the recess. Id sort of imagined it and was very happy when it worked as I’d hoped.

First time making 3 loaves at once which involved oven juggling and they came out underbaked as a result, a bit of a cakey feel.

Still, especially as I also did 50/40/10 wheat/spelt/rye instead of 50/50 wheat/spelt, not bad, will try harder (dusted with Emmer which is a terrible bread flour but great for that, super tasty)

They look incredible, though. I bet they taste beautiful.

I usually get a burst of creative energy on the lead up to Christmas as I just like handmade things. I haven’t started proper yet, but I made some Christmas pyjamas for D.




I used the scraps to make a couple of pairs of briefs so there was no wastage. The fabric glows in the dark, and who doesn’t want glue in the dark fire engine pyjamas?


I also made a sweatshirt with a glow in the dark space theme, because I got some free glow in the dark vinyl and wanted to try it out.

Just catching up on some of your makes, Mimi and they all look amazing! Particularly the dinosaur t-shirts and glow-in-the-dark jumper.

I still have the fabric that changes colour in sunlight to use, I hope it's still okay - it's been packed up for so long.

I have promised Christmas Pyjamas too, but have nowhere to set up a machine at the moment. Eek.

My sunlight changing fabric was in a box for *years* and was absolutely perfect. I think it’s pretty stable. Are you making kid’s pyjamas? If they’re jersey pyjamas do you have a pattern? If not can I give a shout to the Lightning Leggings pattern from W&W (free download) using the relaxed view with encased elastic waistband and cuffed bottoms, paired with something like the Emi tee (again, from W&W) in the cuffed long sleeve view? That’s what I used for the above set and the guy is perfect for pyjamas. I lengthened the Emi so they’d fit for longer.

Is your overlocker back in action now, @goddess Jasmine? (When you find space to set up, anyway).

Ah, that's really good to know, thank you.

I think I have most of the W&W patterns now. I go for the dolman and For Seasons to give me wiggle room, as I don't get to.keasure the recipients, so there is an element of guesswork involved.

I got a new overlocker in the end, and really can't wait to get it back out again. It might have to have a temporary space on the dining table next weekend. Christmas is coming too quickly!

I’ve made a few recent Christmassy things.

I didn’t make this wooden tree, I just bought it plain and decorated it with acrylic paints and a bit of gold mica, after crowdsourcing a few ideas for the text from Twitter (thanks to all who suggested ideas). This is going in front of the fireplace where the stockings all hang, so it worked quite well.



I made some Christmas wreaths. They’re not *overly* Christmassy, so they could be hung at other times of year if we needed a bit of greenery.



And I’ve made a couple of gifts. One on a slice of tree trunk and the other on a wooden disc that I painted white, decorated with acrylic paints.


Nana is the family candy cane dealer and always sends a load to hang on our tree, and Grandad *loves* mint humbugs, so I thought they’d be something fun for them to hang up over Christmas.

It’s Christmas Jumper Day at school tomorrow so I e been quickly changing these few bits:
(an old sweatshirt, an IKEA blanket, some buttons and some iron-on vinyl), into a Christmassy jumper.

Oh wow. That is ace!

Thanks! It’s a relatively simple thing. The only tricky bit is designing/drafting tve collar to fit a ready made garment and sit flat against the neckline/body, which is a more complicated process than you’d think

And I’ve moved to a new program (Affinity 2 suite) after 11 years of using a 12 year old Illustrator release as my laptop gave up and no mere mortal can afford Illustrator under the new subscription model, so I am still very much getting used to that for drawing/making things like the belt. There’s a little detail that you can’t see in the pictures, but I ran a double line of stitches down the front, next to the buttons, to look like the edge of the button placket. I think that’s my favourite bit

That looks great, did you use fabric from the jumper to make the hat too?

I'm very glad that things like Affinity Suite, Black Magic Resolve, Blender and others have entered the market to attempt to break up the Adobe monopoly. Those greedy buggers (and Autodesk) are money grabbing arseholes who think that creatives will keep shipping money to them because they have no choice.

No, I made the hat last year to replace the hat that I made the year before that seemed to go missing but then magically reappeared this morning. Both are completely made of IKEA blankets and a couple of fake snowballs that we used for indoor snowball fights during lockdown.

This jumper is just another iteration of one I made before in 2020. At the time Bean had just started reception school and had been in and out of lockdown since term began. Because of this it was pure chaos and the school sprung Christmas Jumper Day on us with no warning, and as shopping was very limited, as well as having no time to do it, I cobbled a jumper and hat out of what I had around the house.



I used a new brand of white heat transfer vinyl, and it was terrible. The 'buttons' just came off in the wash, so last year he wore that original jumper from 2020 with a hat I made to replace the original, but I added new buttons. Big, big buttons. Probably too big:



So this year I knew that the original jumper wouldn't fit anymore, so I made a new one. I had a bit more time to get the things that I needed, so could add real buttons this year. I used bits of the same white blanket and just had a bit more time to plan, though making it was quicker, if anything, simply as I have space to have the sewing machine set up now.

Oh, I am so very grateful for them. I've been hanging on to my dying laptop because I knew that as soon as it 'went' I'd have no way of actually being able to access Illustrator in any form, so it's been a bit of a stress. I know that Inkscape has been around a while, but I just could not get on with that at all. Affinity seem to have made a big difference, and it is just so much more affordable.

Adobe needed some challenging. I know it's the industry standard, and because of that there is much more community support and learning, but it's just an impossible cost for so many people.

I'm also trying to accept my fate using the Mac office suite alternative (Pages, Numbers, etc) after we lost the key to the Microsoft Office suite (because it was emailed to Russell's old workplace, oops)

As far as Office Suites go, I've had great results with the Google web based stuff. It can do pretty much all of the mainstream work in exactly the same was as MS Office, but has the benefit of being free and automatically backed up (and not at all scanned by Google for advertising purposes, oh no siree)

Or there's Libre Office, which is also cool.

Russell recommended me the Google suite, too. I will give it a go alongside the MAC stuff. I think I had a bit of skepticism because being web-based I worried what would happen if I was somewhere that i couldn't access it, and also because Google already knows far too much about me

If you need just a single-use code, then Wowcher can help - I avoided a subscription to 365 and picked up Office 2021 for Mac there (it's £44 at the mo, I think I got it a little cheaper, but it's also listed multiple times at different prices, so, um). It's a bit fiddly to use, but it did work.

I use this and as a result of the software being ace, I've bought into their line of cameras and editing keyboards so it's a win win! I'm doing exactly what their business model thought I'd do.

You can use GSuite offline with a few browser extentions
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/ ... %3DDesktop

I did some craft stuff. Can't be bothered photophising it. Just pretend it's incredibly mediocre and amateurish.

It’s incredible crafting! A bespoke labour of love to a handful of freaks x

It was genuinely super! Also, it smelt great,

Aw, please photorise your stuff, Dimmers. It would be wonderful to see.

So, last year I made the Willy Wonka costume https://mimicodd.com/we-are-the-dreamers-of-the-dreams/ and the chocolate bars to go with it. The chocolate bars were an afterthought, and very last-minute, so were made with whatever materials I had to hand.

This year Bean is wearing the same costume for World Book Day (I built extra length into the trouser and sleeve hems for this exact purpose) so I have a bit more time to dedicate to chocolate.

And have you heard, Wonka has a new one out? What’s that?



It’s the Scrumdidilyumptious bar.

Or, as this dozy twit has spelled it, the Scrumdidlyumptious bar.


Luckily, it was just the proof of concept bar, so I have adjusted it for when I make the actual 33 bars to take to school. I was concentrating so hard on not putting a double d in diddly that I didn’t see the i. So, didily.

Might need to buy another pack of curly wurlys as I accidentally ate two. One whilst measuring it (with my mouth) and once when I thought I’d better double check.

World Book Day is tomorrow. Glue sticks at the ready.

There's a blow job joke in there somewhere

Now, Grimothy… tut.

I managed the first bit of sewing in the reconfigured craft room yesterday, and made a little summer shirt for Darwin. Thanks to Cras for helping me figure out the yoke direction by taking pictures, and thanks to Findus and The Vision for confirming the pocket side.

I haven’t made a shift since before I had Darwin (when I made one for myself) so there were a few things to remember, but it was fun. I pattern matched the pocket, the shirt fronts and the button bands, which took some mental gymnastics, but I’m glad I did.

That looks fucking amazing, Meems.

Thanks, Gaz. It’s given me a bit more confidence as I haven’t made a shirt in so long I thought I’d forgotten most of the steps.

Jesus Mimi, you need your own TV show!

This is one of the loveliest things anyone has ever said to me. Thank you! Buzzing now

Absolutely incredible work. If I had to raise a minor point of criticism it would be that the mobile phone pocket looks a bit on the small side.

We should get Mimi on the Great British Sewing Bee