Charity

Thought I would quickly share with you the poster I made for this year's charity Christmas Quiz at my local pub. I wanted to keep it quite simple and traditional, and played with the idea of leaving offerings for Santa and his reindeer. The title font and the sleigh were from dafont, and the border illustration was my own work. Will hopefully be getting some more Christmas themed stuff up here again soon!

final

So it's the last day of 2011, and the new year is on the horizon. It's been an amazing and dull year simultaneously, with my graduation happening and then...  not a lot else. Next year it's time to get me some serious move on, and get myself back into working and hopefully starting to forge myself a decent career.

For now, as a final goodbye to 2011, I thought I'd share with you the labels I did for my Christmas presents. It's a combination of my favourite things - victorian type, painting with gouache and food! These were printed on sticky paper and put onto gift bags.

The truffles I made were all eaten too quickly for me to take a good photo, but I can now reveal their lovely fillings as everyone has received their gifts. The first two fillings were taken from Hope & Greenwood's recipe book and I gave them some festive names. 

Happy New Year to all my readers and I will see you in 2012!

truffles

Today I've been doing a little bit of painting pictures of food (no change there then) ready for some of my Christmas gifts. I had a go at making truffles (sorry if you are getting these and your surprise is spoilt) so I needed some images of them for the... I suppose you'd call it a chocolate menu? The fillings guide!

I found that making chocolates from scratch was actually pretty fun and not as insanely hard as I thought. I made a traditional style ganache truffle as well as two others with unique fillings. 

The recipes for the unusual fillings were from a book by the rather fabulous Hope & Greenwood that my brother got for me for my birthday last year, and beside the sumptuous recipes the actual writing in there is worth buying the book for alone - a very witty style that kept me entertained whilst endlessly dipping chocolates! You can find the book here (it also features some fantastic photography and lovely fifties style illustrations. It's basically the kind of book I would design if I were a publisher!) 

Here's some sneak previews of the actual chocolates - don't look, friends! The stars I used on the white truffles are Dr Oetker and you can get them from most good supermarkets or online here. I got the edible red glitter from a specialist baking shop in my local town but I found some online here if you'd like to experiment! 

I won't tell you what's in these - I shall save that until after Christmas! 

Update: Now that Christmas is over I can share with you the finished 'choccy menu', complete with details of the chocolate fillings...

quizlet

Just a quick one today to share a poster design with you all that I worked on this evening. My dad is running the local pub charity quiz in a few weeks and wanted a little advertising so I thought I would step in! I have been feeling very Christmassy of late and got a little bit excited searching for typefaces, as I had to get this done quite fast and didn't have time to draw out my own font for a change! The festive type I used here is from this website though it's not entirely the same as the designer intended as I did edit out parts of the original type design. The candlelit background is some collage paper that I scanned in, I think it might be by papermania.  Overall I was going for the whole Tom Smith's crackers victorian postcard style aesthetic. Hope you like it!

festive

Hello everyone! Happy December to you all, hope you have all started your festive countdowns with chocolate today in the same way I have!

Just managed to get some last minute entries into a competition I found through the magic of twitter. The Design Museum and the House of Illustration have collaborated and are looking for festive illustrations to light up their "Sparkle the Dark Up" event, which will be projected onto the side of the building in all their festive glory! So I decided to put together some of my festive packaging images into some entries. To look at some of the other entries get over to their flickr page. 

festive

Hand drawn Christmas holly themed typography

Continuing on the theme of being way too prepared for Christmas, I wanted to share with you a little of the work I've been doing on my own gifts ready for the big festive season. I designed a Christmas-themed font for all of the different elements of my gifts, and have been busy designing labels for different things just to give my gifts a more personal edge. I can never get away from my love of Typography so this was the perfect chance to get some festive designs ready.

 (Anyone reading this who I will be giving the following gift to - I hope this doesn't spoil the fun when you receive yours! it tastes good, trust me I've tried it!)

Handmade Mincemeat in personalised jars

This year I decided to make my own mincemeat, as I have often wondered if it would be really that difficult. Turns out it's not, at all! I opted for our national treasure Delia Smith's recipe which can be found here. Then I simply customised the jars with Christmassy fabric, print out labels and festive ribbon.  

gingerbread

Ok, ok, I know. It's not 'the C word' *ahem*Christmas*ahem* for another ten weeks or so. However, I have been dabbling in a little early Christmas spirit as I have been designing for parts of my personalised presents that I will be giving out to family and friends this year. I have been having fun with paint again (hooray!) and going back to my old favourite of food. These paintings were so much fun, I particularly loved doing the gingerbread house. I also designed the snowflake pattern in the background of these images. I got the colour scheme of the pattern from something I did last year for the They Draw and Cook holiday recipe contest.

I hope to go back to painting food for some of my promo material that I will be working on next, so watch this space! Maybe in a few days I will post some slightly more appropriate seasonal material and do a pumpkin or something? who knows.

 Gingerbread men and candy canes. yuuum.

Gingerbread house - I hope the one I make this year looks this good...

feature

Just a quick hello to say thankyou to They Draw and Cook for featuring my recipe on today's blog :) you can see my recipe for mince pies here. Merry Christmas to everyone, have a wonderful day :)

crafty

Let it Snow

Well, if you are living in Britain and are not living under a rock, you may have noticed that it's snowing. A lot. And when it snows in Britain, everything has to stop - trains, planes, roads, deliveries, the works. Which means I have plenty of time to go taking pictures of the snow and getting on with lots of crafty projects to keep me occupied! The bulk of the white stuff came on Saturday, which is when I took the previous picture. It's a photo of our front path covered in its blanket of ice white snow, which looks rather festive. Lovely to look at, not so lovely to go walking in.. might be time to invest in some new wellies I think.

My mother has been as crafty as me of late, and she has delightfully fashioned a heart-shaped Christmas wreath for our front door which is entwined with Christmas berries, spices and fairy lights.

Mum's festive door wreath

I have also been making gift bags this week - I got hold of some cheap brown paper bags from home bargains and decorated them with illustrations of Christmassy characters such as snowmen and reindeer, and added some shiny curly ribbons and luggage tags. These are for the children of family friends, and will be filled with luscious Gingerbread and chocolate goodies (when I have finished making them!) I also made one or two for my best friends to hold their Christmas presents, I think these bags would be just as fun for adults as they are for children.

Selection of festive characters - Reindeer, Snowmen, Gingerbread men, Robins and Christmas Trees.

All personalised with each child's name on a label, which says Merry Christmas on the reverse

Festive Snowman

Yesterday I had a go at some little chocolatey fairy cakes to match the gift bags. Each one is a simple chocolate fudge cupcake, decorated with snowmen and crisp sugar on some melted milk chocolate. I had great fun picking the decorations and the cases from our collection of pretty treats!

Sweet chocolatey treats

So it really has been a crafty few days. I ventured out into the winter wonderland and picked up some materials to make my boyfriend a birthday present (birthdays in January, the present buying doesn't stop!) and so that will be under construction in the next few days. Soon it'll be Christmas day, and I intend to sit back, perhaps with my Nightmare Before Christmas DVD on (how traditional) and maybe eat many Mince Pies. I am still waiting to see if my recipe for mince pies gets featured on the They Draw and Cook blog, fingers crossed it gets on there soon!

christmas

the tree

lovely busty ladies from TK Maxx

A view of Hedwig and the tree

Fiona the fairy and Philip the horse

beautiful glittery candles from Trago Mills

As you can probably tell, it's christmas at my house! There's never been a more creep-chic tree as ours. We have been making a small collection of decorations for the past three years, since we came to uni. The first was Fiona (the fairy on top of the tree), which I made out of felt and tissue paper in the first year of uni.

The second year brought with it the neon blue lights (seriously not fetching but they are bright and fun) and the lovely being that is philip. The horrid christmas pony courtesy of Millie Delacoe (whose amazing journalism/lifestyle blog you can view here, which will probably include more pics of the tree) and his name is Philip. We tried putting him near the door but the boys wouldn't let us, so with Fiona he now rides.

This year, we went a little overboard with ornaments. The busty christmas ladies are from a lovely amazing shop known as TK Maxx and the candles, golden swan and creepy christmas hat stars are all from the most amazing christmas heaven in all of Falmouth, Trago Mills.

Very excited to get to christmas now - I entered the They Draw and Cook holiday recipe contest last week with a recipe for mince pies (aha! which is why I cooked them last week...) and I can't wait to see if they put my recipe on their website. very exciting!

festive

I realise it's still a good few weeks 'til Christmas... but I have been practising a few recipes to get myself in the little festive mood :) I hope to perfect this recipe by the time we go home. Today, I learnt how to make shortcrust pastry. To many people that may seem like a silly thing to declare as most people probably know how to, I simply haven't made it before so it was a first attempt. It really was amazingly easy, I'll never know why my mom has always said it's difficult. My flatmate Millie and I invested in some gorgeous little alphabet cookie cutters from Aldi last week in the hope that it will make some great concoctions, and I decided to use them to create some themed pastry tops for my mince pies. Got some good little photos of these bad boys - I see a ready-made Christmas card on the horizon!

Been attempting to get to grips with my dissertation this week, I have actually started putting finger to key and writing something down! I hope to have a good quality first draft to get feedback on, and eventually I will get quotes and some good references in there. It's getting tricky to juggle stuff around! As a result some of my studio work has been suffering a little (hence the lack of evidence of drawing on this blog) but I hope the photos of the pies is enough visual stimulation for now. I hope to get some awesome stuff on the go as sooon as possible - it may be all quiet on the western front for some time.