Holiday Softie Awards 2007 - UPDATE

The competition closed last Wednesday and the finalists in each category have now been announced.

Voting is open until 14th November 2007. Anyone can vote, so here's the link to Softies Central where you can check out the finalists and cast your vote if you so wish!

Mother Christmas is consoling herself with a bottle of Pernod, so best leave her alone for now (pssst - she didn't get through, shhh!)

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Holiday Softie Awards 2007 - Mother Christmas

This is my traditional Mother Christmas - made from Calico cloth and Alpaca fleece.

Her dress is made from green felt and her apron is a piece of gingam fabric that I recycled from an old pair of summer trousers.

I have trimmed her apron with white broderie lace and a white satin ribbon. Her dress hem and cuffs are trimmed with Christmas themed gold braid.

Mother Christmas' hair has been needle felted using Alpaca fleece. I also used the Alpaca fleece to create a softer, kinder face. The eyes and mouth are stitched using embroidery thread/floss.

I made her glasses using silver coloured beading wire and my round nosed pliers. They are attached with a small amount of embroidery thread.

I had two more items to enter but didn't manage to get them finished on time. The closing date & time was midnight 31 October US Eastern Time (which was approx 5am here in the UK). Sadly my camera died before I could photograph the other two items (major bummer). But at least I got this little lady entered on time. I think I need to take a time management course one of these days as things are a little bit disorganised at the moment. I'll post some piccies of the other softies once I find some batteries for the flipping camera!

To see more entries, visit the Flickr HSA group page. There are 9 different categories and hundreds of amazing softies!

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Easter hols

It doesn't seem all that long ago that we were wrestling with flu and Christmas decorations in our house. Now, the kids are off school for their two week Easter hols. Where does the time go????

Little Miss CB will be busy for at least 4 days of the holiday attending various sporting activites - namely soccer, netball, basketball and racquet sports. We're very luck here on the Isle of Man. There's a great Sports & Recreation programme which we've watched grow since moving here nearly 5 years ago. Obviously you have to pay for it, but it's a small price to pay for your child's health, fitness and happiness (and mum & dad's sanity!)

We're also going away for a few days over Easter weekend. Mr CB and his Little princess are going to watch Manchester United play Roma at Old Trafford on Tuesday 10th April so we thought it would be fun to tag a few days onto that trip and get the most out of the long weekend. We're not footie fanatics in our house (one look at mnyself and Mr CB and you'll see that I'm serious) but you can't help being enthusiastic about soccer as Little Miss CB loves it SOOO much!

Speaking of which, we have the Manx Youth Games coming up in May, for which Miss CB has been training religiously for the girl's soccer. Watch this space for more gushing, ahem, news!

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