make a few pennies

Come and join us on 2 June and have your own little stall at our community yard sale.

Dig through your cupboards or tinker on some homemade delights and sell your wares and no longer needed goodies under the majestic trees of the beautiful church garden.

Space is limited, so contact me today to book a stall.

Make a few pennies & buy something pretty.

We hope that through this initiative, we can create a platform for the community do a bit of de-cluttering, make some extra cash, tap into their creative potential and get to know one another.

the rainbow party cake

This cake did take some blood (seriously), yoga breathing and a bit of cursing, to complete.  But complete it we did!  This cake is so worth the reaction.  Yes there were literally gasps... Lauren (Lucy's mom) uttered that thank goodness there was champagne, else she would have run home.  I fear that Mariota's (a mom whose kids parties I used to organise way before husbands, children and myprodols) premonition may be coming true:  "One day when you have kids, you are going to be one of those mothers, that other mothers love to hate."  I took it as a compliment at the time, but now I see it as a bit of an omen. Thank goodness I am terrible at a lot of other mommy things: never on time for school, sometimes forget to brush teeth, couldn't find the ballet venue, forget playdates, cereal for dinner... the list goes on..

There were some bumps and bruises, but otherwise we nailed the cake.  I am new to fondant icing... not too mad about the taste, but i wanted a clean finish, and I nearly got it. (This is where the cursing and yoga breathing came into play).   

Otherwise I think this is my most favourite cake that I have ever made.  It was happy & fun.  Livi could help make it, and seeing her smiling with her little fists clenched up in front of her chest in excitement was magical.  

I hope it made up for last years cake.. when I was working 12 hour days and had a 4 month old Sophie.  Pretty much just scribbled her name on a plain sponge and butter icing cake.  I am too embarrassed to even put a pic up.

If you want to make your own rainbow cake, you have to use gel colouring.  A couple of years ago, this was an unimaginable product in South Africa, and I would not have been able to get the colours of the cake even nearly so vibrant, never mind all the shades.  A great tip I also learnt after researching some rainbow cakes came from One Charming Party.  They suggested that you clingwrap each layer of cake seperately and then freeze them.  This makes stacking the layers incredibly easy, and as you can see even liv could do it.

also check out rainbow party:

food & drinks

activities & party favours

invite & decorations

Rainbow party: food & drinks

rainbow  cupcakes

rainbow lemonade

rainbow jelly

brollie cookies

I love these photos!  Ariana and Erin's mom, Catherine took them.  Please go check her out here.    Everything looks so dreamy. And professional! And yummy...


I am pretty chuffed: I made the sprinkles for the cupcakes myself.. 
And to get the blue jelly for the rainbow jelly, I used plain gelatin and coloured it blue.  Gelatin is quite stinky...  I don't know about the rest of the world.. but there is no such thing as blue jelly in africa.


Add to this list:  packets of popcorn, hotdogs & rainbow fruit kebabs..

and champagne. For us folks.  And some quiche, carrot cake, baked cheese cake and a berry vanilla cake. 

also check out rainbow party:

birthday cake

activities & party favours

invite & decorations

rainbow party: activities & party favours

I had reams of ribbon that I bought for the decorations left over, so I snipped and taped bits to a straw or koki pen to make rainbow wands.  Made some homemade play dough in rainbow colours, stuck a personalized sticker and glued on a shape cutter.  I gave a small leap when I found these cute rainbow ribbons.  I glued them on some clips.  Printed some cards with a 4 printed on, and bob's your uncle.

We kept everything quite low key for the activities. Pretty much just letting the kids run wild. We did a bit of rainbow face painting. (Thank you Zanmari and Jacqui)  Here is Liv the birthday girl with her cute wonky rainbow and  red heart face painting.   

We had a snack and party activity table with kiddie size wooden benches for the kids to sit at.  Here the kids could colour in rainbows and suck lollipops.  (Sophie Lou and two.  One for each hand.)  There was also a big bowl of wooden rainbow beads so that the anybody could make necklaces and bracelets, to take home.  This worked out well as the kids who were a bit shy, could play here and ease into the party.  Outside there was the swing, trampoline and hoolahoops. 

 We really made do with what we had, and the kids had a ball.  The only really structured play was hunting for the gold coins to put at the end of the rainbow...  I also tried to make giant bubble mixture again this year.  And again, I failed.  Maybe next year.

also check out rainbow party:

food & drinks

birthday cake

invite & decorations

olivia's rainbow party: Invite & Decorations

Olivia's rainbow party has come and gone.  Liv just loves parties, like all children i suppose.  And I just love how she gets excited about everything you make and do, no matter how small.  We had oodles of fun, and my mind was constantly being hijacked by flashes of rainbow colours.
Here is the first installment of the rainbow party:

 Late into the night, children asleep and all alone, I tied hundreds of ribbons to create this festive garland to string through the house and garden. I think it was more-or-less 30 meters.  I  was amazed at how far 7 rolls of ribbon can go... and there was still loads left.

We also made 6 big tissue paper flowers, one for every colour of the rainbow, to hang above the party table.  These were probably one of my favourite bits.  You can use this tutorial to make these, but for  this size, you will need 10 sheets of tissue paper. And Dexter, the new kitty definitely  loves them: creeping underneath when they were still piled on the floor, and then launching into attack mode. 

We displayed lots of the party goodies in our art deco cupboard.  This all happened with a bit of short notice, as we had planned on a party in the front garden.  But then the weather was a tad fickle, so we had to move most of the party inside, just to be on the safe side.... though just for the record: the sun shone!

Found these very rainbow-y windmills at the chinese trade store, and very last minute, assembled them and hid them among the plants.  I nearly forgot about these, as I had bought them ages ago.

And just for fun, we tied helium balloons around the trampoline.

ooh, and Martin, the mostly amazing husband, found rainbow tulips for a steal, at the Adderley Street flower market..

also check out rainbow party:

activities & party favours

food & drinks

birthday cake