Daily Archives: December 17, 2012

Home made Christmas wreaths 4

 in Christmas / Christmas Crafts / crafts  tagged christmas / christmas craft / make your own wreaths by

There is something about Christmas that just inspires me and I think I have said before we do not buy the adults in our family Christmas gifts, so this year I decided to make use of my dried orange slices and make some home made christmas wreaths for my mother in law and sister in law.

Materials:

Artificial wreath (I wanted it to last year to year)
Dried orange slices
Florists wire
Cinnamon sticks (from the florist as they are much cheaper)
Florists wire
Ribbon
Glue gun
Decorations (I used both wooden ones and also felt one too)
I got my smaller wreaths from Tesco for 97p and the larger ones from Hobby Craft on a three for two for £3.49

Method:

Firstly I dried my oranges slices and allowed them to dry.
For each wreath I made five orange, ribbon and cinnamon decorations by tying a bow in the ribbon and threading some florist wire through the back, then thread the wire through the orange slice. Using the glue gun apply a blob of glue to the rear of the orange and attach the cinnamon stick and wrap with the wire and allow to dry.
Then position your orange decorations on the wreath and using the wire tie them in.
Attach any other decorations or embellishments either with florists wire or a hot glue gun.

Swagbucks Update 1

 in competition  tagged swagbucks by

As you know I have been taking part in the Tots100 Swagbucks competition along with 12 other fantastic bloggers and I wanted to tell you about my experience before the winner is announced next week. I am not sure yet that Swagbucks is for me, I haven’t been very stressful with it, but I do think there are a number of reasons. Firstly the toolbar doesn’t work in Chrome and that is my preferred browser and secondly the major one for me is that I think it is possible to get many more points if you are willing to use Swagbucks to register with gambling sites, but I don’t gamble, so it didn’t really work for me. Another issue was that often people post hints and tips to the Swagbucks facebook page and with the changes on facebook I often didn’t realise they were there until to late.

I am not sure that this time of year was the best time for me to focus on Swagbucks, as I am short of time and I think that if you have time to use it to do the daily poll, survey and searches via them you can make a lot of cash. Wendy made £100 in just three weeks, where I made less than £10! Pippa also made an amazing number of points too, which highlighted to me that it is more than possible and it was me that wasn’t using the site right!

Also I think it is really important that you get other people registered and using swagbucks as you get a proportion of their bucks too and neither of my referrals used the search function.

So my top tips would be:

Get in to a routine (I will try again after Christmas)
Use the seach toolbar
get your referrals to use swagbucks
So I am going to try again in the new year when I have more time and if you want to have a go with me, http://www.swagbucks.com/refer/MuminTheMadHouse

Let me introduce you to decay the next skylander!

 in maximad  tagged skylander by

And I have kept saying no. But the boys love them and want them. They have played on Skylanders with Master Frugal and I am coming to realise that they will not need them all as they can share and swap with friends. Plus all their friends have them and they love to talk about them.

However, we have a rile at christmas, they are only allowed to ask for four things and as they both really want bikes, Skylanders are out of our price range But thankfully the Tots100 might be able t come to our rescue with their great Skylanders competition.

So this is Decay. He is a magic Skylander with his candy cane light saber which shoots sweets at you and tricks you in to getting bad teeth!