The giveaway was for creating your own photo book with Paper Coterie! After having a little snoop around their website I was in love! Everything is just gorgeous, there are so many fab designs to choose from and it took me a while but I finally decided on making a photo book with all my Instagram shots.

Their website was so fun and easy to use, it allows you to upload all your photos and try out different designs and layouts till you find one that’s perfect.

My little book arrived the other day and I am so impressed! The quality is fantastic and I would highly recommend checking out Paper Coterie!

I have always loved the look of turning something old into something new and have been adding tons of furniture ideas to my Pinterest boards over the last few months, especially furniture projects made from old crates! So last week I rung around and found a bottle shop selling old beer swap-a-crates for $1.60 each. It was such a good deal so I picked up the crates I needed and stopped and grabbed a few cans of dark brown spray paint on the way home.

The project was so much easier than I thought it would be, the only hard part was actually waiting for paint to dry! I didn’t bother with sanding the crates, I liked the original stamping and nail holes in the wood and they were not meant to look brand new anyway.

Now what I did realise with these particular swap-a-crates is that when you turn them on their sides there is a gap in the crate that runs down the centre, to make it into a flat shelf I just cut a piece of 12mm wood to size to fill the gap so that nothing could fall through when it was being used as a shelf. I just did this with some of the crates so that the top of the bookshelf was a flat surface. I then gave each crate a nice even coat of spray paint and once I had the layout I wanted I screwed them together so all the crates lined up.

I’m really happy with the finished product and all up it cost me about $45 (much cheaper than buying a brand new bookshelf!) Have you made any furnishings out of old crates before or do you think you might give a DIY like this a try?

 
1. Morning view
2. Bathtime with Maddie
3. Auckland museum
4. Fave smoothie
5. Orewa beach
6. In hospital
7. Maddie Cat
8. Birthday card from Miss K

To make this smoothie you will need:

• 1 large banana
• 2-3 kiwifruit
• 1 cup milk
• 1-2 scoops vanilla ice cream
• 1 Tbsp honey
• 2 Tbsp plain or vanilla yoghurt (optional)

Pop everything in the blender, make sure the lids on! Whizz up and serve. Makes 2 glasses

Ingredients:

• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 cups raw sugar
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 3 tablespoons honey
• 3 teaspoons vanilla extract

When you make the recipe you don’t need to worry about exact measurements, just throw it all in the bowl and mix it up till you are happy with the consistency, you can add more sugar if you want a dry scrub or more honey and oil for a smoother scrub. If you are using this for a mother’s day gift you may also be interested in checking out the free printables I used on my mason jars over at kiki creates.

Ingredients:

• 750g pumpkin, peeled and chopped
• 2 large onions, peeled and chopped
• 375g potatoes, peeled and chopped
• 4 cups chicken stock (stock cubes are fine)
• 1 1/4 cups of cream
• salt and pepper

Method:

• Bring all the vegetables and stock to the boil in a large stove top pot. Reduce heat and simmer for 25-30 mins until soft. Then mash or blend.
• Add the cream and bring back to the boil. Reduce heat and simmer for another  5 mins. Add salt and pepper to taste.

We spent the weekend relaxing with family and friends and I loved watching how excited Miss K was when we did the Easter egg hunt. How did you spend your weekend, did the Easter bunny visit your place too?

 
1. Bike rides at Pauanui
2. Pauanui estuary
3. Birds over Pauanui beach
4. Myself and Miss K
5. Dinner at Mexico (amazing!!)
6. Birthday girl
7. Maddie being a computer geek
8. Sundae Cupcakes

I started by getting some cupcake wrappers and party straws by Paper Eskimo to use as my colour theme. They stock some gorgeous party paper supplies in all sorts of colours but I went with Miss K’s fave colour PINK!

For the cupcake mixture I stuck with my favourite recipe, you can find the method here from one of my previous posts. The next step was the buttercream frosting. I searched the web reading tons of buttercream recipes as I had never made it before and was quite worried about having enough mixture for the 12 cupcakes.

I ended up finding an excellent recipe over at Savory Sweet Life, the frosting turned out just how I had hoped, it tasted amazing and there was plenty of frosting for the swirls. I used a Wilton 1m tip to decorate, then finished them off with the sprinkles and a cherry on top!