My place and yours - Through the front door.

Today our front door has a sign on it saying slumber party. Tomorrow Miss Indi, my big girl, is going to turn nine and in honour of this she has six of her besties sleeping the night at our place tonight.

We are not a very neat and tidy household but we've tried to make room for them by shifting things aside and making piles out of the way. This shoe stack is right behind the front door, its probably time to put away the gumboots and bring out the sandals and thongs.

Through the front door at our place today the air is full of baking smells.

Cupcakes are waiting to cool so they can be iced.

Pizza dough is rising for dinner.

And yoyos are cooling before they are stuck together.

I feel calmer about this party than any we've thrown before. At nine, the girls are quite self sufficient with their activities and because they are here for such a long time, I can wrap parcels, get out paints and fimo, cut up fruit and veg and do any other preparation while they are here.

There's 45 minutes until they arrive, time to get into our jammies.

Thanks to Shelley from Femme de Montmartre. for the theme and Pip as always, for being the hostess with the mostest.

Hey and did you hear the exciting news, I am to be next week's theme queen. Yay!! How exciting! Better dust off my tiara and come up with a good one.

I hope you are having a great weekend.

Yoyos.

We do a lot of baking in our house, so it surprised me when Bren and the girls came home from doing the shopping last week with a bag of freshly baked Yoyos.

Not to be outdone, we baked our own this morning.

I read about eight recipes on the computer and then combined them to make our own.

They were probably the easiest thing we have ever baked.

Great for baking with your kids.

Here is the recipe;

Cream 185 grams of butter and 1/3 cup icing sugar.

Add 1 and a 1/2 cups of plain flour and 1/3 cup custard powder to the mixer and mix well.

Make them into balls and then slightly flatten them using the back of a fork.

Bake in a moderate oven on baking paper for about fifteen minutes.

For the filling combine 1/2 cup icing sugar, 2 tablespoons butter, 2 teaspoons custard powder and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla.

When they are cool and you are ready to eat them put some filling on one biscuit and squash another one on top. Apparently they go soggy if you join them and leave them for a while. I don't think that is going to be a problem here though.

Before I go here's a washer I made last night.

This one is called The Bushy Stitch Dishcloth and the pattern is here.

It is probably the easiest washer I have made to date as it only has two lines of pattern.

I love the edging and the feel of it is lovely.

I'm not sure if those larger spaces are places where it has stretched or perhaps I got a bit too absorbed in the dvd we were watching last night and replaced a few sc's with dc's.

I hope you are having a great weekend.