Whatchya been doin'?

So, that was January huh? It simply zoomed by in this household with a whirl of fun, friends, arrivals and parties! What a great start to the year. Mind you there hasn't been a great deal of actual work done (as in the kind that brings home the bacon!) but the salt mines will wait I guess! Our daughter Ellen, turned 21 and we had a party to celebrate - it was terrific fun and had a dress-up theme of fairy-tales. We had been deliberating over table decorations for ages when one day Ellie eye-spied these beauties over at Grrl+dog. Armed with this fab inspiration we sallied forth to create a whole bunch of 'shrooms'. in keeping with our fairytale theme. First we made the tops from cardboard and layered them up with pages from old books. Then they were given a wash of paint.

Dots were added for that true shroomy effect ...

The stalks were made from rolled up paper and more book pages. We rediscovered the joys of Mod-Podge! And now for the assemblage - we knew we needed them to be stable as there was going to be some rollicking party games afoot and we didn't want the shrooms to go flying .... Rather than try to stick them down, we opted to create a board with pegs that the stalks could slip over - stable and easy to dis-assemble! You can see the work in progress in the background ...

 To complete them, we made glass "mushrooms" and perched a gnome on top - we used some blu-tac on the day just as a little added security - hey these are some of my favourite woodland critters afterall!

 We really had a lovely rainbow of shrooms and as a finishing touch we placed vintage woodland critters amongst the mushroom forest.

I don't have a pic yet of these in situ but when I do, I will show you. So big thanks to Denise for the inspiration and the words of encouragement and a big congrats to Ellen for turning 21!

 So, - what have you been up to over January ...?