Whoopie it's Halloween!

It all started with a fairly innocuous workplace challenge: every team gets a pumpkin, and gets to do with it what they will. Judging takes place at 2pm, this spooky Halloween Thursday.

By Tuesday our pumpkin was still in tact. Something had to be done.

Earlier in the week, someone sent around an email about food waste. This got me thinking. All those Halloween pumpkins are bought, carved and essentially thrown away. How's that for food waste?!

What if you could make something a bit different (and useful) out of pumpkin flesh?

What if you made whoopie pies?

So after Martha Stuart (controversial I know) supplied this recipe, it was really just a matter of using some tricks to turn this pumpkin into a treat.

Before:

During (Part 1):

During (Part 2):

After! Complete with clip art mash-up and patronising note about food waste :)

Ok, so we didn't win any of the awards but the pies went down a treat and everyone was most appreciative - which to be honest, was the most important thing anyway!

Happy Halloween!

Let me smoke my (knitted) pipe

I needed something cute, but not overly fussy for my colleague's new baby. Mainly because her other half did not seem kindly disposed to the usual 'novelty' baby-wear.

So...sophisticated but not boring, that would be a challenge. Until I found this pattern. A quick knit AND I had just the buttons to go with it!

The only thing missing is a tiny knitted pipe to go with it.
For anyone who doesn't get the title of this post, it's a song by Mr B, the Gentleman Rhymer who I've had the pleasure of seeing live a couple of times.

Ain't that the toof

One of my favourite blogs of all time has to be My Milk Toof. The adventures of two little tooth-shaped characters named Ickle and Lardee, each scene painstakingly set up and photographed are as original as they are cute.

So having been a devoted follower for many years, I finally decided to treat myself to one of the limited edition books available for a short time directly through the blog. And today it arrived - whoo!
Note the bonus badges and post-cards :)

So good to see how a quirky idea combined with sheer passionate talent can really get the recognition it deserves. Keep up the good work Inhae!