Book Review: Everything Oz

Time for another book review! Today I'm reviewing Everything Oz: The Wizard Book of Makes & Bakes by Christine Leech & Hannah Read-Baldrey.

Everything Oz contains 50 projects inspired by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and is a follow-up to Christine & Hannah's earlier book Everything Alice which I reviewed last year. 

After a brief introduction, the book starts with a list of Craft Essentials & Cookery Essentials you'll need to make the projects (which are a mix of craft tutorials and recipes). The first projects are a Dorothy doll, some Kansa-inspired recipes and a Toto cushion ...

... then as you go through the book, you follow the plot of the book so you get yellow brick road coconut ice "bricks".... a cowardly lion hand puppet.... green lemonade and popcorn from Oz... winged monkey party invitations... etc etc.

The book is full of charmingly styled photos, and the pages are also decorated throughout with quotations and illustrations from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, plus vintage-style posters, newspaper clippings and adverts.

The projects vary quite widely in complexity / skill level required so there are projects here to challenge you and help you try out new skills as well as some quick and easy beginner-friendly designs. For example, the sewing projects range from little felt munchkin hat egg cosies to an embroidered poppy eyemask and rainbow patchwork apron.

There's also a mix of different crafts in the book, including paper crafting (large paper poppies and balloon mobiles), candle-making (spooky witch-shaped candles) and making homemade face masks and scrubs. Oh, and there are a few things included for you to colour copy from the book and then make, like a scarecrow puppet and Dorothy gift tags. The only slightly random project that made me think “gosh, who would make that?” is the tutorial for making an actual scarecrow (for your garden, I guess?)

The recipes range from things like cherry pie to a rainbow cake to green popcorn (complete with a photocopy-able popcorn box for you to make) and glow in the dark emerald city jelly.

All the projects and recipes have step by step instructions, and most of the craft projects also have step-by-step photos. In the Alice book the templates were drawn with very pale lines making them hard to trace or photocopy/enlarge but that's not a problem this time round.

As with Everything Alice, Everything Oz would be the perfect inspiration for a themed party! But how useful are the projects for other occasions or for giving as gifts?

Some of the designs have a strong Oz theme, so they'd be nice to make for any Wizard of Oz fans you know - like these squashed witch cupcakes (perfect for someone's birthday)...

... and this seriously adorable winged monkey baby bath towel.

Other designs in the book aren't obviously Oz-themed when taken out of context so they'd make great gifts or food/decor ideas for lots of different occasions. For example, you can make dog treats, a felt and yarn bluebird wreath, a patchwork picnic set, large decorative paper rosettes and these gorgeous emerald hairpieces:

You could also easily change the colours of some items to adapt them for other occasions - e.g. making the munchkin hats in Christmas colours to turn them into elf hats.

I have to admit that I'm not the world's biggest fan of the Wizard of Oz but there are lots of things in this book that I’d love to make and I had a hard time picking just a few projects to share with you guys!


Everything Oz is published by Quadrille. RRP £14.99. It's available from Amazon UK, Amazon USA, The Book Depository and many other bookshops.

[Disclaimer: the nice folks at Quadrille sent me a free review copy of this book, and the Amazon & Book Depository links in this post are affiliate links]

A Bit of Baking

I haven't done any baking for MONTHS... but yesterday a friend posted on Facebook that she was spending the whole Bank Holiday baking tasty treats and, well, the urge to do my own bit of baking was just too hard to resist.

Nothing fancy - just some simple chocolate biscuits...

... but oh my goodness they were tasty. And so quick and easy and enjoyable to bake that it makes me wonder, why do I not do this every week??

Tea Parties for a Great Cause

Regular readers will know how much I like a nice cup of tea and a tasty cake...

If you share my love of such things, you may be interested in taking part in the Blooming Great Tea Party campaign.


The tea parties are to raise funds for Marie Curie Cancer Care, a fantastic charity who provide care for poeople with terminal cancer and other illnesses in their own homes. Every £20 raised will pay for an hour of nursing care - last year's tea parties raised enough funds for 30,200 hours of care!

Want to take part? Click here to register, for more information and for lots of useful bits and bobs for your tea party like recipes, and printable invitations, donation forms, bunting, etc. (registration closes on 31st July).


P.S. the pictures in this post are of some cakes I baked a couple of years ago - for high-impact, low-effort cupcakes, nothing beats a pack of dolly mix!

Crafty Maths

A nice cup of tea and some homemade cake...


... plus a box set of Poirot mysteries...


... plus lots of sewing...


... equals a very relaxing afternoon!

Seasons Greetings

Most of my festive shopping, making and wrapping has been done & the baking is going well...
We've got lots of bundles of biscuits ready to give to friends & relations!
I hope you all have a lovely few days however you choose to spend this time of year :)

(Psst be sure to pop back after Christmas for your chance to win a late Christmas present in my December giveaway).

Christmas Baking

Our kitchen has been taken over today by a frenzy of festive baking! So much fun.

(I wanted to take some pictures as I went along to record some of the madness but my camera batteries died after the second photo. Sorry!)

I've been making yummy muesli brownies (a staple treat in our house), my first batch of mince pies of the season and lots of lovely rich chocolate biscuits - "Granny Boyd's Biscuits" from Nigella Lawson's fab book How To Be A Domestic Goddess. Some of them have already been eaten (nom nom nom) but most are destined to be Christmas gifts.

I've been hoarding little plastic containers for a few weeks (from things like supermarket cherry tomatoes) and each one will be filled with baked goodness then wrapped in clingfilm, tied with ribbon and finally topped with a tag detailing the contents including all the ingredients in case of allergies.

There's a bit more baking to be done first though - and so much washing up....

Fairy Cakes

Here are the cakes I baked yesterday, with help from Nigella:Very tasty, but a bit of a sugar overload!

The Urge to Bake

Thanks mostly to the inspiring baking done recently by my Flickr friend Gillyflower, I have been overcome by the urge to bake exciting things and make exceedingly pretty cakes.

I've not managed anything spectacular yet, but I have been shopping for some yummy supplies like these wonderful rainbow cake cases...... and I've temporarily satisfied my baking urge today by making up a batch of brownies. Out of a packet, but tasty all the same!

Confessions

My camera is being very odd today. I don't yet want to admit that it's broken (please please please let it not be) but it's certainly not let me take any photos :(

This means I can't show you what I worked on last night (some more hairbands, with large poppies and giant cherry blossoms like this) ...

Instead, I'm going to admit to my total and utter failure to stick to my Crafting 365 challenge during my internet-less weeks. I was doing so well! and then I got a bit distracted and I had my biggest crafting-free period since I started this last year. First up my neighbour had a nasty fall and we had to break into her house & accompany her to the hospital (she's recovering well, thankfully), getting back at about 1am. Then that weekend the BBC were in Gloucester filming for this year's Doctor Who Christmas special which was just sooo exciting, especially as one evening they filmed in my friend's house and we got to meet the lovely David Tennant. It felt genuinely a bit like Christmas, and all the excitement rather wore me out.

I did manage to get a little bit of crafting done after that - curling up on the sofa and slowly making loads of little thankyou cards out of scrap card and an old book of birds (days 243-7) - but without the daily 365 thing of taking pictures of my work and posting it on here, I rather lost momentum. I was getting to check my emails etc at work and at my friends houses but I couldn't work on my shop at home and it made me really feel at a loose end. Also I'd never really realised before the extent to which I rely on things like digital radio to keep me entertained while I sit and sew. Once I'd worked my way through my dvds I started to get rather restless!

So instead of sitting and sewing, I cleaned the house (it's honestly never been so clean) and tidied up and we had a huge clear-out of things we've been meaning to attend to in the spare room... Then after that I had a proper little holiday during a mini heatwave: lazing around in sundresses, eating strawberries and reading novels (I hardly get a chance to read normally, curling up with my sewing instead of a book before bedtime), and doing the first bit of baking I'd done in months. I used to bake all the time, and really miss it. It's one of those things which I wonder why I don't do it every day, it's so satisfying (and I do like a nice bit of cake).

All in all I think I had about three weeks off from making stuff before I picked up my sewing again (more on that when I can take photos again!). It felt seriously weird to start with, but in the end it was nice to step outside my felt-obsessed universe for a little while and focus on other things. Once I'd stopped being stressed about not being able to check my email, etc, it even seemed like quite a good idea. I am determined to keep going with this 365 thing, it's so much fun and has been so good for my productivity, creativity and working patterns, but in future I shall definitely be building "crafting free" patches into my schedule!

Right, enough wittering: back to the sewing...