Cracking fun

Last night I sat down and made all of my crackers. I was surprised how easy it was and it only took me about 2 hours to make all 12 (in fact I made 13 but the first one went quite dramatically wrong).
It's a simple process and I basically followed this guide from Kirsty's Homemade Christmas.
I didn't bother to measure anything (I like my crackers to be organic, and I'm lazy) but I regret not using luxury paper as recommended - mine was thin and ripped a bit while I was scrunching it and tying ribbons on.

I bought the 12 snaps and hats on ebay for about £5. Other than that, I only needed the toilet roll innards (the one time of year I encourage wanton use of toilet roll around the house!), wrapping paper, double sided tape and ribbon.
I got my husband to pick 12 jokes form the internet (we'll see how funny these are soon) and added these, with the gifts. I find places like Hawkins Bazaar (a sort of toy and joke shop), craft shops and markets useful for finding lots of small gifts. I try to keep the price low, but if you look for nice things to put in them you will end up spending £3-5 per cracker in my experience so making several can work out expensive. Plus you end up walking around shops putting things in toilet roll tubes...

There are more details and some gift suggestions on my blog

Gifts for Nerds!

In the unlikely event that any of you have a friend who roleplays to buy a small gift for, I thought I share what I've put together.
I'm referring specifically to those who do tabletop roleplaying, also known as pen-and-paper roleplaying - Dungeons and Dragons and the like. For a full explanation see this wiki page or alternatively this very accurate description, but essentially this is a game of make-believe with rules and statistics and to do it you need paper, pencils, rubbers and variously sided dice.

I had to find cracker sized gifts for 4 friends who do roleplaying and I thought that giving them a set of items they can keep and use at each game would be a good gift.

The dice I bought from ebay for about £4, do a search for 'poly dice' or 'dice set', you're looking for a set of 7 dice with 4, 6, 8, 2x10, 12 and 20 sides.

The pencils are Ikea pencils with the writing scraped off and the rubber is from a stationers.

I made the pouches from some old muslin I had laying around and matched the colour of the dice to the ribbon I used.
First I cut 2 pieces of cloth 12" x 3 1/2", plus about 1/2" for seam allowances. I sewed 2 sides to make a pouch.

 Then I took one pouch, turned it right way out and put it inside the first, sewing around the top and leaving a small gap to turn the pouch through.

 I forgot to take any more photos, but essentially, I hand stitched the opening closed after I'd done my turning so that both pouches are the right way out. Then I pushed one down inside the other so that the pouch becomes self lined. I sewed a channel for the ribbon, unpicked the small bit of seam in the channel and threaded the ribbon through.

Voila, nerdy cracker gifts for less than £5.

I found I had to make the inner pouch a little smaller all over for a comfy fit, but it's not essential.