Happy New Year!!!

I wish you all a very happy, healthy 2012, full of love, creativity and courage (especially for my Greek friends!)!!! As long as we are healthy and surrounded by our family and friends, we can deal with everything...

These days I thought I would take a few days off from the blog... We celebrated the New Year's Eve with friends in my house and I had the New Year family lunch at my place as well. It was a bit crazy, but I managed to cope since I didn't really cook anything, hehehe. That might sound crazy, but it is known to everyone that my kitchen is my least favourite room in my house (as shocking as it may sound to most of you!). Plus, there are 5 ladies in my family more than willing to cook - mother, aunts and cousins. I still have food for the next week!

I also had to prepare my handmade presents - not many (only three), but quite time-consuming. But I made them for people I love very, very much and I really enjoyed it. I finished them the very last minute, but was able to take some quick photos.

For my two aunts I prepared a "book/album" for their favourite recipes. They liked it very, very much and I was really pleased. As it is supposed to be used in the kitchen, I avoided the embellishments (after all, we don't want glitter in our food, right?) and went for practical:

Each page has three pockets for tags-recipes, front, back and on the top:

Also each page has two more pockets (front and back) to use temporarily for recipes found in magazines or that have hastily written in papers (as they usually do):

Now, for my mother, just like last year (and every year it seems like!) I made a wall calendar. She uses them to take notes of payments, doctor appointments and the like.

This year I decided to have a theme - and the theme chosen was happiness. I chose some of my favourite quotes and this is the calendar I made:

So that's all for today...

Happy 2012!!!

Hugs,
Anastasia