Overnight French Toast with Panettone (or without)

Last year, I put in Snowy & Chinook's recipe for pancakes, from Snowy & Chinook.

This year, I'll give you my favourite breakfast recipe. This is my version of Overnight French Toast: French toast you make the night before and then bake in the oven in the morning. This is a very kid-friendly recipe, both preparing and eating.

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Family Santa

Snuggled on the couch this dark Winter morning, preparing to write a little entry on one of the best Christmas books ever (Brian Wildsmith's 12 Days of Christmas) ...

Hi Bloesem Kids!

We're excited to be a part of a giveaway on the great Bloesem Kids.

For those of you that are new to our blog, we welcome you here to a few of our most popular posts:

How to make a mini-kite
How to draw an owl
Bunny origami
Making Leo Lionni rock frog & toads
Making pompom characters

If you like paper crafts, you might like to make our robot paper dolls (which could be great for the Christmas tree, too).

If you like to knit, you might like to make our Windy scarf (free pattern) or our finger-knitting tutorial.

If you like free things to download, you might like our colouring pages, our templates for shoelace sewing kits or our block puzzles.

If you are a fan of beautiful children's books, then here is a summary of children's books we like.

If you like making or listening to music, we have activities and songs to download here.

If you would like to follow our blog on pinterest, we have a board here.

Thanks for visiting!

Early Christmas trees

We don't yet have the tree. But, as some of us are quite excited about decorating already we painted some trees onto construction paper with washable poster paint for the little ones to decorate.

Then, for ornaments, we cut shapes out of scrap origami,

Our December winner

The December winner, for our greeting cards at buyolympia, by random draw, is: Krista Smith. Congratulations, Krista! Thanks to everyone else who enetered and again for everyone's kind comments. We'll be giving away something new in January, so try again next time!

One of our entrants, micia, has a cute blog which features this week how to make an origami Santa Claus (Babbo Natale), which you can see here. Great!

Thanks again to buyolympia for their product photograph.

Munari's Briefest + a Sack of Snow and Stars for Santa Claus

You might know Bruno Munari from some of his more famous children's books, like his Bruno Munari's ABC or Bruno Munari's Zoo. We talked about his book Drawing the Sun a few months ago.

Bruno Munari was an Italian artist, poet, writer and designer. He originally began making children's books for his son, Alberto. Find out more about his work here at munart.org.

To blog for the fewest of minutes, here’s Bruno Munari’s "Chair For the Briefest of Visits”. It is petite and sloped downwards, for an immediate slip off.

And here is

a Sack
of Stars
and Snow
for
Santa Claus
(from Bruno Munari's ABC)

December giveaway: cards

We are having our December giveaway early, because the prize will be more useful before the winter holidays (although these are useful all year round): a set of our greeting cards. We've just gotten caught up and restocked our cards at buyolympia.

To win a set of our cards, please leave a comment below this post. Please be sure to leave an address so that we can contact you. Let us know in the commments below. Contest ends midnight December 9. This is open to anyone worldwide and there is no fee to enter.

Our cards are 4.75 inches x 4.75 inches and are blank inside. They are offset printed on glossy cardstock and come packaged with a white square envelope. There are 4 cards in our set, Windy, Sunny with his guitar, Snowy and Chinook jumping on the bed and Chinook with a snowball. Each one has a little drawing on the back. (Thank-you to buyolympia for the product photographs.)