Make hot spiced apple cider for a crowd easily and quickly this Christmas and Thanksgiving season with this recipe and technique.

Wooden kitchen spoons decorated with wood-burnt designs make a fabulous and inexpensive homemade gift.

I've said this enough times that you probably think I'm a broken record, but I love creative gift wrapping!  And I love it even more when I come up with inexpensive (or even free) packaging ideas.

Make your own beautiful gift boxes out of colorful cardstock with this tutorial.

Tutorial for making these adorable Scandinavian tomte Christmas elf ornaments (or gift toppers!).  It's a great craft for kids and adults alike.

Tutorial, including recipes, for making a basket made out of sugar cookies, filled with mini muffins.  It's the turducken of the baking world!

My six year old daughter had a Doctor Who themed birthday party this year--and in fact, what she really wanted was a Weeping Angel party.  She graciously allowed me to do Doctor Who more generally (so as not to completely freak out her other first grade friends), as long as I promised to make her a weeping angel costume for Halloween.

We don't get much in the way of seasons here in Phoenix, and I miss that, so I relished every crisp breeze and beautiful autumn leaf on our recent trip to the UK.  One of the autumnal highlights of the trip was our visit to Glendurgan Garden in Cornwall.

The theme this month in the Make it Happen Blog Hop Challenge was organization.  It feels like my entire life is a struggle against the minions of Entropy (aka my children, and their amazing destructive powers).  My blog was similarly very chaotic; I'd often be photographing, writing, and posting a project the same day, with absolutely no clue what I'd be writing about the next day.  We took a three week vacation to the UK in October, and I knew I needed to figure out this blog planning thing before I left.

We just returned from a grand family vacation to the UK, including some time spent in London, and I thought I'd share with you some fun activities and sites that were great for the whole family, kids included.