We love to get creative at Christmas time. This candy wreath is a great little craft to get stuck into, it makes a great, colourful decoration that guests will love as they get to eat a piece when they come to visit (that is if you haven’t managed to scoff the lot first!)

It’s really easy to make. As always our faithful Momiji interns were here to lend a hand.

What you’ll need

- Lots of sweets, anything with bright colourful wrappers
- Lots of ribbon
- A hole punch
- Wooden ring, or strong wire that you can bend into a circle
- Scissors

If you’ve gone for strong wire, start by bending it into a circle and twist it at the top to keep it together.

Use the hole punch to make a hole in the wrapper of each sweet.

Tie the sweets onto the ring individually. If you’ve got long lengths of ribbon showing, curl them with a pair of scissors.

That’s really all there is to it. You can hang your wreath anywhere and some people even hang a pair of children’s scissors from the wreath so guests can easily snip their candies off.

As always, we want to see your pics, so don’t forget to post them to the Facebook Page.

Today's festive treat is a downloadable gift for everyone. Our friend, Kipi Ka Popo, has designed this lovely Momiji Christmas scene just for you.

You can deck out your computer desktop, iphone or even your iPad with festive Momiji goodness. Simply click on the screen resolution below and save the picture as your desktop wallpaper.

Computer desktop - 1280 x 1024
Computer desktop - 1024 x 768
Computer desktop - 800 x 600
Iphone/Iphone 3G
Iphone4
iPad

It’s time to deck those halls, and when our lovely Momiji interns came to visit, we made these great Origami stars. They’re really easy to make.

You just need 5 sheets of origami paper (4 and a half inch squares) You can use any colour you like, our paper had a white side and a coloured side so it makes it a little easier to see where to fold.

Fold one sheet in half, then fold it in half again. Unfold it and it should have creases in a cross formation.

Fold 3 of the corners into the centre and unfold again. Fold opposite corners into the centre to make the shape above. When you’ve done that, fold the whole thing in half along the centre crease to make the shape above.

Repeat these steps with all the other sheets so you’ll have 5 identically folded pieces.

Tuck the coloured side into the gap created by the folded paper, make sure it’s tucked in at the back too. When you’ve done that, fold along the join. Repeat that until all 5 pieces are tucked in like a circle.
Fold along all of the creases again and gently pull the star out until it looks just right.

Now it’s ready to hang on your tree.

We’d love to see pics of your stars, so post them on the Facebook page.

Where would we be at Christmas time without a couple of jingly tunes to get us in the festive spirit?

For today’s Advent Calendar treat, we’ve put together this fab video playlist of our favourite Christmas songs of all time. Our favourite Christmassy activity is to settle down with a glass of mulled wine and wrap all our gifts accompanied by these songs.

These are just a couple of our favourites. What songs get you in the festive mood? Let us know on our Facebook page or in the comments below.

We’re spreading Christmassy messages today so while it’s chilly outside we can all feel a little warmer inside.

Our good friends and Momiji interns, Charley and Charlotte have made us this amazing Christmas tree. We want to decorate it with Sparkle Tags featuring Christmas wishes and messages from all our Momiji friends.

If you have a Christmas wish, message or dream, email it to us and we’ll put it on our tree. It could be something simple like hoping you get lots of goodies in your stocking or it could be a message for someone very special. Tell us about it and we’ll put it on the tree.

We’ll be announcing some of our favourite Christmas wishes over on our Twitter feed and Facebook page throughout December, so keep an eye out for yours.

Today is a very special day, it’s Thanksgiving. It’s time for our American friends to share a big Turkey dinner together and think about all that they are thankful for.

It’s also exactly one month ‘til Christmas so the countdown starts here.

To make the next 29 days wait seem shorter, and to spread a little festive Momiji love, we’ve just launched the Momiji Advent Calendar!

Click here to sign up and you’ll receive a daily dose of jolly directly from Momiji HQ. There’s Christmassy projects, printables, downloadables, offers, discounts and a whole manner of Christmassy shenanigans ready for you so sign up now.

Get your party hats on, the festive season starts here!

Thought Bubble festival is a comic-book convention held annually in Leeds. We went there, armed with blank dolls, paint and a whole manner of Momiji goodies, at the weekend and loved every second of it.

There were loads of Cosplayers dressed as their favourite characters from Anime, Manga, Comic Books, Films and just about anything else you could think of. A large number of comic book artists were also there, signing comics and looking at everyone’s work.

The workshop was fantastic and the painted dolls looked amazing! Who would have thought of creating a Momiji inspired by a pineapple? Or even a steampunk themed doll? The level of creativity at this workshop was off the charts and we had a great time chatting to all the Momiji fans who came along. We’re donating 50% of all the workshop ticket prices to Médicins Sans Frontières so a big thank you to everyone who came along to paint.

Hallowe’en is right around the corner and we’ve been celebrating with toffee apples, spooky cupcakes and pumpkin carving.

Pumpkin carving is great fun and our work experience girls, Mary, Charly and Charlotte, got stuck in. We’ve made some pumpkin stencils based on our favourite Momiji designs; the Momiji Maid, Kitty, BFF and Snuggle. You can download these stencils for free and join in with the Momiji Hallowe’en fun! You can also upload your pumpkin photos to our Facebook wall and we’ll send a prize to our favourite.

“But how do you make a Momiji pumpkin?” You might ask. If you’ve never carved a pumpkin, we thoroughly recommend it.
Using a small knife (and watching out for your fingers) cut a small hole around the pumpkin’s stalk at the top. Take this off – it will be the lid. Then scoop out the insides.

Download the Momiji stencils here, resize the picture to match your pumpkin and print it off.
Pin the design to your pumpkin.

Using another pin, make small dots around the edges of the design. When you’re done, take off the paper and begin cutting it out.

Black areas on the design should be cut out entirely, white areas should be solid pumpkin. The grey areas on the cheeks and on Snuggle’s head are shaded.

To make the shaded effect, shave the first layer of pumpkin skin off but don’t cut the flesh away completely.
Refer to the stencil if you lose track of your design

When you’re done, turn off the lights and admire your Hallowe’en masterpieces!

Drumroll please. Actually this deserves more than a drumroll, bring on the dancing girls, fireworks, kangaroos and maybe even the All Blacks performing the Haka. The Australasia webshop is now live!

It’s taken a little while but we got there in the end. So here’s the deal:

• We will now be shipping to Australia and New Zealand (from Australia)
• We’ve reworked our database so that Momiji fans Australasia can now join The Collective under their correct country.
• If you live in the Australasia region and had previously joined The Collective under another country or continent (because yours wasn’t listed as an option) then it would be great if you could reregister under the correct location (then we’ll remove any duplication from our database so you won’t get stuff twice.) This will mean if there are any specific offers or bits of news for the Australasia continent then you won’t miss out.
• The first 100 Australasian customers will receive a free mystery gift (worth over $20) with their order. Yep, that’s right; if you get in quick there are some fabulous freebies to be had.
• For the first 7 days we’ll be running an extravaganza on some of our Celebrations dolls. Choose any 2 of the dolls pictured here (All Generation 3 Celebrations dolls) and we’ll add in a third doll free. (Offer is only available in the new Australasia shop)

• To begin with there may be some differences in what’s available in the different lovemomiji.com webshops around the world. This is a temporary thing and we’re working to get everyone in line for the New Year.

Happy shopping, people. Make sure you’re one of the first 100 to get your hands on your free gift!

To celebrate going live we devoted a day at Momiji HQ to all things Australasian. You’ll have to excuse the abundance of clichés and stereotypes here as we attempted to create our own little sunny paradise in the corner of the office. Kangaroos? Check. Koala bears? Check. Kylie and Jason on the stereo? Erm...check. Charlie and Charlotte created an abundance of bunting with Aussie and New Zealand flags as well as pictures of shrimps, sheep and Bret & Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords.

We thought it would be fitting to devote an afternoon to one of our favourite Aussie traditions; The Tim Tam Slam. For those of you unfamiliar with the TTS here’s a definition from Wikipedia:

“Opposite corners of the Tim Tam are bitten off, one end is submerged in the drink, and the drink sucked through the biscuit. The crisp inside biscuit is softened and the outer chocolate coating begins to melt.
Ideally, the inside of the biscuit should collapse but the outside should remain intact long enough for the liquid to reach the mouth.”

So basically you have to use the biscuit like a straw for your coffee and then shove it in your mouth before the entire thing melts into a big mess in your hands. Despite a fair bit of searching we couldn’t find Tim Tams anywhere so we had to make do with the very British McVitie’s Penguin substitute. With hindsight we think they were a bit too sturdy for the job as they didn’t melt quite as dramatically as a Tim Tam, but nevertheless we enjoyed conducting the experiment.

Cameron embraced The Slam...and the dressing up.

Deb was the best. Excellent technique.

Gemma took a while to get to grips with the whole thing.

Dr Karl and Deb stood by in awe as Kat broke with ‘Slam’ convention by using minty green tea.

Rich was rubbish. He did too much eating and not enough dunking. Nicole was putting him off.