While I really should have been up to BeanPi business today I got distracted as my Mum had bought the Bean some new t-shirts. They were lovely colours but plain so I saw it as an ideal opportunity to do some stencils for my girl! She loves butterflies and turtles at the moment so the subject matter wasn't hard to choose.
Hello and welcome to Tanushree (or Baby Nushree as Anneli has taken to calling her). How cute is she?
First child of my very good friends Av and Ruchi, and possibly the loveliest little thing I have seen in a while! She makes my babies look huge!
She also was the recipient of BeanPi's first foray into baby toys. A happy tag sun with a couple of bells inside for fun.
As I mentioned previously I decided to do cupcakes for Juno's birthday this year. I have become a little tiny bit obsessed with them, and the fact that our local poundland has silicone cupcake cases 6 for a pound really sealed the deal. I went for 3 varieties: vanilla chocolate chip with white chocolate icing, double chocolate, and carrot and honey with lemon icing.
We have so many dandelions on the green outside our house we just can't keep up with them. I have sacrificed my lawn for the joy the Bean gets out of blowing the clocks. No doubt next year our lawn will be as full of dandelions as the green.
But I'm trying to think of other things to do with them. Here's some pictures we did. I put the glue on and Anneli blew the clocks over the paper and stuck the petals on. She then drew the leaves with pastel. I think they are pretty marvellous!
Yay I've done it! I decided to make another attempt at the tablet. This time I decided to add vanilla, so I made some vanilla sugar (by putting a vanilla pod in a bag of sugar and leaving it for a month). I knuckled down and gave in with my holistic approach, returned to my scientific training, and used a thermometer. I took it to the "firm ball" stage and let it boil till the colour was right and then whipped until I felt the crystallisation begin.
Once the tray had cooled overnight it was plain to see that this batch was the perfect combination of shatter and crumble.
I've had a bit of trouble keeping up the the blogging recently, mostly because I have so many things on my list to do!
But here is the latest BeanPi bag, made for one of my Mum's friends. It's a knitting bag again, but soon I hope to diversify.
Now the big new thing is behaviour. To be honest she is pretty good and obedient etc etc but there is always more that parents are asking of a toddler! So we are going to attempt sticker charting! Super nanny reckons you can't do this until 3 years, but we will see.
I have been experimenting with crayons again. I wanted to try and make some in a more interesting shape and a first birthday present seemed like a good excuse. I had an ice cube mould that looked suitable, but I didn't know a) the melting temp of crayon b) the melting temp of ice cube tray and c) was the difference between a) and b) large enough to allow oven-based crayon meltage.
It turned out that the answer to c) was no and odd smells alerted me to immanent (no doubt) toxic breakdown of ice-cube tray.
So I built a kind of double boiler and tried same in the microwave.
This was loads more successful and produced some rather lovely star crayons that I was pretty proud of actually.
A couple of them exploded because I popped them into the freezer to cool down and they had accidentally got a drop or two of water in them during the process. But hey, what's a little collateral damage?
I have met several people in the past that love cupcakes and I have never really totally understood them. I mean the issue is that the actual cake is never that good. However Mum bought me some of those silicone cupcake cases so I thought Bean and I would have a go at baking some.
At last the sun is here and we can get the kids in the garden! We've had a little trouble with gazebos in the past because we bought the cheaper ones with plastic frames. Our apple tree has been decapitated twice by high speed gazebo blowing across the garden when the corner pieces snapped in the wind. So last year we invested in a proper metal framed number. It is much stronger and as a bonus is super fast to erect. I've customised ours into a fully shaded play tent!
OK so at some point Bug either dribbled into or dropped my lovely phone. Sadly this means that although the screen works when it is closed it doesn't when it is open. I can use it to make and receive calls, but texting is rather dependent on my blind skills. So for some reason I thought I might be able to fix it. I have no idea why I thought this, I no nothing of phones or electronics or anything like that.
Here it is disassembled:
I didn't manage to fix it.
I did manage to put it back together and it still worked in the same not working sort of a way. And that is surely an achievement.
I had a lovely Easter up with the Grogs but the weather was not that fantastic. Let's face it, it was freezing...and therefore we didn't want to spend too long outdoors. A bit of hurried crafting did cure the cabin fever for about 5 minutes though...and here we present the Brewer Easter Lamb.
An unfortunate aversion to sugar in one member of our family has led to the necessary discovery of a sugarless birthday cake. So we decided a carrot cake would be a good thing to try and that Splenda would be the sugar substitute of choice. Have you ever seen this stuff, it is really strange! Tastes lovely and sweet (slight aftertaste noticed by me but not by D) but weighs next to nothing. It's bulked out by a filling agent to make it spoon for spoon as sweet as sugar, but in its raw form it is apparently 600 times sweeter (how do they measure that?).
