Ellie's New Chair

Just finished the latest bean bag chair. This one is for my very good friend Tessa's daughter Ellie and will match her curtains! I've done another of the primavera ones as I have been fiddling around with the pattern trying to perfect it.

You can see from all the examples below that each is a little bit different, but I've finalised it now and Ellie's will be the gold standard.

So the deal is if you are interested, I'm selling them for 30 quid. I need about 2 weeks notice if you want to give them as presents etc. so bear that in mind if you want to make an order. At the moment I can't get hold of the blue monkey material from my supplier, but as well as the others shown above, the links below show some examples of what else you could have. Or if you want to supply your own material the cost is 25 quid.

Fabrics:

cheeky monkey - spice	cheeky monkey - primary
down on the farm - bluebell	butterfly - bluebellx
blue discs	floral 2
roar - red	fish - red
piccadilly - cobalt	jigsaw - lime
spot on - raspberry	spot on - chambray
tiddler - ocean
oasis - green	primavera - petrol

oh no oh no oh no

BBC director general Mark Thompson. Photograph: Richard Saker

The BBC plans to axe two radio ­stations – 6 Music and Asian Network – cut spending on imported shows and halve the size of its website, it is claimed today. The Times says the measures are part of the BBC's strategic review to be unveiled next month. Under the plan, the BBC intends to shrink overall services and focus more on quality over quantity. There have already been reports suggesting that the BBC will axe the digital radio stations 6 Music and Asian Network.

via guardian.co.uk




CLOSE RADIO 1 INSTEAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

New Machine

Just bought myself one of these....
very very excited!

Does anyone need a sewing machine? I'm looking for a good home for my old one...

Experiments in recrystallisation

I've been working for some time trying to get the perfect recipe and method for butter tablet. I'm getting pretty close now, I think I have the right recipe, it is just the method that is trouble. Specifically I think the issue is the crystallisation of the sugar. I'm working on the theory that too little beating once the mixture is cooked will result in an amorphous toffee, and two much will result in crystals so small what you really have is a fudge. Although I clearly had good crystallisation visible this time, and the tablet had the required 'shatter' when I tried to cut it, the texture is slightly gritty.

So did I beat it too long or too little? I think it was probably too long, but does anyone have any ideas?

Either way I think this is one of the greatest things that you could encounter in a cake tin!

Soft toy storage

I've been working on a soft toy storage system for the Bean for a while...at last it is finished!

I had some old wooden door knobs hanging around and some tester pots of Wilko's emulsion paint (I use this paint for a lot of things...it is fantastic actually and costs very little).

Using one of those things you stick candles into cakes with I painted all the knobs with a sponge and let them dry.

After sticking them too her bedroom door with Araldite (loving epoxy glue!) and holding them there with selotape for an hour or so, I left them for 24 hours and strung some nice blue elastic between them and there you have it!

It's Spring

I declare it to be Spring. Two sunny days this week!

Jam Tart Day

Pancake day turned into jam tart day in our house. Despite loving them last year, Anneli totally refused to eat them this year. Oh well, all the more for me and D. Bug had a good go, but I think a lack of teeth made things difficult. Still jam tart making was a huge success, and I love the fact that from the photos you can clearly see that Bean has been eating flour when I wasn't looking.

They taste a lot better than they look!

Brilliant Rug

Just wanted to sing the praises of this fantastic rug we bought from IKEA. We've had it a couple of years now as we bought it for Anneli, and it has been well abused, weed on, calpolled, etc. etc. and yet look how marvellous it still is! The beauty of it is you can stick it in the washing machine and it dries quickly too.

Valentine's

I have been trying to get the garden in order. Last year I was so pregnant and also dealing with a one year old I just didn't get any weeding done, and we decided to concentrate on veg rather than flowers, so the garden looked a bit crap. This year we will be just doing flowers and fruit. We have an apple tree and a plum tree and we just planted another apple. We have loads of raspberries and strawberries and also blackcurrents and red currents. Probably we won't be able to resist a few veg, and tomatoes practically grow themselves...I usually get a bit carried away so no doubt we'll end up growing loads. BUT this year I can't stand looking out at a big patch of weeds so I have been sorting things out in the dark after the girls are asleep! D's let me do some on the weekend too 8)

But of course it is Valentine's day and I didn't want the old card to be as freaky as last year's. So I did a lovely monster bookmark for D this year (he has been using one of the celebrity top trump cards I made for him many years ago. It is the Barry Bethel one and since he is *allegedly* a child abuser and wife beater I thought he needed a change)

Of course when Anneli saw it she wanted some monsters too so I had to quickly make a family.

Happy Valentine's everyone.

Not quite a Masterchef

I've been reading Michel Roux Jr's sort-of-autobiography "A Life in the Kitchen" just out of interest as my Mum found it in the local library and I have got love for that man. Of course it leaves me feeling all inspired to do nice cooking (but not in a I'm-going-to-actually-go-and-buy-special-ingredients sort of a way, more of an it-is-interesting-he-puts-a-spoon-full-of-yoghurt-in-a-chicken-when-he-roasts-it sort of a way).

Today I made a couple of lasagnes (what is the plural of lasagne?) and when I was making the sauce I accidentally dropped half a nutmeg in whilst grating it. I forgot about it because I thought I would just fish it out when I was making up the lasagne and I was going to make a fun game out of it with Anneli when she got back from swimming. Of course when she got back she didn't want to make lasagne so I just did it quick and ladled everything in.

D got the nutmeg. Rather an unpleasant mouthful apparently.

Stamping and rocking

Tuesday mornings we usually have to do a bit of time-filling round her because Grandma comes up and after that the day is a lot more exciting. I have discovered a lovely little playgroup round the corner that only has about 10 kids in it, but that kind of clashing with Grandma's arrival time and 10am is late in the day around here. We've recently banned the TV (it's asleep) until 4pm, so now we have to think of exciting things to do!
This morning I made some stamps out of carrot. The Bean is quite obsessed with stars and moons, so that is what we went for. It's difficult to carve a star, you know! She didn't seem too fussy though. I remember my Mum making stamps for me out of potato and it being the best thing ever. However I'd much rather waste a carrot than a potato!

I mixed up some really cheap glitter glue that I got from the pound shop (6 tubes for 50p) with some water and food colouring and she had a great time painting and stamping, she even asked for more when it had run out. Usually this kind of activity only lasts 10-15 minutes and we got a good 20 mins today so that must be counted as a success!

On a more personal note I have resisted this treat for long enough! When we were in Christchurch we tried this amazing rock from Sweet at the Arts Centre and managed to avoid buying it for 3 weeks (I don't know why this impresses me, we ate 12 afghans every single night between the three of us so it is not like we were abstaining). Anyway my wonderful sister bought a pack for us so I have started it at last! Not only is the colour wonderful, but the little screwed up faces make me smile. AND it actually tasted like sour apples. Yum!

bread

I have long lamented the dire lack of good granary bread in Epsom. At first I actually started to believe those that said I was just too fussy when it came to bread (which is not true at all, surely a good granary is not too much to ask?). The fact of the matter is that we don't have a great baker in town, and the supermarket bread here for some reason is not great (really crumbly). There has recently been the great addition of a lovely baker stall to the market on Saturday which is nice for a treat but I just can't afford to pay 2.20 for a loaf of bread. I was talking about this recently to a group of friends and one of them said she and her husband felt exactly the same way and had discovered Hovis bread mixes.


It sounds ridiculous, but for 70p-ish you can get a bread mix where you just add water (and a bit of butter if you fancy it) and leave it to rise and pop it in the over for 30 mins and Bob's your uncle! The great thing is it makes lovely light bread just like the baker's rather than the usual slightly more dense home-baked stuff.

So now we have a twice weekly baking session to make bread! The only problem is making sure the Bean doesn't eat it all before it is cooked. She has also taken to picking out the seeds from the flour and eating them!

This week we had an extra treat of home-grown raspberries from the freezer.

All enjoyed by Bean and Bug alike.

Lovely plants

The girls and I went to Wisley on Friday with Granny to see the butterflies in the glasshouse there. It's such a good place to take the girls and we have been going since the Bean was tiny. If you are a member of the RHS you can get in free and take a friend in free too. Kids go free so we go on Mum's membership. The problem is that it is almost impossible to avoid buying something as all the plants are so beautiful! Of course I couldn't resist and here is a picture of my beautiful new curly spider plant (Bonnie)! Plenty of propagation opportunities with those babies too!

Crayon fun

OK I admit I have been waiting for an excuse to do this for ages (having seen it on WhiMSy love)! But the Bean has just discovered that it is really fun to snap crayons. Well yes it is, but it is also really annoying to have loads of little bits of snapped crayon all over the place. So the solution? One massive snapping and peeling session and then melt them all down to make some chunky crayons perfect for little fingers.

Snapping done by the Bean and unfortunately all that peeling done by me. It made my fingers bleed.

And there is something really lovely about all those tones of crayons ready to melt. I just used a jam tart tin and put similar colours together but the one I did with mixed colours worked great too.

So then into the oven at about gas mark 7 for just a few minutes (this is an attempt at a mid-melt shot, please do not examine the disgusting state of my oven).

Then let them cool and finish off in the freezer and out they pop! Strangely there seemed to be a layer of hard colourless wax on the top of most of them but I just carved it off with a knife, and the new crayons are much softer and nicer than the old ones.

Here we are giving them a go

And the Bean trying them out at some real colouring (actually in this shot you can also see one remaining snapped crayon and her brilliant Stabilo pencils that are really not meant for children but are actually so perfect for them it is worth the slightly more sizeable investment)

And then too too many pictures of the crayons themselves because I think they are beautiful!

Afghans

I am trying a new thingummyjig where I can just email a photo straight from iphoto and put text in and hopefully it will just appear on my blog. Here's hoping it works!

Anyway this post is about the amazing Afghan. I'm sure those of the nationality are also amazing but in this case I am talking about the chocolate treat. I discovered these whilst on our most recent trip to NZ and by golly they are a wondrous thing. The latest batch I made them all half the size of the usual ones, thinking they might last longer but of course 1 day later and we have scoffed the lot (with a little help from our friends...) Here's the recipe:

200g butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/4 cups plain flour
1/4 cup cocoa
2 cups cornflakes
about a cup of raisins
about 1/2 cup of coconut

Cream the butter and sugar, sift and mix in the flour & cocoa. fold in the cornflakes, raisins & coconut.
Cook for 15mins at 180 deg C.

Remember to add the cornflakes as late before baking as you can and squish them down on the baking tray
You can make it as a solid block in a tray, but you need to bake it for 25 mins instead.

The best thing I just discovered is that you can use Weetabix instead of Cornflakes. For us this mean they are now a fully storecupboard item! Yay!

Posted via email from Alice's posterous

Posterous

This seems to be a wizard where you can email photos and text and it appears straight on your blog. I've just tried it so we will see if it works...

I think you just sign up at posterous.com and then you email in whatever you want and at some point it appears on your nominated blog. If it works it will make life on blogger a whoooole lot easier for putting on photos of what I am up to. Not sure if it can do anything but put the photos at the top and then the text underneath, but presumably I can fiddle around with that once it's there (if I can work out how to access the html). Or maybe I can just edit the text in blogger once it is there. We will see.

Resurrected

I've decided to resurrect my blog for two reasons...firstly because I loved it in facebook (to which I am totally addicted) at the end of the year when it did a summary of all my status updates for the year and I remembered loads of cool stuff, but also because the time is going so fast and I want to keep track of what I am up to with the girls! Especially now that the Bean is approaching the age where she can really get into arts and craftage, I'd like to record our escapades.

So the first discovery was that I have forgotten how to do html. I know you don't actually have to do it now, but I like to customise things! I've managed to add a few bits and bobs and fiddle with colours but it is a work in progress.
Anyway I am importing my blog into my facebook notes now, I mean if people can be arsed to read my status updates then they may well fancy wasting a bit more time reading a whole lot of jabber.