Nine

The day is over so this is yesterday’s news

She’s already thinking about turning 10 which just makes my head spin.

This big girl used to be a tiny weeny girl with size 3 red wellies

J took her to town today to buy a cake and some books and it poured with rain so hard when they were out that they called El Famosisimo to pick them up in his car and drive them home. She came through the door soaked but beaming, flanked by two big brothers who had humoured their little sister on her special day.

We knew that it was a special day as she has been talking about it for about six months. Now the day has passed but we are stretching it out by having a party later today and making a birthday weekend of it.

Now we just need to wait for Miss Froo’s birthday which is due in September which despite her wish for it to be next week is actually a whole spring and summer away. Thinking about summer makes me yearn for a day without needing to wear something woolly but I must wish my life away!

Potatoes

It must be nearly spring? Surely? I see snowdrops and the start of daffs too round here and they are small signs aren’t they?

I was hoping to get a box with new compression stockings in it today as I’ve got a party to go to and I need a ‘skin’ coloured stocking to wear with the ‘James Bond’ dress code. During the winter I wear a black stocking and match it with a black sock on the other leg or with a random sock that no-one can see under a long skirt or trousers. This is not a good look with a dress, high heels and a bare right leg.

I ordered new stockings last week and for the first time ever, Juzo made a mistake with my order and sent me the wrong ones. My current stockings are getting a bit slack and that makes me feel less comfortable than I would like. If they can be put on and taken off without a struggle then they’re past their prime. If I approach anything like Nora Batty wrinkles in the stocking I get more pain because the blood that should go back to my heart gets stuck in my leg.

The postman came and he had this box, not a stocking box. Good and bad news!

I haven’t opened it yet but having received a box like this last year from the Potato Council I can tell you that there are probably six seed potatoes in there and two black potato growing sacks along with a load of blurb about how to engage school children with potato growing. Last year we grew a good few dinner’s worth of potatoes and tipping the bags out and hunting for the potatoes is like finding treasure in dirt.

The bags will be parked in the garden and filled with compost that will need to be scraped out of the bottom of the compost tardis but the garden is a total mess at the moment and I think I need to make a trip to the dump before I can show you any pictures of anything out there!

Hopefully the stockings will arrive tomorrow.

Mayonnaise Chocolate Cake Recipe

This is a very old recipe that I got from Blue Peter when I was about 10 years old. As a child I had developed a great dislike of marzipan and wasn’t all that keen on fruit cake so my mum used to bake this cake as an extra cake at Christmas. It was enjoyed by everyone who ate it, as long as we didn’t tell them what the ingredients were!

I was sure that when I got married my wedding cake would be a huge mayonnaise cake but fate and the generosity of friends meant that I ended up with a beautifully decorated traditional wedding cake so I cut it with grace and didn’t eat any of it. We still have a huge chunk of it wrapped in tin foil in the under stairs cupboard!

Now I bake this cake for birthdays or big treats and we love it with cream and strawberries in the summer. It was in imperial back then and I still think in ounces so here it is in all its glory:

10 oz plain flour
8 oz sugar
1½ tsp baking powder

7oz mayonnaise (not a low fat one)
4tbsp cocoa powder
8 floz boiling water
1tsp vanilla essence

Sieve the flour and making powder into a bowl and add the sugar.
Then add the mayonnaise and mix it all up until it looks a bit like breadcrumbs.

Add the cocoa powder to the hot water and pour this into the bowl along with the vanilla essence. Stir this up until everything is a very dark shiny brown and you can’t see any more breadcrumbs.

Pour into a tin and cook at Gas 4 180° 375°F for about 1 hour 20 minutes. Cooking time may depend on the size of your tin. You can cook this in a 7″ or 8″ round tin for that long but if you use a bigger tin it will cook more quickly. Check it after an hour and see what you think. The top should have cracks in it and a skewer should come out clean.

This is a dense, sturdy cake that is best served with something like cream or ice cream or mascarpone with fruit on the side.

Here it is in action on El Famosisimo’s 18th birthday dusted with icing sugar and topped with lots of candles that struggled in the breeze.

Enjoy!

Moon

Did you see the moon tonight? It was huge when it rose and I kept catching sight of it through the trees and across the fields whilst I was out this evening. I came home and took a picture but really the only way to remember this beautiful sight is hold it in my head. How many sights are stored in my mind? I don’t know, but there are lots of moons and I don’t know why.

What did you see today that made you stop and stare?

Cold

It feels like Saturday but the clock tells me it’s Sunday now so it is already J’s birthday. How 15 years have flown with the one who was a boy of few words and is now nearly a man and still of few words. It was cold like it is now when he was born too and I carried him in a rebozo under a huge overcoat of my grandad’s to keep his skinny limbs from freezing.

Later on he will have his favourite dinner followed by a mayonnaise chocolate cake with whipped cream on the side. The girls will make a huge fuss and he will be underwhelmed but happy.

The freezing temperatures have enabled the girls to try out something I saw on Pinterest somewhere:

They only needed all this stuff to make the ice bowls

They set it all up at about 5pm on Friday and by 11pm that night the water was already well frozen and Mr G got in the car to see how cold it was… -7! Living in a river valley keeps us a bit warmer but not that much.

This morning they pushed the ice out of the containers and watched them all day as they melted a little bit but not completely then became filled with snow. Miss Froo couldn’t find her mittens so I made another pair – my only FO this week. If you missed my how to sew mittens tutorial my biggest tips are to use a zipper foot and sew the seams then cut the fleece afterwards. The thumb and other curves are tricky to sew without going off the edge and pinning the two layers together makes this easier to handle. Get your zipper foot out and start sewing!

The snow was dry and easy to play with until it got dark but now it is melting and everything is dripping. We’ll wait and see if it freezes tomorrow but in case it does I’ve moved the car up the road onto a flat road so that we can get out if we need to. Last year when the weather was bad I ended up leaving the car here at the bottom of the hill for nearly two weeks as I didn’t want to risk driving up one icy hill and down another to the main road which was well salted and clear.

Keep warm and sleep tight.

What no Fairies?

We’ve had a month of madness here and I’ve barely done any sewing let alone any blogging about it – as you will have noticed! We’ve eaten some fantastically tasty new dinners and been out and about at the seaside with the rellies as well as out walking here but my creativity is feeling a bit squished and I’m getting antsy.

I am struggling with the annual irk of winter which is that we spend too much time indoors and too much mess is made that doesn’t get cleared up. I really do still believe that fairies will come in the night and everything will be cleaned and tidied by them ready to start a new day. Or, if they can’t make it at night then they will come when we are out during the day and I won’t come home to washing that need processing or dishes that need to be washed.

We have been making envelopes at a rate of about six a day for the last week since the wonderful The Crafter’s Companion Enveloper Pro was delivered by a very patient post man. This poor man has to come to our house in a van now to deliver parcel after parcel containing vinyl albums bought for pennies on ebay by El Famosisimo.

We’ve also had a run on badge making so we are surrounded by snipped up bits of paper and magazines as well as all the washing which I have been drying on the really useful Ikea Pressa peg things on the shower rail or the door frame as I can’t be bothered to go to the shed and put them in the tumble dryer. I feel like I am the only person who has piles of clean folded clothes on the sofa which don’t move (no fairies again) as well as piles of clean plates that get dirty then clean again and don’t make it into the cupboards in-between those states and paper everywhere. I just can’t be bothered to keep moving things and putting them away ALL THE TIME…. I think I need to go to housewife boot camp or something to sort myself out as I’m twenty years into this job and I have still not really got the hang of it.

I have a few finished things and more unfinished things to show for a month’s worth of thinking about sewing:

What you see here is what can be sewn from 1 meter of denim: one pair of trousers for Miss Amoo – now 128cm tall, one bodice for a simple A line pinafore for Miss Froo and one back piece sewn from the leftover denim ready to be cut to shape and attached to aforementioned bodice if I can find more denim to make the front.

The bodice is completely lined with a bit of one of Mr G’s ink-stained shirts and finished with poppers so as soon as I get some denim there will be no excuse not to get the thing finished. This is proving tricky though as there is currently absolutely no denim in my favourite shop. Local folks will know that this small town is disproportionately well supplied with dress and upholstery fabrics, notions, yarn and more in three fantastic shops all called Masons. The ladies tell me that ‘He Who Does All The Ordering’ hasn’t been well and some things haven’t been restocked lately as his mojo is taking some time to find again. That and the price of cotton is ridiculously high at the moment and denim is hard to find at reasonable prices. So, disappointingly, the only useful bit of the metre is the trousers which have been well worn already.

The other thing was a last minute birthday gift for Mr G. The story behind this is that the caravan came with a stainless steel tea pot which we have been using on a daily basis. We have had tea pots before but always ended up breaking the lids somehow so the hinged lid of the metal pot is a real bonus.

Now that Mr G is getting into drinking green tea and decaff Earl Grey he needs a littler tea pot at the office doesn’t he (this is my thinking, not his). I left it til the last minute and bought a brand new shiny pot for one from an old fashioned hardware-and-more shop in Oxford that is close to where Miss Froo’s drama thing happens. It is the kind of place where you have to ask if they have something as everything is everywhere. On enquiring, the chap moved some plastic sieves on a high shelf to reveal three different sizes of boxed tea pots. This kind of shopping is much more exciting than buying him yet another pen, I can tell you!

This was the winner and is is seated on a hastily but carefully sewn tea pot mat to save scalding his desk. This is the first time in years that have bound something without using the Singer bias tape foot but the thick cotton (from trousers) the batting (fleece) and the backing (check shirt) wouldn’t fit through the foot so it was old fashioned half machine, half hand sewing that got the binding so neat. I’m so happy with it that I offer you an extreme close up as a bonus.

I have yet to cut any of the Rag Market fabrics to sew anything for myself so I plan to do something about that next month. Or not. Depending on the effect produced by the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Australia.

New Year Sewing

We’ve had a busy afternoon with friends with lots of eating after a pretty long walk which was a good way to spend the day.

I was browsing Pinterest ( you have a lot to answer for analog lady!) and saw a pillowcase bag from Martha Stewart’s crafty summer things. Looking at photos of summer sewing stuff was a bit distracting but I got a summery pillowcase out of the drawer and sewed one up.

I didn’t like the idea of a knot on my shoulder so I cut the thing in half from 3″ from the corner instead of right at the corner. In hindsight I did my maths wrong and should have only gone an inch or two in as I have a very wide strap and a relatively deep and narrow bag…

I used my trusty narrow hem foot to finish the diagonal edges to save getting the iron out to press and turn then turn again.

Here’s the finished bag with a square bottom to add a bit more room and shorten the darned thing. The button is there to hold the loose inside diagonal bit which makes a kind of handy-ish pocket inside.

And best of all this was a job that left very little waste so there wasn’t much to tidy up:

What you see above is tiny trimmings from both ends of the pillowcase, the triangle ends left after sewing the gusset and the flappy bit inside that holds the pillow in. As the pillowcase only cost 50p from the YMCA shop last year this was a thrifty make in all senses. the larger piece of leftovers might become something else soon so I’ll keep it in the drawer and throw away the little strips. When I’ve done that I must go to bed and *NOT* look at Pinterest again tonight.

Well

2011 is almost packed up and put away. The tree is still up though and the stars are still shining outside albeit with one larger area of dark matter becoming apparent following a quick repair to enable a further six stars to light up. (Cut off light bulb, strip wires, twist together again and apply some tape. What do you mean I should have soldered the wires?! Having an electrical engineer in training here is putting a damper on my happy-go lucky electrical solutions!)

I love the possibilities that the New Year brings and every year I hope that we will be contented, healthy and all move forward in positive ways. This year we are still hopeful but also sure that unpredictable times lie ahead in many areas of our lives. I think we will have to make sure we do things that make us happy to balance out the other bits but sometimes life is like that.

There have been a lot of good times this year as well as a few bad ones here and there and these are some pictures that trigger good memories for me.

Closer

Well it’s getting ever closer now… We have been working on the tree and a few decorations but that’s it so far because I have yet to find the box containing the tinsel.

Here’s how it started on Monday afternoon

It is a simple origami folded thing from here . This year the tree is double spread of newspaper wide and three pages long. Then we plastered it with old envelopes and flour/water paste.

It was painted this very green shade on Tuesday and is looking much drier and stiffer now. The tree has already suffered some damage from being under the soaf so this will need a minor corner repair at some point! (It’s the picture that is fuzzy, not your eyesight)

Miss Amoo went to a home ed thing with friends the other week and came home with some lovely crafty things including this little fabric decoration

Hers has 2-3″ squares and a ribbon on top which looks great and I thought I might have something somewhere to do something similar. In all my tidying up of late I found a bag of 1″ squares that I cut last Christmas and the year before to make little scrappy wreaths with a home ed groups we go to. I didn’t want to make wreaths again so I’ve made these:

They’re blutacked to the back of this little door and I might sew some more tonight if I can drag myself away from doing nothing. It really feels like it’s time to hibernate and my whole self is slowing down as everyone else is revving up. Never mind.

Simpler Christmas

Yesterday I mentioned some Christmassy things and today I’m going to tell you a few things we have done, just for your entertainment. You don’t need to follow in my foosteps!

It was Christmas 2007 when I decided it was truly mad to send out cards which cost trees to make, money to buy, money to post and then would get binned a month later was madness so I wouldn’t buy any. Most people I would have sent cards to I could have called for a chat or visited or seen in the street to give them my good wishes so did I really need the cards at all? That year Mr G bought some cards and sent them to people he thought would be offended if they didn’t get one but then he said we shouldn’t buy a tree. What? No tree?

I grew up putting up a silver and white tinsel tree every Christmas. It was then folded up into a long thin box and kept in the loft til the following year. My mum never wanted to buy a real tree but I always wanted one so when I had my own home I always bought a tree. Before we had a car we would choose the most runty looking tree that no-one else wanted from the Sea Scouts at Donnington Bridge on about Dec 20th and carry it home. When I learned to drive I had an ancient Fiat with a fold back roof and we squeezed the tree in and let half of it poke out of the roof which the boys thought was really funny.

We have an old Christmas tape that we have always played in the car on such journeys and then play indoors too once we are feeling a bit more festive which usually happens around the 23rd or 24th. By staying away from too many shops I can manage to hold on to the truth that Christmas does not actually start in November at all! I can see might be hard if you have to walk through town every day to work but being here in yokelville is a bit easier.

Back to the tree thing: Mr G used the same wasteful arguments I had used against card purchase, against tree purchase and I couldn’t disagree. Why would we cut a tree down just to let it die in the house? So we made a paper tree from newspaper and envelopes that I collected during December. We folded a massive origami tree from the newspaper than papier mache’d it with the envelopes then painted it green and hung it on the wall.

We did the same thing in 2008 and 2009 with the same kind of end product. Then in 2010 I didn’t make a tree and the kids got antsy and I threw caution to the wind and bought a tree (runty again) in a pot so we could plant it therefore not violating any principles (much). I planted it after Christmas and it died. It is still in the garden looking dead so I think we may go back to a paper tree this year.

With the cards gone and the tree gone we also stopped wrapping the presents. The children each have a stocking which holds a comic to read when they wake up, a satsuma and some gold chocolate Euro coins (Lidl don’t do pound coins). Their presents are in white bags tied with red ribbon inside a larger white bag tied with a ribbon which as their initial Sharpied on it. The Sharpie bit was done by Mr G late one Christmas Eve when I had sewn a load of little bags of different sizes and sacks and couldn’t be bothered to embroider their initials on them. And Sharpie just doesn’t wash off you know!

The little bags are mix and match depending on who has what size of present and some new bags needed sewing when Miss Froo grew old enough to want presents. I sew the bags with the Easiest bag gusset in the world which I had been using for a while but used as one of my first posts on this blog way back in 2009.

It is fun trying to remember where I have stored the bags and the stockings the finding a bag to fit each present and tying them up and we don’t have to come downstairs to a sea of wrapping paper on Christmas morning either. We stay in bed and let them open their presents and do what they want all morning then we get up and start making something to eat.

And so to food: we are meat eaters but we don’t buy a turkey. I get a big long piece of beef which I chop about a third off and make into stew for Christmas Eve then we roast the rest for Christmas dinner which is usually at about 6 o’clock. No rushing around to eat before the Queen’s speech in this house, no. The Queen is lucky if we haven’t got back into bed after having put the meat in oven by then!

My food tips/observations are these:

Freezing breadcrumbs before Christmas is helpful as you can never spare any bread to make stuffing once the shops have close for the holidays.

No-one eats more on the 25th and 26th of this month than than they do on any other two days so there is really no need to go shopping as if the end of the world is nigh. The shops are only shut for 2 days at most so if we can survive on what we have in the house for that long in ‘normal’ weeks so we can in this week too.

You can never have too much mincemeat but you can have too many roast potatoes.

It is hard to stop anyone eating any Christmassy snack foods before Christmas without the threat of some form of dire punishment

It is just another day and another meal so as long as everyone is full at the end of the day it is all ok.

We have some stars that we hang up under our porch thing. We love making the snowflakes from Marcel’s kids crafts as seen here last year and the stars from here

It all boils down to not buying stuff thereby avoiding shops and shoppers, being ordinary and remembering that these days are also about midwinter and that we are halfway to the days being longer again which will bring warmth and new growth soon. Stay calm!