It’s been a grumbly sort of week.
A week of coughs and sore teeth, thrashing children in my bed, of forgotten phones, cheesecakes oozing out of their tins in the oven, sore shoulders, last kid collecteds, I’m hungry but not for thats and I’m sorry for shoutings.
I think I’ll just creep quietly into this corner and hope that the universe doesn’t notice me until things are looking a little more cheerful.
This week has been sunny (which, in Edinburgh means impromptu picnics and running as many loads of washing up and down the stairs as humanly possible).
It’s also required a change in beverage format to suit the weather.
Unchanged was the repetition, so much repetition.
Stop me if this sounds unfamiliar…
You receive a lovely gift of a voucher to a wool shop. So you go along and choose something that costs ever so slightly more than the voucher (despite all your intentions to stick to the budget).
‘What are you making?’ the owner asks. ‘I was thinking of a lace shawl.’ you remark breezily, neglecting to mention that you’ve never knitted lace in your life.
It occurs to you that perhaps you should dip a preliminary toe in the sea of lace knitting before subjecting your gorgeous purchase to excessive ripping out. Into the stash you go, vaguely check your meterage and cast on.
Of course, it becomes obvious that you don’t have enough wool to finish, and you even think about just having a tiny look in the wool shop on the off chance they have something in a coordinating colour.
Your sensible self is desperately running alongside shouting things like, ‘This was meant to be a stash-only project!’ and, ‘You weren’t meant to spend any money on it!’
You come to your senses (also, because it’s a Monday, the wool shop is closed) and check the stash again, only to discover a ball of wool so close in colour and weight it seems almost impossible it was bought 4,000 miles and several years apart from its new shawl-mate.
This is why there is stash…
My work this week can best be described as incremental.
But there are only so many times you can make a movement before it must come to some result, so I am awaiting the discovery that I have accidentally completed something.
Oh, look!
Having tested a variety of stem/branch ideas, I suppose it was only logical that, when faced with the fabric I was actually going to use, I decided to do something completely different.
I’m trying to embrace a bit of texture, as well as rediscovering an technique I haven’t used since I was enthusiastically making friendship bracelets at school. (I’d like to see the youth of today try to use loom bands in their future textile art…)
I haven’t quite got the stems finished, but on the whole, I’ve made quite a lot of progress on it this week.
Next week will hopefully involve cutting a lot of leaves…
The furniture rearranging continues apace.
I’ve reordered my supplies by genre rather than work/not-work and realised that I had only been using the front half of my plan chest drawers. (I suppose that’s part of the challenge of a large drawer in a small space!)
With the liberal application of hoarded fruit punnets and clicky-sticky tape, I’m slowly bringing a bit of order to things (no clear flat surfaces though, let’s not be too hasty).
I’m still itching to draw rather than sew, which hopefully explains the slow progress on anything involving a needle and thread (no matter how beautifully organised). I did get a bodkin out, which is always pleasing. I’ve been playing with corded rouleau to use as stems for the Ark Project tablecloth, and it’s been unnecessarily difficult.
In the end I’ve settled on turning the loops empty and then threading it with a homemade cord made of scrap fabric. I’ve managed to streamline the production so much that I’ve stopped cutting holes into the ends of the fabric in favour of slits so I don’t have to put the wee flappy pieces in the bin.
I’ve become very callous and started to cut up abandoned or unsold embroidery. I just don’t seem to have the energy spare to deal with shuffling it around or looking after it.
I wish I could say it was helping me get more work done, but it’s been mainly infinitesimal updates to various baby books, half rows of knitting, and a pleasant return to regular Pilates sessions.
This is my favourite bit of the cord-making process, when you pull the two ends and they lock together. I’m not sure what the emotional equivalent is, but I’ll let you know when I find it.
I can’t get over how miserable I was this time last year…
But here we are, and I’m up to my elbows in a very pleasant project: Little Lion’s Birthday Bunting.
It started when The Flat Buddy offered to organise an interactive baby shower for Dragon and we came up with the idea of people making and sending in bunting flags. It was a huge success, and hanging out of the Birthday Bunting marks the beginning of birthday festivities.
Now that The Flat Buddy is several hundred miles away, I organised Little Lion’s Bunting Appeal (discovering in the process just how much work went into the whole thing) and again was properly overwhelmed at how lovely people are.
Even Dragon got into the act, designing two flags and doing some of the stitching himself.
I’m looking forward to getting it all stitched together in time (I hope) for birthday festivities on the weekend (and more cake, which we missed doing this week).
In lieu of cake, here is a photo of the Lovely Young Man posing expertly in his Gentleman’s Relish. Because he is as wise as he is tall, he’s already worn it enough to avoid the Boyfriend Jumper Curse, which we’re all very pleased about.
March has come in with Little Lion’s first Nursery Plague which rapidly swept through the family.
There is nothing like the zombie-film aura which surrounds you as poorly parents of poorly children. Even the cat joined in after indulging in a sumptuous floor-feast because we couldn’t face tidying up around the high chair.
When we emerged, I discovered that I had 10 days to make Little Lion’s birthday bunting, a jumper which has been haunting me for two years was complete and I’d read War and Peace.
Readjusting to life on land has been unexpectedly tricky. I’m still looking for my concentration, I’ve lost the ability to tell time and if anyone wants to do my invoices for February, I’d pay you in plum tart!
(Not shown – Welsh cakes and brownies.)
I was sitting on the (very crumb-covered) kitchen floor (because it’s better than sitting in a chair), trying to document the 25 minutes (using my new productivity app*) I’ve spent this week on the Ark Project, when the radio intruded on my internal monologue and presented me with the title of the post.
I have a few sketchbook pages of notes and a little swatch of stiffened silk which really represents me coming to realise that I’m going to be cutting hundreds of leaves out of silk very shortly, and I don’t really want to hem them. I also have to get a handle on properly 3D rouleaux which use the minimum of silk, more on that when I get it to work.
*I’m using the Pomodoro Technique which times you working for 25 minute blocks. It’s been quite helpful for taming my distractible nature, even though the free app I have keeps demoting me to Unrepentant Slacker!
And now it’s time for …Cake of the Week, iced buns!
I’m very pleased with these, they’re hitting the not-too-sweet spot nicely. (I didn’t fill them because the first iced bun I ever ate didn’t have filling so I have grown to love them as oddly sweet bread rolls.) I can only show you the elegant pale yellow icing. After the first four were iced the colour scheme descended rapidly into the lurid and sludgy spectrum. I’m thinking about making half-sized ones for Little Lion’s upcoming first birthday celebrations (which is a bewildered post for another day).
It’s half term, and we’ve reached maximum entropy.
I have very little to show for myself since last week apart from a small but significant gusset for LYM’s jumper, some rather decadent cake and a half-written blog post about flapjacks.
We are a broad-shouldered family, so I suspect that the adding of gussets will become a useful skill for me. I have a small pile of bought clothes which could do with the addition of a little more room in the oxter department, so this will be the first of many. I used this TECHknitting tutorial, which was quite helpful and also provided a chance to learn a few more decreasing and i cord-making skills.
Have you noticed that all of my cake photography is half-eaten?
This was one of those dinner party desserts that look desperately complicated but really aren’t. Blind bake a shortcrust case (I added a little sugar to Delia’s recipe), when cool pour over some salted caramel sauce. (I had a jar of caramel sauce left over from Shrove Tuesday, but it had the same ingredients as most of the recipes I’ve seen online). Allow to cool and make ganache. Allow to cool and pour over while still just runny. I had some leakage where my pastry case wasn’t quite chocolate-tight, but no one seemed to mind!
Sprinkle with a little more sea salt if desired and serve in very small slivers with blood oranges.
If you’re crawling to the end of half-term, I wish you the best of luck.
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