Cake and quiche...

When it all goes wrong there is always cake. There was a bit of drama last night. Someone was trying to top my door slamming teenage behaviour, and she did. I think the last of my patience has gone.

So this morning, with that someone safely out of the way, I decided to make a Victoria sponge cake. I don't think I've made one before and I may never make one again. Yes it does look a bit flat but that's gluten free flour for you. Yes the buttercream looks a bit on the generous side but that was a lucky mistake that just happens to compensate for the dryness of the aforementioned flour. Yes the cake is perfectly round, it's just the dome making it look kidney shaped!

It was quite an adventure; I used nearly every bowl and utensil in the house, and I've well and truly mastered the Kenwood Chef. I love that thing. So simple to use and saves my arms from unnecessary work which means they're ok for crochet. That's the main thing ;-)

So quiche was next on my hit list. I found my idea of a perfect recipe on the Internet. It didn't call for ready made short crust pastry. It did call for lots of things that needed using up. We have a fridge full of tomatoes. A basket full of onions and a lot of farm eggs. Tomato and onion quiche. It should really be called tomato, cheese and onion quiche. There was talk of this being a thrifty recipe using up things you already have in the house (the chances of us ever having that combination of left over stuff again is very remote).

My inexperience in cooking in general meant that I didn't realise the pastry quantity would only make a tiddly little quiche in a tiddly little flan dish. Nowhere near enough for M's healthy appetite. I only realised this when I came to roll it out. I had to abandon my new flan dish and grab the smallest baking thing we have which is a glass Pyrex thing. I'm a bit disappointed my quiche doesn't have those lovely wavy edges. Pants. It smells good though, I just hope it's edible. (Update: yum, my first ever quiche, I wish I'd tried making one years ago!). M gave the cake the thumbs up too but he knows not to expect cake and quiche too often. My baking enthusiasm comes and goes!

Head, shoulders, knees and toes...

Remember that song? Oh the drivel we had to sing when we were kids.

Don't be fooled by that fixed stare, he's 'armless! Ha.

Man that head was fiddly!

Arms are next. Followed by mushroom hat. Woohoo!

Have you any wool?

This week is flying by. I can't believe it is Wednesday already. It's another lovely sunny day here. I popped into town this morning for a change of scene. M and I have been wanting a ceramic flan dish so that we can add quiche to our repertoire of meals. OK, so neither of the kids actually like quiche but my goodness it's only egg and pastry and they like both of those. I found exactly the flan dish I was looking for (plain white) in Scope for £1.50. It's perfect for a family of four.

We are still not having much luck with gluten free pastry and crumble. This is two years on and results are still hit and miss. M made an apple crumble yesterday and it was a miss. Ugh. The crumble was like eating plaster.

Of course I had a browse for vintage crochet books or patterns, and stumbled upon this book as I was leaving Oxfam (it was on one of their display units). It's 1986 and by Search Press and the text is somewhat chatty, like talking to a member of the W.I. :-)

E is a big fan of cacti and has a whole bedroom windowsill of them. All but one of the examples shown here are knitted but I'm sure I could make some crochet ones as a stocking filler present.

The garden is too sunny to photograph the pages in this book; everything just bleached out and indoors is a bit dark. Can you make out those wonderful knit and crochet gardens? They are amazing and made by the author. I love the way pom poms look like aerial views of trees or shrubs. We have a long narrow garden which could be immortalised in wool but it would have to be a fantasy garden. We have a couple of sheds, a bit of lawn and lots of big trees and that's it. See the little beehives in the close up? Oh yes please. I'd love a garden this organised. The author suggests what an ideal project this would be for a school class because 'even the tiniest addition would make a valuable contribution to the whole effect.' How lovely. Reminds me of when I helped one of Ella's primary school classes with weaving. Oh boy, that was an experience I wouldn't like to repeat.

The house and garden hanging would be a major undertaking but the colourful patchwork hanging is much more manageable. The seventies vibe obviously hadn't worn off by 1986. I just wonder how anyone ever had enough wall space with all these hangings! Macrame hangings, block print hangings, weaving and crochet hangings. I'm sure there were more. Currently our house has no wall hangings! Argh! I need to rectify that.

Oh and one last thought, can you imagine the look on M's face when I show him the title of this book, 'Have you any Wool?' Um, yeah, just a small cupboard full (sheepish face!) :-)

Wild swimming...

We've had several gloriously sunny days here in Lincolnshire. I know I keep on about it but I can hardly believe my luck to have found a whole nature reserve less than a mile from home and pretty much all to myself in the week. It's been really good for the soul. If I'm not smiling at the dogs I'm smiling at the clouds or the wild flowers...yes I know this is starting to sound quite mad.

It occurred to me yesterday, whilst Harvey was doing thirty laps of the lake, that the water looked extremely inviting. I was hot from the walk and it would have been refreshing to take a dip. There were two problems though, one is that I've never swum in a river or lake before and don't like the thought of swimming with fish or other slimy creatures and two there was a big sign saying 'no swimming'.

When my brother and I were small we'd frequently see people swimming in the river, with all the danger of boats and propellers, weeds, pollution etc. We were happy to stay dry in our little boat (pretending to be Swallows and Amazons) only having to worry about running out of fuel or losing the oars in the water.

I remember one quite scary incident with a lake that involved a friend and her dog. It must have been one of the winter months because the dog swam out into the middle of a lake in the woods behind our houses and suddenly lost the use of his back legs. My friend quickly stripped off her trainers and socks and waded in, by the time she got to the middle of the lake it was too deep to stand. Bear in mind here that she was a good swimmer and I only had my width badge (which was about ten metres!). Quick as a flash I was thinking about them both getting into difficulties or catching pneumonia. It was very frightening. Luckily this adventure had a happy ending. Both friend and dog made it back to the shore. We ran back to her house and wrapped her and the dog up in towels and then duvets. We didn't tell our parents until we were safely into adulthood.

I dread to think what my own children would do in a similar situation. They don't seem to have the common sense that my generation had because they have played in such a different way, mostly under the watchful eye of Mummy. I've never let them go off and play in woodland by themselves because of the society that we live in now, and that is a tragedy in itself. That's not to say that I haven't done my best to encourage imaginative play.

The biggest laugh today was watching Riley try to swim. Harvey glides through the water with the gracefulness of a seal. Riley on the other hand hasn't worked out that doggy paddle needs to be undertaken beneath the water level in order to be propelled forward. Hence the style looks similar to that of a drowning dog (see top pic)! In fact the first time we saw him swim we did think he was drowning and I was getting ready to take my shoes and socks off! Today Harvey must have decided that the lake was the perfect way to cool down. He ran at speed to the edge and launched himself into the air before splashing down a couple of metres from the bank. It was quite spectacular.

The cherry on the cake was spotting a Heron near the river bank on our way back. You can never get close to them and it spotted us long before we spotted him and took off with his ungainly body versus wings ratio. He was still rather more spectacular than Harvey's bomb diving!

Hey dude!

A lovely sunny afternoon gave me the chance to do a little bit more of Paul. This was following our nice long dog walk... you can see the dogs in the second photo but thankfully you can't smell them. Eau de Pond with faint undertones of fox poo.

Paul is looking a bit strange with his long body and absence of arms, not to mention his unstuffed face. His eyes look low but I swear that is where the pattern suggests they go. When his head is stuffed I will be able to do his rosy cheeks and then he'll start to look a little cuter.

A spare basket is where he is living for the time being, with a scarf thrown over the top to hide him from nosy people. I'm only managing a short spell on him every day. The stitches are small and I have quite big hands and the thumb and forefinger grip on a 2.5mm hook gets painful, but I do love this intricately stitched look. I've not done anything like it before, and after Kira and Lupo I may not do anything like it again!

In other crochet news I've completed one Christmas gift and have more on the go. I'd like to be sharing the finished one with you now but the recipient reads my blog so it will have to stay secret for now. I can tell you that it was made using a gorgeous alpaca yarn that was very nice to work with. I purchased the pattern via Etsy and it suggested the time taken to make it would be approximately ten hours. I've no idea whether it took me that or more but it was a very manageable project considering I am making two and have left my gift making much later than I would have liked. I will take some photo's and share them with you after they've been unwrapped.

autumn walks with Harvey and Riley...

It's funny how we shift and adapt to the seasons, sometimes without even realising. Over the summer I favoured certain dog walking routes and now I seem to have returned to those I favoured during the winter. There's not much logic to it. Perhaps the summer ones were a little shorter because it was hot. Perhaps the autumn/winter routes are full of interesting trees, fields, hedgerows. I've already harvested some crab apples that no-one seems to have spotted. Harvey and Riley have harvested thistle heads and grass seed mainly, they transport them home in their long curly ears. I suppose that's the gun dog design for protecting the inner ear from such things. When I had my two other Springers in the New Forest they used to collect mainly heather in their ears and that was a lot easier to brush out.

There are plenty of rivers and streams on these local walks. In fact this last week or so the environmental agency have been dredging them and cutting down all the stuff growing on the riverbanks. It's revealed a network of burrows, most likely water voles. It has also uncovered a whole host of interesting smells according to the dogs who have been up and down the muddy banks with their noses doing overtime.

Eventually we come to a nature reserve which is really one of the area's best kept secrets. It was created by three sisters who bequeathed the land to the community when they died. Volunteers have planted all sorts of saplings on newly acquired neighbouring land which have grown considerably in just two years. They've also introduced lots of wild flowers, most of which I've missed having been busy elsewhere for most of the summer (cricket mainly!). There are hundreds of flowers which have now gone to seed and I don't think they'd miss a few seeds would they? The top half of our garden has huge trees down each side which prevent the grass from growing healthily. We've been thinking of introducing wild flowers but it's an optimistic thought... the dogs have no respect for plants.

Autumn is most definitely my favourite season, what's not to love? Perfect temperatures, beautiful colours, seed heads galore, blue skies, muddy dogs...

Puur Haken... Pure Crochet

There must be a bit of a shortage of good crochet books. When I browse through Amazon to see if there's anything new and inspiring I get the same old titles. So when I saw this one on the 'My Rose Valley' blog I thought I'd give it a go. Yes it's in Dutch and no I don't speak Dutch. I do know someone who speaks fluent Dutch though, but in the meantime my ability to read crochet charts or diagrams is improving all the time. The charts in this book have handy row one and row two etc markers which the Italian ones didn't.

It is a very dark  and overcast day here in Lincolnshire so the photo's are a bit rubbish. I have my eye on those place mats which would look rather good in our rustic kitchen. (It's so rustic we still have bare  plaster on two walls!) I like the aran style scarf which uses front post trebles but not in a way I've tried yet (diagonally?). The egg cosies are on the to do list too since we've been getting through trays of 36 from the farm up the road. Why, my sixteen year old daughter has finally learnt how to boil on egg! Despite that though she still only has them for breakfast if M happens to be home and offers. Lazy.

There are several projects that look simple but effective. This is a book I would have loved when I was just starting out in crochet. I could have tackled the simpler projects but still had some for when I'd learnt how to do front and back post trebles, join as you go, puff stitches and bobble stitches etc. There's a simple floor rug using t shirt type yarn with a simple bobble stitch. I need to spend a weekend cutting up Jake's old t shirts. The last time I sorted out his chest of drawers was last year when he was 12, I came across a whole load of age 9-10 t shirts which he'd grown out of when he was about 7. He hates to part with things, I think he's going to end up like those hoarders you see on tv!

Progress on Paul is still happening. The neck and the beginning of the head was a bit of a nightmare. The pattern writer says she wrote the pattern for beginners. Nooooo way! You'd have to be a darn good beginner to get through this.