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A List of Nonsense born of Industry

November 3, 2011 By 5 Comments

(This post starts as one thing and ends up as something else. I’ve let it stand, as opposed to editing myself.)

I’ve been beavering away making some bibs for the Craft Fair in Dulwich on Saturday. I’m piggy-backing on my friend Jo’s jewellery stall as I did last year, so I imagine we’ll be being very badly behaved and tasting all the delicious cakes (I hope the cake lady is the same as last year – they were amazing, and she introduced me to the delights of edible glitter).

Thoughts that have occurred while I’ve been busy:
  • This room is no warmer than it was in the spring.
  • 4OD is great, because it has an archive of shows from forever, so I finally got the see the Devil’s Whore, and made myself a new hero in Edward Sexby.
  • I have a lot of fabric in my drawers that I’m probably not going to use and should have a de-stash.
  • I fiddled with the blog layout again, and wish I could find the colour green I used about four years ago, rather than the slightly odd green that looks fine on my mac, but not on my PC.
  • Signing up for nanowrimo is so so so optimistic, given that I’m three days behind already.
  • I don’t really know how to reconcile all the different parts of myself into a coherent whole at the moment.
Ever feel as if you’re floundering a bit? When I’m busy I always feel as if I ought to be attending to something else. There’s always the feeling that some parts of me are being done a disservice, by the effort of distilling them into one shape or another. Perhaps I’m trying too hard to be coherent, and the trick is to let things flow more, the way children will throw their entire being at a task and then seamlessly move onto something completely different.

I confess I’ve often thought of stopping writing here lately. My landscapes have changed since I started blogging in 2007, and I don’t know if this space suits me anymore. I keep fiddling with the blog’s layout too, because it’s just not comfortable, and each time I’m happy for about 36 hours. Perhaps I did everything the wrong way round, when it comes to writing, blogging, making, having a child. My instinct is to stop and start again, but where would that get me? At the beginning again. Where I love to be, happily master of none of the things I take up. I really fancy learning Norwegian, for example, which is really just part of a wider interest in norse myth, old english and the experience of North, and being Northern. But where does it fit in?

Elizabeth wrote of creative people who have a keen urge to pursue more than one discipline. Perhaps the nature of blogging means that I’m stopping myself from experiencing more pure joy in following my interests because of the tramlines I made for myself with the title, or the notion that I must write about everything here, and then stopping myself doing things or writing about them because of some odd idea that they aren’t suitable. I’m not good at compartmentalising. Maybe that’s it.

Perhaps the whole thing is best summed up with the trouble I have choosing a twitter name. In the dark history of the internet, you chose an avatar and a pseudonym, keeping your real identity a secret, since the internet was full of Wierdy Geeks. If I was just one thing, or had just one website, then it would be easier to settle on a name. I’ve flipped back and forward from one thing to another, causing confusion and delay, not least to my own sense of identity. This week I realised it would be much easier to tweet under my real name, since this is the only way that I can safely encompass every part of myself, and everyone is on the internet now anyway. But my name is taken. Where to now?

Should I end this post by making excuses for myself? Blame it on the darkness? Blame it on a lack of chocolate? No, my friends, I think not. No more excuses.

Filed Under: Diet & Butter, Life, Sewing - 5 Comments

November, November

November 1, 2011 By 6 Comments

*I did this face in about five minutes flat, having realised it was not half an hour to the child’s bedtime and we hadn’t carved a face. Halloween is not one of those things you can do the day after. I may have modelled it on my own dismayed face brought on by slack parenting.

*I have done my back in. This seems a cruel and unnecessary reminder of my advancing years. It was almost better but then I jumped off a stile because I was being chased by a horse (I say chased. I mean the horse was ambling after me slowly. But my friend mentioned the deer in Nara who bit my bum in search of biscuits and I panicked.) I am currently in love with the wee adhesive heat patches you can stick on, which seem to be the best thing for it, but I’m still doing everything v.e.r.y. s.l.o.w.l.y.

*I joined the ranks of people who can speak to their phone to Get Things Done. (Siri, the voice assistant on the iPhone 4s.) I thought it would be rubbish but it isn’t, and I can add things to a groceries list as I pootle around the kitchen, which means that when I do my online shopping I actually get the stuff we need. Big breakthrough.

*I started making a baby blanket from the yarn i got at Ally Pally, and I also did some sewing at my desk again. It felt good to have busy hands again.

*I also made welsh cakes at home for the first time ever. They were amazing, and I only tried them because it was a rainy day and they don’t require much in the way of dairy produce (online shopping failure yet again). Most of the ingredients are dry and will just be hanging around in your cupboard. You don’t need a griddle pan – a frying pan is just as good.

*I keep expecting Winter to arrive, but so far it hasn’t and we’ve been making the most of the fair weather while we can. There’ll be enough dark and bitter days in the coming months, and the clock change only hastens them in. The sun set at 4.45 today. We were still in the park, still had energy to burn. It makes less and less sense to me to have more light at 6am than at 5pm, but this might have a lot to do with my child now waking at 6.30 instead of 7.30.

*As if I didn’t have enough going on I set up a tumblr, purely for pictures from my iPhone and Instagram. I’m finding time passes so quickly now, and the business of toddlers makes it harder and harder to record things (witness this poor neglected blog), and often the only thing I have time for is a quick snap with the camera in my phone. But at least I have that.

*And apparently it’s November now. What the hell happened to this year?

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: , - 6 Comments

Let Them Make Cake

October 10, 2011 By 8 Comments

After a blustery morning in the park I decided it was just Too Much to ask of my hair to spend more hours being flung about in the wind, so instead we stayed in to make cakes. What else?

Little cupcakes, frosted with buttercream I showed Fitz the picture in the baking book and he immediately declared that he wanted cakes. This isn’t unusual. Lately he’s been known to suggest cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner, so I’m left in no doubt he really is my son (need I say he doesn’t get it? Well, he doesn’t. I am mean, and consume unhealthy treats after he’s gone to bed). However, he did understand me when I said we had to make them first (scone baking sessions paying dividends), possibly hatching his plan to cover himself in flour from head to foot that very second.

It ended up being the most interactive baking session we’ve had so far, with him enthusiastically tipping the butter and sugar in, giving the eggs a beat, and getting way too excited with the flour bag. Note to self: when you’ve finished with the flour, put the bag back in the cupboard. I confess it was me who got the food colouring out but he wouldn’t have it, and I had to settle for making pretty buttercream icing instead.

The buttercream was an afterthought, just to use up the already softened butter that was left over. It’s a simple recipe:
use 1/4 butter to icing (confectioner’s) sugar – I had 50g butter, and around 200g of sugar. Beat the butter in a bowl until creamy in colour and texture. Add the sugar and mix in well, using 2-3 tablespoons of milk to loosen the mixture – add these gradually, as needed. Flavour with vanilla, rose, orange, coffee…, and add a bit of food colouring if you fancy it a bit pretty.
Then I went overboard, and piped it on. I’ve never piped icing before in my life, but now I want to pipe everything. I’m really excited by the baking possibilities for winter days. By spring my ass is going to be Huge with a capital Hu.

And the cakes themselves? Delicious as well as pretty, and there are even some left over for tomorrow.

Filed Under: Baking, Fitz Tagged With: , , , - 8 Comments

Then there was Cake

September 14, 2011 By 4 Comments

I was overcome in the week before Fitz’s birthday when I found out that my friend was baking a Peppa Pig cake for her daughter, who’s only one day older than my boy (we were in the hospital at the same time. If I’d been quicker about it they would have shared a birthday. Oh if only I’d been quicker about it.). I panic-bought a book about icing cakes in the shape of tank engines, before remembering that my son truly is my son, and that a chocolate cake would be more than exciting.

Besides – imagine if you pulled out all your cake decorating stops when the child is only two. You’d have nowhere left to go by the time they were six…

So a chocolate sponge was born, and this week both halves made it out of the oven and onto the worktop, rather than the floor. The recipe was a Nigella one again, but she likes to bung hers in the food processor all at once – sometimes I don’t hold with her shortcuts. I did a sponge method instead, and yes, the effort was rewarded, by not one but two chocolate cake nay-sayers pronouncing it lovely and light. As light as it can be under the weight of chocolate butter icing, I guess.

You know, the most fun was sitting with Mr J and sticking on the chocolate buttons, and not just because you get to put one on the cake and then one in your mouth. It was our heady anticipation of the boy’s glee at being given an entire cake. It was talking about whether or not he’d do his excited hands (he did) and whether he’d say it was “amazin’!” (he did).

Next year we’ll even talk about whether he’ll have a huge sugar high and race around the house on his trike non-stop for half an hour once he’s eaten it. That is, if I’m not too busy sculpting a fire engine out of sugar paste…

Filed Under: Baking, Fitz, Making for Mothers - 4 Comments

A disaster

September 6, 2011 By 3 Comments

There is nothing quite like watching one half of your husband’s birthday cake slide off the oven shelf in slow motion, while you reach out to stop it with a bare hand, grasp the tin, think twice, and then see the perfect sponge splatter onto the floor. Nothing quite like it at all.

Undeterred (that’s not strictly true – I was extremely deterred for a couple of hours) I cut the other one in half and sandwiched it with creme fraiche and strawberry jam. It was delicious, but there was a little part of me always thinking ‘but it could have been twice the size’. Eeyore. That’s me.

 

 

Filed Under: Baking, Life Tagged With: , - 3 Comments
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