Crafty Mermaid

I bought two healthy heart cook books a few weeks back and this was my first recipe from it - Yum! Pork with rosemary, apples and lentils. Hmmmm.... It doesn't quite look as nice as I thought it would when I served it up - need to work on my plating! :) (And yes, that is rosemary stalks in the middle of the pork - straight from the garden)

Button biscuits and a new tea cup... I really like this cup as it reminds me of tessellations and DNA structures. I think I paid a little too much for it (especially as BM recently broke the handle and its now superglued on) but I love it so its staying!

Its a beautiful sunny day here in Middle Earth and I managed to get bright photographs of my FINISHED picnic blanket - oh did I shout that? Terribly sorry and all that! I really love it and am so happy that I managed to stick with it over the six months it took to finish . I've been missing working on some crochet and can't seem to get into some unfinished cross stitch pieces I have lying around the place. My grandmother suggested at one point using the same colours I started with to finish this up but as I had gotten them in a kit for a scarf and was travelling through a number of continents with this blanket in tow (seriously, I think its seen more airports than the average Kiwi- the person, not the bird or fruit for that matter). But thankfully when I was thinking of how to finish it I found a colour very similar to my first and used that. So happy with it!

What could be better at the end of a rather tiring day...

My first Stitch and Bitch evening included plum pie, moose cake and a coal fired BBQ (they did mean to get charcoal, really). It was followed today by some of this ... ...on the train.

BM has a 'thing' about Whales. I blame it on the kiwi obsession with Whale Rider . So we are now the proud owners of a Whale chalkboard for the fridge and a whale scrubber for the sink ala Nood and the Dog's Breakfast .

I love the patterns and colours here.  Not rightly sure why :)  Wellington has some strange slightly hidden away places...

I finally downloaded some pictures from my phone and found this from last weekend.  BM was very, very keen to BBQ and we haven't had a lot of suitable days this summer unfortunately.  But we did manage it last weekend and BM tried a recipe for BBQ bread.  Yum!  They tasted a bit like herb scones.  They're officially called Herb Damper Bread and BM got the recipe from a book he has called the Big Barbecueing and Grilling.

Just about to go to bed (again - seem to be posting too late these nights) and wanted to report that it is indeed wet, wet, wet today again.  So no beautiful sunny shots of the blanket.   So I'll leave you with images from Martha's Pantry .   A lovely magical place where it doesn't matter that it rains :)  I have some baking exploits to share tomorrow as we had friends over for dinner tonight - I had a really lovely time and should be going to a stitch and bitch on Monday night (BM was invited too to do 'blokey BBQ things').

I'm just about off to bed - its a long weekend here and unfortunately for me I have to do a bit of work over it.  But it will be more than made up for by the joint pleasures of viewing a house for sale (we're not fully decided if we want to buy yet - but it has to be good to get an idea of the market) and high tea at Martha's Pantry (yum!). I had planned on posting about my crochet blanket - which is finally finished!!!  But it rained a LOT today and I couldn't get a proper bright photograph to show.  This is especially important as I plan on printing some of them out to send to my grandmother who was very helpful with colour choices when I was back in Ireland. So rather than leave this an image free post - here's a view I have on my walk to the train station every day - gotta love art deco.

Of course, when I start making cards, I find it hard to stop - which explains the mountain of cards I have stored (and the reason that I need to be creative about distributing them to people).  I think my favourite here is the last one.  Its nicely balanced and still comes across as clean - some of the others I'm really not so fond of at all.

A few more cards for my expanding collection - I really need to meet more people or start to sell these.  I've been following the Taylored Expressions blog for a while - it showcases a number of card making ideas and products.  I haven't bought anything from them - in case you're beginning to think this is a sales pitch!  But I finally got around to see how their card templates work as a basic starting point - I tried this one out .  And I like the two cards I produced as a result.  Of course, I couldn't stomach having leftovers and finished up the paper with the other few cards on this page. I think this is my favourite and strangely is my screensaver at work at the moment.  I definitely wouldn't have put as much on the card if I hadn't been working to a template so it was good to get out of my comfort zone.  (I also like that it looks like a flower against the sun and that I thankfully had paper and stickers that I think worked together...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sew-Cath-Kidston/dp/1844007561/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b The giddy purchase of a new craft book. And this one comes with fabric - how could a girl say no?? So many projects and so little time :) Available at amazon obviously!

My parents gave me fake snow this year for Christmas and the eagle eyed (or closely related) amongst you may have spotted it from this post . So this is what came in the can - a shovel and two dried packets of powder. Add some water and voila! Snow as a table centrepiece.  There was LOADS - shovels and shovels of the stuff.  So I added some to glass jars and put candles in. I've been watching it slowly shrink over the past week and as the water evaporates, we're down to about a 1/3 of the platter while the better insulated glass jars are holding up much better!

I went over for dinner to a friend's house this weekend and was asked to bring dessert. I made Lemon Sour Cream Cake from the Edmonds cookbook (Auntie M if you're reading this - it was yum, definitely make it from the copy I sent you for Christmas!).  It came out really week and was great served with natural yogurt.  I had to decorate with the marshmallow stars just to give it a little extra something.

My craft room was originally a dark terracotta brown and a deep almost blue navy.   I finally picked a colour for it and spent some of the time over my Christmas holidays painting merrily away.  It really was a pleasurable experience (except when we realised that the skirting boards weren't actually white and we had to redo those too as they had bits of the old colours liberally applied in places they shouldn't have!). The colour of the room was something in between the photo above and the one below.  They really were quite strong colours. (And in case you noticed, yes I did write on the wall with my tester before we painted!) I'm very much a process girl and I thought a photo of the room with my painters tape up and the undercoat would be vaguely interesting for people. Ok, fine, I can't lie.  I'm just too damn pleased with the whole process not to share it all - it is a web log after all :D It was at this stage that I remembered my mother's sage ad...