How to Knit

A delightful lady called Julia, read my post about my issues with wool work and embroidery, which you can read here.

She sent me this:

You should watch it if you do nothing else today.

I literally cried with laughter.

I give you an eyeful

I am, as regular readers will know, quite keen on charity or thrift shops.  I love a bargain, and I love rooting through other people’s stuff in search of treasure.  I have a regular route of shops I trawl through at least once a fortnight. Sometimes I am lucky, sometimes not.

Recently I have been fixated on finding nice pottery rather than finding clothes.  I have a wardrobe full of lovely things which I rarely wear, many of which come from charity shops.  I have however, been ‘off’ clothes, preferring instead to stuff myself into the usual jeans and t-shirt combo because it is comfortable, quick, and means I can get dressed in the dark.  Which I do.  Literally.

I have, however, since my latest Orc project started to take shape, been paying much closer attention to the clothing racks in the last week.  I have got some absolutely wonderful Orc clothes, which I know I promised pictures of, but I want the children to model for me, and we haven’t had a moment lately.  Photos will be forthcoming.

Today however, I found something for me.

It was not a good day to find clothes. My period had started. I was sore, and bloated and generally utterly depressed about how I now look like I am 140 years old etc, even though I don’t really, but today I do, if you see what I mean.

Then I found a dress.

I thought it was a table cloth, and I pulled it out because I loved the colours and thought I might be able to practice with my new sewing machine.  Then I realised it was a dress and fell in love with it.

The price label had fallen off, so I dragged it to the counter and asked the lady, who said: ‘Will a pound do?’

The words: ‘Not arf’ tumbled from my lips.

I dashed home with it to try it on.  It fit.  I LOVE it.

I tweeted about it.  There is an amazing blogger who I follow called Vintage Vixen. I found her through my lovely blogging friend Alex at Odd Socks and Pretty Frocks.  Vintage Vix is a thrift fashion ninja lady.  She gets bargains I can only dream of.  I blew my own trumpet and Vintage Vix took up the clarion call, demanding a photo.

This stymied me a little.

I hate having my photo taken, and I have been better about it of late, but today was a bad day.  Today I felt like a troll crossed with a viking and a bit of Mexican wrestler thrown in.

I wavered.

Then I thought, ‘Bugger it.’  Screw your courage to the sticking post.  It’s a great dress.  And so what if you don’t look like Kate Moss?

I screwed my courage accordingly and got Jason to take my picture before I could chicken out.

I wouldn’t let him take another.  I worried that if I did that we would still be here next Tuesday.

I rushed off and stuck it on Twitter before I could change my mind.

People were nice.  I don’t care if they were lying.  I’ll take what I can get.

And you have to admit that despite the short comings of the model, the dress rocks.

And it has awoken my interest in clothing again, so I might dust down a few items from the wardrobe and start to get more playful in future.  And I might even turn the light on when I get dressed, and possibly brush my hair.

Although that might be going a bit far.

Comfort and Spice

The second cook book I have been given to play with this week is called Comfort and Spice, and is by a food blogger called Niamh Shields, who writes the blog Eat Like a Girl.  It is by the always interesting publisher Quadrille, and forms part of their ‘New Voices in Food’ collection.

The book itself is a thing of beauty. It is smaller than the average cookery book, and lighter. You could actually put it in a regular book shelf space, and not break your wrists carting it around.  The photography is beautiful and the idea of commissioning a series of up and coming writers or less well known writers is a good one.

The only thing I have found frustrating with the book so far is that the layout is far from intuitive.  The sections are hard to distinguish from each other, and the recipes are fairly eclectic, so it’s hard to work out where they fit.  It’s best if you have time to browse through it, just going oooh and aaaah.  So far I’ve made a short list of about ten things I MUST try and there are about twenty or thirty other things that I’d like to get around to.

So far though, we have only tested one recipe.  Tilly made Halloumi and Pomegranate salad for me last night.

Usually Tilly does not do savoury.  She is interested in bread, and baking, and very good she is at it too.  She is less enamoured of savoury food, and therefore has much less interest in cooking it.  I have been hoping that she would find a way into engaging with it, and I think with this recipe we may have cracked it.

She loves halloumi cheese, and she loves pomegranates. She was desperately hungry for a simple supper type snack, and couldn’t find anything she wanted to eat.  I pointed her at this.

She took to it like a duck to water, and apart from mashing her halloumi so that it resembled scrambled eggs, she did a damn fine job.

She liked it, although she didn’t love it, but I am happy with liking it.

I loved it. I loved it so much I ate a huge plate of it yesterday, and finished the rest for lunch today.

I have been browsing through the book as I was making my shopping order up today and have many things I am desperate to try, so I will keep you apprised of our progress as we go.I think the next two things I am making though are the chocolate and chilli truffles and the lime and passion fruit curd.

It’s a good job I am at peace with not having a career as a model because this waist line aint getting any thinner.

Bill’s Everyday Asian (this is a cookery book, not a porn site)

I love cookery and food in general, but it is one of those things. When you are a stay at home mum, which I am, having to come up with meals seven days a week tends to sap the strength of even the most committed foodie.  I often find myself dreading finding something to shove on the dinner table.

This is down in part to the repetition, but mostly, it has to be said, it is down to me sharing a house with four of the fussiest eaters the dear Lord ever saw fit to plonk on the planet.  I sympathise with them a little.  As a child I was faddiness personified, and had a weird and wonderful diet that drove my poor mother to distraction for years.  I have since, and for no reason I can put my finger on, become a kind of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall figure.  I am curious about almost all foods, and will try most things once, even things I think I will hate, just in case I don’t.

I also have an appetite like a Thames Dredger. I just keep on eating.

If there is no food around I am bereft, and have been known to start plucking my feathers out with despair.

I do have hopes that the family dining situation will improve however.  Tilly is becoming enormously adventurous, both in what she eats and what she cooks, and is now a pleasure to eat with, for the most part. She still has her moments, but that’s o.k.  I am just thrilled by the fact that she will try things, and she has finally come to the understanding that ingredients combined do not always taste of their individual components.  This is a revelation, and a very welcome one.

The other two are still working on things.  We have good days, we have bad days.  We have days where I want to smack them with a pan. We have days when we give up and go to the chippy.

At the moment though, things are looking up in the culinary stakes.  I have two new cookery books to review for Amazon Vine and we have been having a lovely time so far.

I have Bill’s Everyday Asian, which is possibly the most appalling name for a cookery book ever.  It sounds vaguely pornographic.  It is by the Australian cook, Bill Granger.

He is not really very well known in the UK, although I have noticed his face cropping up more often on the digital cookery channels in recent months. I believe he is hugely famous in Australia though.  I am imagining him as a kind of Australian Jamie Oliver.  At which all my Australian friends will now mail me with vehement denials that he is anything of the sort.

I got this because I got the book Bill’s Basics to review earlier in the year and I have used it over and over again.  It is a genius cook book, full of simple recipes that taste great and are really easy to do.  His carrot cake instantly turns you into a domestic goddess.  I have defected, for the purposes of carrot cake, from Nigella, who I swear by in all things baking, to Bill.  It is that serious.

I would point out for English readers that Bill’s Asian is not Indian food.  It is noodles and lemon grass and that kind of thing.  I wouldn’t say he draws influences from a specific country but it is Thai/Vietnamese style stuff.

I love this sort of food to eat, but rarely cook it, as I don’t really have any idea what I am doing.  I find it a bit daunting to be honest, but I thought if anyone could break me in gently, it would be Bill.

So far I have made two dishes, the chicken wings in a sticky, hot sauce, and a dish called Pork Larb.  The chicken wings were more simple than I imagined they would be, but rather messy to make.  They are as messy to make as they are to eat, and if you don’t make your syrup just before you coat your chicken wings you end up with your syrup mixture hardening in the pan to the point where it is fairly useless.  Once I had mastered the timing all was well, and all chicken wings were eaten appreciatively.

The Larb I made this evening.  Again, it was simple to make and, like stir fries, once you had prepped your ingredients it was quick too.  It is basically a kind of spicy mince, with crispy veg and fierce hits of lime and chilli and lemongrass.  The veg added crunch, as did some toasted rice grains.  We had ours with noodles. Bill suggested serving it with raw cabbage segments.

I wish, when I suggested this, that I had taken a picture of Jason’s face.

He has his limits, and raw cabbage segments is one of them.

Tomorrow I’m making a kind of clear, spicy broth that is served with bits of sirloin.

Jason is already banging his knife and fork on the table.

The next post is about our adventures with cook book number two.

Nom, nom, nom.

I have finally chosen my Halloween outfit

It is warm, practical, ghostly:

and I can tuck a hot water bottle into the folds without anyone noticing.

Toasty yet ghosty.

Bitch and Stitch

Jason bought me a sewing machine yesterday.  I may have mentioned in a previous post that I was thinking of investing in one.  If I am going to be hand making Christmas presents this year and Jason and the children want Orc wear for the modern family, I am not hand stitching everything.

I hate needlework.

Actually, that’s not true.  In recent years, since I have thrown off the bonds of oppression placed upon me by hideous needlework teachers of yore, I have quite enjoyed my odd foray into needlecraft.

I should say that I hated needlework at school, and it is taking me a long time to realise that nobody is going to clip me up the side of the head if my seams aren’t straight, or if I don’t want to make a school blouse or a dirndl skirt and pretend to be Julie Andrews on a school trip.

I am not naturally deft of hand.  I find sewing quite hard.  I find all crafts that require material quite hard. I knit like I am trying to build a wall.  I have never attempted crochet because of this, and the fact that when I was in the throes of knitting, people would shout: ‘Just RELAX!’ in a way that was guaranteed to make you very nervous and uptight.  I decided that wool work was too stressful.  I expect I might be alright if I could find someone to teach me who was a) relaxed themselves or b) learn it by myself.

With needlework everything seems far too technical. It involves measuring and cutting and darts and pleats and crinkly paper that rips, and pins that try to kill you.  It is a violent art, and don’t let anyone tell you any different.

My first proper needlework assignment at school was making a cushion.  This was when I attended a convent school.  There were only four nuns left in the school who taught. Unfortunately one of them was the needlework teacher, Sister Noella.  Sister Noella was small, round, and Irish.  She was also fiercely and committedly insane.  And a huge fan of unwarranted physical violence.

A slap up the head was a good cure for whatever ailed you, particularly if you couldn’t do back stitch with a rusty needle and thread that had been specially waxed to be extra slippy.

The needlework room was in the grounds of the school and had once been a chapel for the convent.  It was dank and dark and full of louring statues of the Virgin Mary beadily assessing your chain stitch in a very unforgiving manner.

We would be walked over to the chapel from the main building in croc formation, indoor shoes in hand (yes, we had to have brown shoes for indoor wear, black shoes for outdoor wear. V. important for saving of souls and soles), while Sister Noella beat any stragglers around the head with the flat of her hand.

Once inside she would instruct us in her arcane arts.

I realise, with middle aged hindsight that Sister Noella only knew slightly more about needlework than I did.  Hence cushion making for all.  Also her avoidance of sewing machines that were placed around the walls.  We were never allowed to use them.  We had to learn to stitch everything by hand.

I think Sister Noella had been a bad nun, and had consequently been given the needlework class as some kind of divine punishment.  She hated it as much as we did.

The materials we had to work with were legendarily awful.  My cushion sported a brown nylon, silk effect backing with an orange raffia front.  The raffia shed everywhere and was absolutely impossible to sew with any kind of commitment as it would just unravel into your lap as soon as you touched it.

On top of the orange raffia I was required to stitch on purple and blue felt flowers, and then add the stalks in green wool, chain stitch.

It was, as you may imagine, a symphony of delight.

I gave it to my grandmother for Christmas.  She wept.  I suspect that they were not tears of joy.

After that Sister Noella retired and we had two more needlework teachers, both of them fierce and depressed that they were not working for Christian Dior, but were holed up in a dank chapel teaching surly twelve year olds to make blouses they did not want to wear.

Both of them hated me and refused to exhibit my skirt in the second year parents evening display, or my blouse in the third year parents evening display.  Mainly due to the blood stains and ineradicable sweat marks.

I was also banned from the sewing machines after I sewed my finger to the armpit of my blouse.

In the third year, my needlework teacher was also my domestic science teacher.  We had a falling out over the appropriate method of decorating a Christmas cake. She said plastic sledges and snow men.  I said a trillion, billion, edible silver balls.  I won.

She refused to display that at the parents evening either.  It sat in the cupboard with my blood stained blouse. A shrine to my incompetence.

I suspect she would be amazed at my reasonable level of competence now.  I clearly did not show early promise, but that’s probably down to the fact we never made anything I actually wanted to cook or eat and there was very little motivation to progress once Sister Noella stopped slapping us around.

Now though, I am going to explore the possibilities of the sewing machine.  I did not want to do anything whizzy.  I just wanted to sew in straight lines quite fast. Hence the £59 simple model from John Lewis rather than the £400 one which rotisseries chickens as it does your overlocking for you.  My level of ability is underlined by the fact that I am most excited by the knowledge that it is purple.  What does it matter if it only does 8 kinds of stitches, as long as it is purple?

You may wonder how come I am being allowed such a lovely treat, and indeed my new oil cloth, a new brownie tin and a device for poaching eggs which does not involve me burning my finger ends off.

It is because a) I allowed Jason to go out and miss the Halloween party this weekend. b) I also did not say a word when he got back from missing the Halloween party to announce he had only come home for a wee, and was off out to play poker.  But more importantly c) he bought himself an XBox and some new games yesterday and spent all night hogging the telly and shooting things.

I earned it.

 

Neigh I Say

I am not a fan of things equine.  This is a bit of a shame as I grew up in Leicestershire, surrounded by people who hunted, and there are riding schools aplenty.  Prince Charles hunts with the Quorn don’t you know? And I’m not talking about vegetarian mince products.

My best friend decided that she wanted to learn to ride when we were about fourteen.  I went for lessons with her.  I did not enjoy them.  I confess I was rather glad one day when we went out hacking and got thrown off, and she did not want to go riding any more.

It did not stop her wanting to go pony trekking on several holidays we went on after that.  On the trip to Snowdonia I got the horse that was the most miserable git in the equine world.  It kept trying to bite my leg, and when it couldn’t do that it would console itself by eating all the bracken at the side of the bridle path.

The woman in charge would come shrieking over and tell me that I was not to allow the horse to eat the bracken as it might get colic and die.  If it did this, it was made clear that I would be paying for pony burial and new pony.

I could do nothing.  The horse shrugged me off like a particularly annoying gnat and carried on eating bracken.

I do not believe in cruelty to animals, but by the end of the trek I was wishing it an early, colic filled death.

The last time I got on a horse was on a holiday to Cornwall when we went trekking near The Lizard somewhere.  We set off across miles of scrub land punctuated by old tin mine workings.  In the middle of nowhere my horse decided to gallop at break neck speed into the distance and shuck me off in the process.  I flew neatly over its head onto the ground below and narrowly missed being trampled to death under its hooves.

As we were in the middle of nowhere we then had to catch my unrepentant horse, and I had to remount it and limp back to the stables where my bloody knees and elbows could be attended to.

It only confirmed to me that I should never, ever sit astride a horse for pleasure.  I tried, I failed.  I am entirely reconciled to my horseless state.

I have found an acceptable subsitute though, and I never fell off it once:

What I should have worn at Halloween

This is me at Croft Castle during our half term holiday:

I think I look like Nanny in Black Adder II

 

 

 

 

 

Beeny’s Restoration Nightmare – Episode 2 – Series 2

After Grand Designs last night we ploughed on with our evening of home improvement television by catching up with Beeny’s Restoration Nightmare. You will recall that I blogged about the first episode here.

For those who can’t be bothered to read back, Sarah Beeny, loveable property guru, is seen, with her husband Graham Swift, doing up their 97 room, 200 year old crumbling ruin, Rise Hall.  This series sees them concentrating on the grand rooms of the South wing of the house and fighting the council who seem to be behaving like absolute arseholes about planning issues.

Last week they restored the Regency dining room. This week they worked on the morning room and the drawing room, both of which are vast spaces in their own right, but which are also linked by double doors, so they can be used as one gigantic space.

There was less to do in these rooms than in the dining room.  The fireplaces and mirrors were still intact and ready to use.  The problem with the rooms was their sheer size.  Painting them took weeks and weeks, and as with the dining room, there were plasterwork friezes to be picked out and it was all very time consuming and fiddly.

The main issue the programme focussed on this week was how to dress a huge room.  Buying a corner sofa from DFS really isn’t going to cut it, as every modern piece of furniture just gets utterly swallowed in the cavernous space.  You need big pieces, and you need lots of them.

The first thing was to tackle the lights. Chandeliers were called for, and Sarah and Graham trekked off to an antique shop in London, which is one of the world’s top specialist in antique chandeliers.  They consulted an expert chandelier historian who showed them an elaborate piece which I thought was deeply unpleasant.  I am however, not enamoured of chandeliers in general, so I am the last person to ask.  I do appreciate though that a couple of uplighters from Ikea really weren’t going to do the room justice.

Sarah and Graham dutifully oohed over the light.  Sarah asked how much it would cost to have a modern replica of the one they were looking at made. She clearly knew already that the one dangling above them was way out of their price range.  The estimated cost of making an exact copy of the light was £25,000.  The original was £95,000.    The man assured them that it was worth the extra money for the historical interest of the piece.

I was very impressed that they did not faint, snort or just burst out laughing.  Even £25,000 for the replica was way out of budget.

In the end Graham got given a whole load of chandeliers for free by a man who had bought them as part of an investment that went horribly wrong. He was over the moon, as Sarah’s solution had been for Graham to make one himself out of bits of broken chandelier.  Not an easy undertaking, especially with tight schedules left right and centre.  It’s a good job she didn’t have to ask me.  I’d have still been building the chandelier in my dotage.

They then went to an auction house to buy ‘big’ furniture and Sarah had to be physically restrained from buying lamps.  Graham actually help her hands together to stop her bidding. This reminded me very much of the way my parents buy things at auction.  There was a lot of hissing and giggling, and judging by how many lamps Sarah was stuffing in the back of a transit van later, she won.

Back at Rise Hall, they lost the furniture they had already bought, and had to split up, combing the house from top to bottom, and communicating via the power of walkie talkies whilst trying to flush out a load of Regency sofas.  I can’t say we have that problem in this house.  It is the only reason we have not succumbed to the lure of a 97 room, dilapidated mansion.

Ahem.

When the rooms were finished they allowed a local company from Harrogate to use the rooms for a photo shoot for their new collection of clothing for dogs.  Graham despaired over the doggy foot prints all over the new carpet and Sarah looked on in horrified fascination as they tried to squeeze a bull dog into a tutu.  Their own, sausage dog was roped into wearing a bomber jacket/gilet and was so anxious about it, it rolled off the sofa onto the floor and then tried to crawl under the chair in a fit of embarrassment.

What I love about the programme is the constant banter and bickering between Graham and Sarah.  They argue and fight and disagree but in a very companionable, married way.  They don’t take each other or anything else too seriously, although it was clear that the whole planning thing was getting them down at times, and they seem to genuinely adore each other and their children.  The children flit in and out trailing kittens and dogs and bits of pond weed and there is a great air of organised chaos.

It reminds me of home, but on a much larger scale, which I like. And I’m glad I don’t have to do the hoovering.

Grand Designs – Ian and Clair

Last night Jason and I watched Grand Designs together.  Although this series has shown some beautiful houses, it would be wrong to say that I don’t long, just a little bit for the odd programme where things go a bit wrong, or there is a teensy disaster.

This is, of course, a terrible thing to think, and I will probably be struck down by the God of flat pack furniture or some other such deity, but the odd trauma is what makes the programme so compulsive to watch.

Kevin has had a series of rather laid back, zen type builders in recent weeks, people who do not melt down if something goes wrong.  They have also been people with manageable, flexible time frames and a policy of only doing as much as they can afford in a reasonable way.

This is, obviously, the best way to do a build.  There are less heart attacks, less tears and generally your life will be happier.

Not everybody does it like this though, and last night we saw a couple who were the antithesis of say Ed and Rowena and their hand carved house.

Ian and Clair lived in London.  They lived in a subterranean flat lit by rippling pastel mood lighting.  Their kitchen was basically a zen corridor with a kettle in it.  Their bedrooms were like space pods from that weird Seventies television programme Space 1999.  Ian was an architect.  Clair was Clair.

They were hip, they were groovy. They wanted to partay despite having two teenage children.  Clair wore interesting hats.

They were slightly bored of living underground, Wombling free.  They had chanced their arm and bought a plot at the end of a super expensive mews in West London.  It was a nightmare space.  It had a railway line as one boundary and was hemmed in by houses everywhere else.  There was about enough space to park a caravan, and the rest of the site was littered with trees.  It was also miniscule.

The only access to the plot was through a hole in the wall at the end of the mews.  Every lorry, delivery, large piece of drilling equipment would have to go up and down the mews, much to the utter unamusement (my new word) of all the neighbours.

It would be fair to say that their plan to turn the plot into a house was about as popular as if the site had suddenly been populated by gypsies who had been granted a 99 year lease and the right to graze ponies on the site.

Things deteriorated when it transpired that although Ian only had planning permission to build an 800 square foot house, he had applied for triple that, because he planned on excavating down below the water table to make a vast, subterranean basement which would be a ‘play space’ for adults.  The children were tired of being Wombles. They were going to be allowed to live upstairs in the sunlight.  Ian and Clair were going to continue their underground life, but better, with more disco lighting.

The programme saw some fantastic scenes with the pursed lipped resident’s association not being at all won over by Ian’s patience and Clair’s line in avant garde headwear.  They didn’t care that Ian wanted to build a wellness suite, and that Clair needed to fit in a psychedelic glowing disco floor and DJ booth.

And where would the enclosed carp pond with free flowing water feature go if they couldn’t tunnel into the earth?

They were very misunderstood.

Poor things.

Things went from bad to worse as Ian got planning permission, and one of his workers proceeded to run a lorry into a neighbour’s garage wall.

Then the five metre deep excavations turned out to be digging up what was the course of one of London’s old rivers.  The site began to resemble Ian’s longed for carp pond.  You think they would have been happy, but there was no room for the disco floor and the water kept fusing the lights.

Pumps had to be employed 24/7 until the space was suitably tanked.

Ian seemed rather nice.  He drove the project on with ferocious concentration, but then he had irate neighbours, a ridiculously small budget and a very demanding wife who got sick with stress when faced with a white plastic door handle on the shower door that she might be forced to look at every day.

Clair was difficult. She freely admitted to being difficult.  It didn’t make her any more endearing.  Ian juggled away, fixing problems, shelling out cash, pacifying neighbours and coming up with innovative solutions to problems that would make lesser men weep.  Clair swept about claiming that this freaked her out, that freaked her out, the other freaked her out, and wringing her hands hither and yon.

The family sold their flat to finance the project. They moved into a house boat, which a friend had loaned them for free.  After twenty four hours they moved out because Clair got boat sick, and the boat frightened her.  Ian gave in and shelled out £2,000 per month for a flat until the house was liveable in.  Clair melted down about the door handle while Ian got on with fixing the polystyrene wall when it blew out and tonnes of liquid concrete threatened to pour all over the railway line.

I really couldn’t sympathise with her plight I’m afraid.  I’m sure she is an absolute delight in real life, and it is clear that Ian adores her, but she did not come out terribly well on film.

And the house? Well, I have no desire for a carp pond or a wellness suite.  I do not want a disco floor to make my life complete.  The house was sleek and wet look. I like roughage in my houses.  Kevin liked it because it was clever, which it was, and ingenious, which it was, and it was very architectural with a capital A. I got it, and on paper it would read beautifully, but I didn’t love it.  And I think that is the thing about houses. You have to love them.  Otherwise they just don’t work.

The worst thing?

No books. No bookshelves.

Now if they’d turned the underground lair into a library I’d have been with them all the way.