Monday 18th August - Making things

I sort of managed to keep going with the Make-something-every-day challenge whiile we were away in the holiday cottage.

I can't remember what I made when, through 8th-17th August.

Some trial paper cuts using a craft knife I bought on the first day of the holiday.

A papercut bird, using the pattern on one of the cushions at the holiday cottage as a starting point.

Some chocolate cookies (eaten before they were photographed, but I have the tightness of my waistband as evidence

A paper plait

Several inches on my current piece of Tunisian crochet (which then had to be taken back because I had lost 5 stitches of the width as I went along

An origami chicken (we were staying at The Poultry Cottage and there were pictures of chickens everywhere)

A chromatography flower using kitchen paper and ink from my fountain pen

The drawing for the next papercut bird, using the other half of the pattern on the cushion

Decorations on my Moleskine diary and notebook

A fruit cake

Some scones. More scones. All gone.

So I reckon I've been keeping on top of things. And I still haven't had to use my emergency extra make that I prepared earlier.

Today I made apple sauce using the windfall apples from our tree.

Saturday 16th August - Soup and Scones and Meatballs

Back when we were first married we had a food budget of £10 per week.

If I go back to my old diaries of the time, I can see exactly what I spent the money on. Every week I would plan all the meals and list what I needed to buy, and the cost of each item. We would have either a small chicken or a half shoulder of lamb for three meals (roast, curried or in sauce, carcass pickings with rice) and then a repertoire of other recipes to see us through the rest of the week; scrag end of lamb, streaky pork slices, and, of course, mince.

One thing that never featured on the list was bread; we always ate scones. Not the big, glossy, slightly chewy scones that you get with a cream tea, but smaller, crumbly ones, best eaten on the same day. We used milk that had "gone off", kept specially for the purpose. You can use milk that it is anywhere from smelling slightly odd, to all lumpy. But once it has separated it has Gone Too Far. I think of this as a northern recipe, from Scotland, via Northern Ireland, rather than the Home Counties or West Country version.

I used to make up a big bowl of the dry ingredients to last the week, and just take out what I needed each day. It's the same recipe as drop scones, but with much less milk.

Preheat oven to 200C

For 8 small chunky scones;

Weigh out 8oz SR flour (white, brown or a mixture), 1 oz sugar (light brown, dark brown or white) and 2oz butter (back in those far-off days we used marg)

I don't add extra bicarb, so these won't rise as much as posh scones. I don't use eggs, or added salt, either. Or glaze them. These are everyday, rough and ready scones.

Combine these ingredients by "rubbing in" until the butter has completely disappeared and the texture is fine and cumbly.

Add enough milk - around 5 tablespoonfuls - to bind the mixture into a dough. Work it together lightly with your fingers, and then turn it out onto a board. Gently shape it into an oblong and cut into eight squarish pieces.

Put on baking tray (either flour the tray, or use baking paper to stop them sticking) and cook for 8-10 minutes until golden on top.

Best eaten warm!

Soup

We had soup and scones for lunch yesterday as we hadn't been shopping after a week away. In the freezer I found a tub of home-made tomato and vegetable sauce, a tub of chicken stock, and a bag with six meatballs. Heated together, that made soup.

Meatballs

Preheat oven to 180C
Take a packet of decent premium sausages, skin them and put the meat into a bowl. Add a packet of quality minced beef and combine until thoroughly mixed. Shape into little balls the size of a walnut and arrange on baking trays lined with baking paper.

Bake for about 25-30 minutes. When cool, freeze them loosely in labelled plastic bags. On the assumption that you started with around 900g meat in total, divide the number of meatballs you made by 8 to know how many to serve up as a portion with gravy or pasta sauce.

Saturday 16th August - Home from home

We're back after a week away in a Landmark Trust holiday cottage just inside Wales.

It's a delightful cottage, in the middle of a Royal Forestry Society plantation of all kinds of redwoods and leylandi trees.

It's the little white cottage in the background, not the gothic fantasy henhouse in the foreground. I've taken this image from the postcard of the house, which was also used to create one of those jigsaws with "charm" pieces, so that's why the trees in the background are bare. No road noise, no over-flying airplanes. No television, no telephone, no radio...

Ah, but we are a family of techies, so it wasn't long before we had wi-fi rigged up!

It was very pleasant in the evenings, sitting together in the little living room, with or without the wood fire burning, gentle background music, people reading, or playing games, or doing Tunisian crochet (that's me).

The Tunisian crochet was gently hypnotic, so much so that I discovered when I had finished the wool that I had discarded several stitches along the way and had to rip out most of the strip that I had created. Easy come, easy go.

We played board games and card games together - an evil game called Munchkins, and a totally baffling game called Discworld. Number One Son also completed two jigsaws in record time, and folded nine origami chickens, using instructions gleaned from the internet (have wi-fi, have Everything!)

The chickens were for a treasure hunt that a previous visitor had created some years ago, and written up in the log book, but had disappeared at some stage. Maybe the housekeeper had hoped that they were gone for good?

Home, with all the hassles and trials and tribulations and busynesses and demands and to-do lists and schedules and timetables of the past few months felt satisfyingly far away.

Am I glad to be back? Err....

Thursday 7th August - making things - illustrations

I've kept the challenge going for 7 days now;

There is another quilted mat, and a square for the knitted blanket project for days 5 and 6.

So, here's the list
day 1 and 2 piano kit, crochet circle
3 free motion quilt sample
4 quilted mat
5 knitted square
6 another mat

Today's effort is a paper cut of a bird. I took the design from a book, and used my small, cheap embroidery scissors as I don't have a suitable scalpel.

One of the reasons for the challenge is to try out different techniques and ideas. I love paper cut designs, but have never done one before. I suspect that using a scalpel would be much easier - quite a few of the thin paper bridges between the cut areas are more fragile that I would like due to the clumsiness of even these tiny scissors.

I think it is the uncompromising contrast between the paper and the background that appeals to me. It is similar to the way I've always liked Arthur Ransome's illustrations for his "Swallows and Amazons" books,

and Tolkien's drawings for "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings".



The main reason I bought Gombrich's "A Little History of the World" was for the woodcut illustrations.

Woodcuts have that same cleverness in the way simple black and white space is manipulated to create a complex image. Is suppose the musical equivalents would be Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and maybe the pentatonic scale.

Monday August 4th - train travel again

I'm in the middle of four days of trekking up to London for a series of fairly routine tests, scans, and what have you connected with the heart/lung condition that I have. Thursday and Friday last week, Monday and Tuesday this week.

It is a tedious journey, not improved by being on the early train today (and tomorrow). Imagine doing that trip every day for work - ugh.

Anyway, so far the test results have been encouraging, in that they seem to indicate that my condition is stable. For me that is a positive result; systemic sclerosis is not something that can be cured. They just try and slow it down, and treat the consequences as they arise. So "stable" equals "yippee"!

But that's not what I'm posting about. I spent my waking hours on the train working out what to do with yesterday's "make". When we got home, I made this:

 
I cut four squares from the quilting sample I made, and hand-stitched the borders from some bias binding that I had leftover from I don't know when or why. But I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to finishing the other three. I'm not good at repetition. I suspect I have quite a low boredom threshold.

It did make me think about all those women working away at Tear Fund and Christina Aid workshops all over the world, stitching away at all the hand-made textile good for sale in the catalogues. Hats off to their perseverance at getting on with the job.

There's no fear that any of you will be receiving a set of handmade fabric coasters for Christmas, by the way. At least, not these ones. I still regard these as prototypes and I am unlikely to go into full production in the forseeable future.  

Sunday 3rd August - making things 3

No 1 Son has a habit of posting very technical blogs. Best Beloved finds them interesting and amusing. They could be in Greek as far as I am concerned.

That opening paragraph is by way of being a warning...

This is what I made today:

It is my first ever attempt at free-motion machine quilting. I have learned a lot in the process, including when it is time to say "it's just a sample" and stop before things start becoming seriously ugly.

My sewing machine came in a dinosuar egg - I bought it because it is Extremely Portable and my mother had the previous model - almost identical except that mine has a three-step-zig-zag - the height of technical innovation back in 1979, and hers only had a normal zig-zag.

Everything, except the instruction books, (which luckily I still have) folds up inside the machine. And, lookee, lookee, isn't this wantable? Flip open a secret door and you find all the bits and pieces (except the oil which I used up many years ago).

Oh Elna Lotus, I love you.

I selected the darning foot (visible in its brown nest to the right) and the button plate, in shadow, next to the darning foot, and tried to fit them. Then I read the instructions and all became clear.

The button plate prevents the serrated feed dogs (now covered by the plate) from feeding the material through under the needle when you set it all in motion. The darning foot has a little circle of metal pressing down on the fabric which acts as a mini-embroidery hoop, stretching the fabric flat as the needle plunges down to catch the bobbin thread.

I discovered the hard way that a 70 gauge needle was too fine, and that it is important to get the button plate firmly clicked down, and that I had been missing the final step in threading the machine for the last ten-fifteen-twenty? years. Anyway, after two broken needles, and a tangle of waste yarn

I managed to do a reasonable first attempt at free-motion all-over quilting. The middle isn't complete because the failed early attempts meant that I emptied the bobbin before I managed to finish the job. I did try to get it all going again, but there was a serious problem with the lower tension and so I ripped that last bit out.





Actually, there was a minor problem with the lower tension throughout the whole exercise, which I shall have to address next time. If you look closely at this picture of the underside you can see a lot of loopiness - this could be happening when I kept stopping to re-position the sample, but I suspect that I need to tighten the bobbin tension (using the screwdriver in the secret compartment) next time.

Here's a handy hint - there have been a number of sad stories of cats needing to be taken to the vet after they have licked up stray threads, and having expensive operations to remove the tangle from their innards. Somewhere, someone suggested that you take a small bottle with a plastic cap, cut a cross in the cap, and force your threads into the bottle. This dried herb bottle has proved ideal, and lives in my sewing kit.


Well, there you go. A technical post of my very own.

August - making things 1 and 2

This is usually my most productive month of the year.

Typically, I will make things, do gardening, write, knit, sew, meet people, finish off projects, start new ones... whatever.

This month, my personal challenge is to make something every day.

It wouldn't be a proper project if it hadn't failed at the first hurdle. Yesterday was a hospital day, so I didn't make anything. Never mind. I did two things today instead.

I learned to crochet a circular mat:

It will even lie flat, with a bit of firm persuasion. Crochet is a new "skill" for me, although "skill" may not be the most appropriate word.

And I completed the kit I was given several years ago to build my own grand piano;

It's made out of nano-blocks, a kind of stupidly small and fiddly lego. And it's probably the closest I'll ever get to owning my own grand piano.

At school there was a concert grand Bosendorfer, a work of art in itself. It stood there, big, imposing, willing you to play it, and whatever you attempted to play, it would transform into something better than you ever imagined you could do just from its own perfection. One of my piano teachers had his own great Steinway grand, in the front room which had been especially organised just for the piano. There was almost no other furniture in the room, and the wall-coverings and flooring (polished floorboards) were chosen simply to provide the most perfect setting for the piano's magnificence.

If we moved to Shropshire, or Warwickshire, or somewhere unfashionable, I would be able to afford both the piano and the house to put it in. That's just SO not going to happen. I'll make do with a nano one for now.