10 things

• The running continues to improve - I like it more each time I go, and my 5K time is now down to 31 minutes and 4 seconds.  The sub-30 5K run is heading my way, I feel sure.  My brother-in-law asked me last night "what's changed for you with running?" and I had no insight for him beyond that I didn't used to enjoy it, but now I do.
• Our Race for Life is in Cambridge next weekend.  A massive thank you to all the blog readers who have contributed so generously to our Just Giving page - some of whom I haven't even met before.  I don't have an email address for everyone who has donated, so I haven't been able to thank everyone in person - have a public, and sincere Thank You here instead!  We shall, of course, report back here after the race with photos....
• We have both bought bright pink t-shirts to wear for the race, even though neither of us likes bright pink.  Olivia pointed out that if we didn't wear bright pink for the race we might feel like a couple of sparrows in a flock of flamingos.
• I just found out about the Walk for Women event happening across the UK this summer - I hope I'll be able to go along to at least one of the walks.  They are happening all over the UK to celebrate 100 years since 50,000 suffragists marched across the UK, ending at a rally at Hyde Park to raise awareness of their cause.
• When women get together, they can really make things happen!
• The most famous suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst believed she was born on 14th July - Bastille Day - although her birth certificate states that in fact she was born on the 15th.  Nobody has really got to the bottom of why this discrepancy came about.  My own Grandmother was definitely born on Bastille Day, however, and was given a French name by her parents as a result - she is 90 today.  Happy Birthday, Grandma!
• I have booked tickets to go and see the Pompeii exhibition at the British Museum, which has been extended until the end of September because it has been so madly popular.  If you want to go, book soon - there are only a few slots left for September.
• The other exhibition I am determined to go to this summer is The Laura Knight Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery.
• I have learnt more about my daughter's interests and plans since she set herself up with a Pinterest account, than any amount of chatting over supper, on runs or long car journeys has ever revealed.  She dreams of travelling to Poland and China and likes foxgloves, trilby hats and lavender.  Who knew?
• In the bustle and busyness of full time work, running, summer plans and end of term, I found myself with an unexpected half hour to myself one afternoon last week.  I was close to one of my favourite places in the whole of London - St Paul's churchyard - so I lay in the dappled shade, reading my kindle and reflecting on how even in the middle of a hot, crowded city like London, there are places of sanctuary and calm.

Well looked after

Friends old and new came out to the pub with me and we laughed, chatted and drank for hours.  Olivia drew me pictures and baked me a cake.  Cam let me have control over the TV remote so I could watch endless Glastonbury and athletics. My Mum and Dad phoned me at breakfast time for a chat.  Graham roasted a chicken and baked pommes dauphinoise.  The sun even shone for me.  It has been a great birthday weekend, and I have been very well looked after.
   

10 things

• I'm very tired, with dark smudges of sleeplessness under my eyes.
• I went to Kew Gardens today, walked miles and made myself even more tired.  Then I took photos of myself against a wall of orchids.

   

• My desk is a mess, which is very un-Nancy-like.
• I made Graham an apple and almond crumble cake for his birthday today - it is very, very good.
•  My laptop died.  I bought a new laptop as soon as I could because I have essays looming.  I find it scary spending that much money in one go; I'd be rubbish at being really rich.
• All my iTunes playlists somehow got wiped when I moved iTunes over to my new laptop.  What I thought was a disaster has been rather liberating and I am enjoying wasting hours of my time putting together new playlists.
• I've nearly finished my placement at hospital, and once this essay is handed in I go back to University for a few months.  I've loved working on the wards but I am looking forward to getting back to the lecture theatres and seeing all my friends again.  I can also use it as a legitimate excuse to buy new stationery.
• Olivia's very long, dark, thick hair goes up in a bun for ballet twice a week.  I love her hair like this.  How many buns have I made in the last seven years she's been doing ballet?

 

• Cam is watching Big Bang Theory, via our Lovefilm subscription - he loves it.  I am getting sucked in, and love it too.
• I made a loaf of raisin bread today.  Just because.  I shall take a couple of buttered slices with me to work tomorrow. 

The two of them

There is one day in between their birthdays.  Yesterday Cam turned 13 and tomorrow Olivia turns 10.  Today is the day in between.

Aged 7 and 4

Aged 12 and 9

They've always been close, and for that I am thankful.  But this birthday season makes them into even more of a unit than usual.  They become quite twinny as they plan wishlists, outings and birthday menus.  The excitement of the other one's birthday seems to make their own even better.  They spend weeks secretly drawing each other birthday pictures and working out what to buy one other.

Aged 5 and 2

And if they can keep this closeness through their teenage years I shall be delighted.  It doesn't always happen.

Aged 12 and 9

Happy Birthday, my two loves!

Time off

Half-term reading for C

Time off is always welcome - and time off from school is particularly appreciated around here, even though school itself is generally enjoyed.  This past week the children were off school for half term, and G took a week off work as well, so we all had a week off at home together which felt very special.

We crammed our week with Good Things:

• a family trip to Kew Gardens with cousins, uncle and aunt.  With the aid of a toppled snowman, C was taller than both Uncle and Dad for the first time.



G, C and Uncle M

• a family trip to Cambridge to see the newest member of the family, and another uncle and aunt.  O took approximately 200 photos of her smallest cousin.



Baby A's perfect little hand

• a birthday for G
• a trip to the other side of London to celebrate a milestone birthday for G's father



O reading and C listening to his iPod on the tube

• a long walk through the forest with old friends
• a day chilling out with more old friends, some computer games, and knitting for the Mums


Slow but steady progress on my shawl

• a day at the Olympic Park to watch the Track Cycling World Cup at the velodrome



Cheering on Team GB at the velodrome

Everyone's back at school and work today, and I miss them.  I am tidying, and cleaning, and setting the house back to normal.  It feels too quiet, but I go back to noticing - and appreciating - the small things. 

I spent a happy half hour in the garden this morning, chatting to the hens as I cleaned out their eglu and inspecting the progress of the buds and bulbs.  While we've been having time off with family and friends over half-term, the plants in the garden have been hard at work.  Spring is so nearly here.

Snowdrops

Clematis bud

I heart pies

I love pies with all my heart.  Pies make me happy.  There is no casserole or stew in the world that couldn't be improved with a lid of some sort.  I love crumbles, cobblers and crunchy breadcrumb toppings to pies, but a proper pie has a pastry top.  I think my love of pies might really be a love of pastry.

Most of the time I end up making two pies at once because I always make more pastry than I need for the main event.  I find it easier to have plenty of pastry and deal with leftovers than work with a parsimonious amount of pastry.

This morning I made C the giant mince pie he requested for his twelfth birthday tomorrow.  I used the orange-scented pastry that Nigella makes for mince pies in her Feast book - it has a very subtle orange flavour and is not too rich, but flakes beautifully.  I added a peeled and diced bramley apple to the giant jar of mincemeat I had (leftover from last Christmas - mincemeat keeps wonderfully, tucked away at the back of a dark shelf).  C loves apples, and a chopped apple stirred in made the mincemeat go further - you need a great deal of filling for a pie this big.

I decided not to go with a proper lid.  When I make small ones at Christmas I always top them with a star, and I thought stars would look rather nice on a birthday pie too.  I cut out the letters for C's name and added them to the stars to make it extra celebratory.

C's giant mince pie, for his 12th birthday

Because the stars on the top didn't use much pastry I had plenty left over.  Often I turn small amounts of leftover pastry into jam tarts (for sweet pastry) or cheese straws (for savoury pastry) but there was enough left today for a whole other pie.  I chopped up another couple of bramleys, tossed the pieces with brown sugar and allspice, and made an apple pie which we can have for tea tonight.  The apple pie was topped with a hedgehog just because I have a sweet hedgehog cutter from Ikea that I like using.

Apple pie, with gratuitous hedgehog motif

So the birthday boy gets pie on birthday eve and pie on his birthday.  He likes pie too.

~~~~~~~~~~

Pie notes

• I always brush the top of my pies with milk, not beaten egg.  This is because I can always think of better things to do with an egg than use it to glaze a pie (and have half a floury beaten egg left over - what a waste!).  Milk ends up giving a very similar burnished result, although admitedly a slightly less shiny one.
• Get a silicone pastry brush.  For years I used a bristle one that looked lovely but left bristles over the tops of my pies.  Not a good look.
• Mostly I use shortcrust pastry for pies, and I make it in my mixer.  I mix two parts strong white bread flour to one part fat (which is usually 50:50 butter and trex) then add liquid once the flour and fat look like breadcrumbs.  Liquid is usually water, but can be milk or egg.  For C's mince pie the liquid was orange juice.
• Life's too short to get really het up over how neat a pie looks.  If it is patched and slightly raggedy it will still taste great.
• If I'm making pasties rather than pies or tarts I use rough-puff pastry.  The best instructions I've found for rough-puff are in Hugh F-W's River Cottage Every Day book.
• If you use metal pie and tart tins you never have to blind bake the pastry.
• I am hoping that somebody who loves me might buy me this t-shirt for Christmas.
• I currently have the Pieminister cookbook out of the library.  It is a glorious book with pies arranged according to season.  I've tried their curried chicken and squash pie recipe which was stunning. 
• This Hairy Bikers' Perfect Pies book was out last week and is also on my reserve list at the library.  I have great hopes for it, as the pie recipes in their Mums Know Best books are already real favourites in our family.

Two pies for the birthday boy

Autumn birthdays and autumn knitting

Next week there are four birthdays in five days: son, daughter, brother and nephew.  I am running between the Post Office and the sorting office.  Birthday baking has begun.

Brownies and buns for a birthday

These are chocolate brownies and fairy cakes - fresh out of the oven and waiting for decoration.  The house smells good. 

C has asked for a giant mince pie for his birthday cake.  He loves mince pies more than anything else, but I refuse to make them out of season - they are just too Christmassy to have at any other time of year.  However, the birthday rules in our house state that the birthday person is allowed to have any cake they want.  So I have agreed to make a giant mince pie because I think birthday rules should outrank seasonality rules.

The other thing I am busy with at the moment is clearing a backlog of knitting projects.  I desperately want to wear this baktus scarf I started ages ago, with autumn in mind.  Last night I stayed up late so that I could get to the turning point and start decreasing. 

Turning point - yee-hah!

Half-way through the baktus scarf

Psychologically I am much keener to finish it now that I know I am over half-way though.
.

Then I need to turn my attention to this baby kicking bag for a new neice who is due in February (very exciting, as she comes after three nephews in a row - I only have one neice at the moment).  I knittted kicking bags for my last two nephews (you can read the blog posts here and here) and they proved to be very useful and appreciated gifts.  A kicking bag is such a practical item for a newborn baby.

Baby kicking bag for a new neice

With this red bag I have finished the cabled cuff and now just need to sit down and go round and round in stocking stitch for a few weeks.  Time for some dedicated tv and film watching.  Perhaps accompanied by a slice of birthday cake.

Weekday walk #14

I didn't have my usual walking companion with me today, but instead I had C and O who have had a bonus day off school because of the teachers' strikes.  It is also my birthday today, and as a special birthday treat they agreed to come on a weekday walk with me, be cheerful and not moan once!

I wanted to do a walk from this excellent book which I received as a present this morning.  I really love this series of Ordnance Survey Pathfinder books and have loads for other parts of the country I've visited.  The walks are accurately described, interesting and varied.  There are excerpts of Ordnance Survey maps within each walk so that you don't need to carry a separate map too.

We started at Parliament Square, where the police had closed most of the roads and were setting up security barriers ready for the protest march.  This is a part of London I don't know well at all, and I loved having a good nose around while the roads were all closed to traffic.

Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament

Police horsebox in front of the Cabinet War Rooms

We headed away from Parliament Square and our walk took us on a meandering route through all the Royal Parks to Kensington.  We saw deckchairs in St James's Park and Hyde Park, and Guardsmen outside St James's Palace - trying to keep a straight face while all the tourists stood next to them and posed for photos.  Each time someone took a picture they would quickly switch their bayoneted machine gun from one shoulder to the other and make everyone jump!

We larked about under the big trees in Hyde Park and enjoyed the wide open spaces by the Serpentine as we headed for Kensington Palace.

It has been such a treat to walk with the children today.  I've got plenty more walks planned with them during the school summer holidays.  Just a few more weeks to go - I can't wait.

A simple bag

Very often the simplest things are the nicest.

This is a denim tote bag with boxed corners, sewn last night using instructions from Bend-The-Rules Sewing.  I made it for O to give to a friend for her birthday this weekend.  Who doesn't love a bit of denim and red polka dot?

Simple pleasures.

Patchwork

I have done some spring cleaning over at my Etsy shop which has been sadly neglected over the past couple of months, as I was so poorly before Christmas and then became pre-occupied with G's birthday quilt.

I've just listed some great little patchwork lavender sachets like this one.

I raided my scrap basket for fabrics in my favourite sort of spring flower colours - pinks, lilacs, creams and the occasional dash of red.  The sachets measure 10cm square and are stuffed full of my Mum's homegrown French lavender, which smells gloriously pungent thanks to all that Mediterranean sunshine.  Just a little squeeze of the sachet fills the whole room with the smell of lavender.  Go and take a look at them here.

My mind has been on patchwork in more metaphorical ways too.  I am currently figuring out how I can get back into work over the next few months, and have been struggling with some conflicting claims:

• my accountancy training, which I would like to keep using in some way
• the need for flexible, local and part-time work which will fit around the rest of the family
• my creative life - sewing and writing - which perhaps should also be incorporated into my working life in some way

I've been tumbling over all these thoughts for a few months now and not reaching any useful conclusions.  I am also increasingly intimidated by the actual process of looking for part-time work in such a challenging economic climate - writing a good CV, filling in application forms and actually working out what jobs are out there.

In the New Year, help and support came in the form of a phone call from Women Like Us - a recruitment agency (currently, sadly, only based in London) that specialises in bringing employers and mothers who want part-time work together. 

At an hour long coaching session at Women Like Us earlier this week, my new career coach and I talked about patchwork, and she pointed out that taking a new direction in my working life may not be a bad thing.  My career overall may end up resembling a patchwork quilt - with some very different fabrics in there - but if there is a common thread holding them together, that's okay.  Not surprisingly I liked this analogy very much.  I came away from our session very motivated, with much food for thought, and also with a list of nicely practical things to do before our next meeting.  If you live in London and are looking for part time work, or a part time employee, I can't recommend Women Like Us highly enough.

In other news, excitement for G's 40th birthday on Valentine's Day is building rapidly.  I have a whopping great leg of lamb marinading in the fridge ready for a family party tomorrow, and this afternoon I am making a start on the first of two birthday cakes.  Pubs, fancy schmancy restaurants and top secret presents are also involved!

Happy weekending everybody!

10 things

• Graham's birthday quilt is finished.  A week ahead of schedule, which means that it took me five full-on weeks from start to finish.  I've been remarkably modest with photos of it so far (ahem...) so here are a few more.

• He loves it.  Phew
• I've given it to him a week before his birthday, but I'll still take it back off him on Birthday Eve and wrap it up!
• I made Baileys Choc Chip Scones this afternoon.  Yes, you read that correctly.  The recipe is from Ruth Clemens, a finalist in the Great British Bake Off last year, and goodness me, what a recipe!  They actually taste like Baileys.  So good.
• O and I went to see the Royal Ballet's production of Giselle yesterday.  It's only on for another couple of weeks, but if you can manage to get tickets then do.  It was incredible - so romantic that it actually left me in tears at one point.  And I have never seen or heard a standing ovation quite like it at the end. 
• Now the quilt is finished, I am in a frenzy of excitement about what to make next.  Pyjamas for the children are top of my list.  And then some shirts for me, some more cushions for the house, and some bits and pieces for my poor neglected Etsy shop.
• Maybe I should reverse that order and sort out the poor neglected Etsy shop first?
• I have been trying (really very hard) to read some Virginia Woolf.  But sadly it's proving unreadable.  So I may have to fall back on the Cal Patch book, which finally came through on my reservations at the library, and which is proving well worth the wait.
• I came back from the supermarket, and without being asked C unpacked and put away all the shopping, and then made me a cup of tea.  I thought back to those seemingly endless toddler years and wished I could go back in time and tell myself that this day of genuinely helpful children would come.  I don't think I would have believed myself though.
• We're all loving The Human Planet - genuinely some of the best television I've seen in years.  I do like a nice bit of quality tele in the evenings.

Quilted leaves

All I see these days - in my waking hours and my dreams - are leaves.  Fabric leaves, scattered on the quilt, piled up on the arm of the sofa, under my needle, and drawn onto squares of fabric - waiting to be cut out.

But ten minutes ago, I finished.  The leaves are done.

I took the two pictures above at lunchtime today, when the sun was streaming through the windows and I was curled up in the armchair, with my lap full of quilt, stitching as fast as I could.  There were still a few leaves with pins in them, waiting to be stitched.

And below, here it is in it's full unfolded glory.  Taken with the flash, at nearly 11pm, but still looking damn fine.

Tomorrow I'll be adding some machine quilting to the green and brown borders.  Then over the weekend I am going to make and attach the binding.  I'm aiming to have it all done by Sunday night.  Wouldn't that be good?  That would make it five weeks from start to finish.  But I mustn't get carried away - I'm not quite there yet.

I counted the leaves.  Of course I did.  There are one hundred and thirty one, which represents true love on a major scale.  Very appropriate for his Valentine's Day birthday.

Birthday season

In the past few days we've had:

• 2 birthdays
• 1 spooky birthday party
• 3 packets of little candles
• 24 cupcakes with orange icing
• 3 big, gooey, chocolatey, peanutty, gloriously decorated birthday cakes!

A ballet bag for Bella

One of the nicest things that happened this week was being asked to make a ballet bag for a friend's little girl. 

Bella is four, loves her ballet lessons and all things girlie and pink.  The old plastic carrier bag she was carrying her tutu around in just didn't cut it any more, so her Mum asked me if I would make her a ballet bag.  It had to be roomy enough for her tutu and also girlie enough to satisfy Bella's style requirements.  What an excellent brief!

I rummaged through my piles of fabric, and came across a piece of this wonderful Alexander Henry apples and pears fabric that was just big enough.  I have used it in so many projects over the past few years that I can't remember them all.  I was amazed to find this last piece lurking at the back of a shelf, just big enough for bag making.

I made a large tote bag, and boxed the corners to make a wide, flat base.  I embroidered Bella's name on one side of the bag and sewed some suffolk puffs on the other side.

I made straps long enough for Bella or her Mum to sling the bag over a shoulder, and lined it with the last remnant of the thick white sheeting I acquired from my Grandmother and used here and here.

Then I really wanted to add a pocket too, because I know from years of O's ballet lessons that there are so many little extras required for ballet that would get lost at the bottom of a big bag - the hairpins, hairbands, little pink socks, a hairbrush and so much more.  I didn't have quite enough of the apples and pears fabric left, so I made a pocket out of this green Tanya Whelan fabric instead.  I love the way it contrasts so well with the white lining, and picks up the green in the apples and pears.

Cutting up the green pocket fabric made me think what an excellent fabric it would make for an apron, so today I made the rest of it into another reversible apron for the shop.

And it looked exactly as I had imagined it would - always so gratifying!  The reverse side is made from a vintage French cotton that I bought this summer in France.

Then, because I was on a roll I made another apron for the shop - this time in pastel pinks and oranges, on one side using some more French vintage fabric bought this summer, and on the other side a really lovely, bold print from Ikea.

And now I have to stop sewing for other people and turn my attentions closer to home. Next week both the children have their birthdays and C has asked me to make him a cushion.  Here is the one I made for O's birthday this time last year.  C wants a Swiss themed one, and happily I did go mad in two fabric shops in Interlaken and Brienz when we were on holiday so I think I may have just the right sort of fabrics...watch out though, there may be edelweiss and fondue sets involved!