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

• The University is a 7 minute walk from Loop.
• I have been running errands to Loop for my Mum.  She needs some nice projects to knit whiles he recuperates from a second hip replacement operation.  Nice projects need nice yarn.  Loop has verrrrrrry nice yarns.
• Mostly I have been terribly well-behaved and just bought what Mum wanted, but yesterday my resolve crumbled and I bought myself a skein of Malabrigo Worsted in  the Rhodesian colourway - a wonderful burnished orange - to make myself an autumn hat.

• I don't really have time to knit, as I am too busy practising my aseptic technique, writing biology notes and submitting my first essay.
• My first essay in eighteen years.
• That makes me feel even older than saying 'my son is thirteen'.
• Olivia has decorated the chimney breast in the kitchen with A5 sized manga portraits of everyone in the family.  It looks wonderful.

• Some of the likenesses are uncanny - Uncle Richard and Granny are particularly good.

• I am still cooking - almost as much as I did before I started my nursing qualifications.  I am still baking all our bread, and making yogurt, and making midweek suppers and packed lunches.  Olivia's doing most of the baking though, and Graham is cooking on weekends.
• It is not easy to let other people have their turn in the kitchen.  Doing the cooking is what I do best.

10 things

• I was going to make a mixed berry cake. The children said they would do it for me. They separated the bowl of mixed blueberries and redcurrants into two piles and turned it into a Union Jack cake.

• Yesterday we celebrated our first wedding anniversary.  First anniversaries have the theme of paper, so Graham gave me an anatomy colouring book, which I have been longing for ever since I first applied for my nursing course.

• I start three weeks today.  THREE WEEKS!
• Tess has fueled the excitement further still, by sending me this wonderful Ladybird book as a Good Luck present.  I adore all the 70s and 80s uniforms in it, and desperately wish that an old-fashioned nurse's cape with red sashes was part of my uniform.

 

• I have four litres of homemade chicken stock sitting in the fridge, after roasting a chicken on Saturday - two litres of giblet stock, and a further two litres from the carcass of the bird. I am compiling a list of favourite soups, which is getting longer by the minute.
• Although, actually, I think really good chicken stock is best used in risottos, where its flavour can shine through.
• I have a long list of favourite risottos too.
• I finally found the pink aircell blanket that Olivia had as a baby, and bound it like the blue ones I did last winter.

• I am reading Almost French, by Sarah Turnbull and enjoying it enormously.  She writes with both love and honesty about living in Paris.  I'd love to live in Paris.
• London is pretty wonderful though.  There is a growing sense of expectation about The Paralympics, which start in just two days' time.  Olivia is the only one in our family who has tickets this time (she is going with school) - and the rest of us are all rather envious.

Art ideas for older children - revisited

Both the children continue to produce large piles of drawings and paintings.  It is what they usually do after school during the week: get home, make a cup of tea and settle down with some drawing.

After I wrote my earlier post on art ideas for children last month, I've had so many comments and emails from people sharing what books and resources their children love - they have been so helpful and interesting.  Have a look in the comments of my earlier post for some of them. The Ed Emberley books in particular seem to be loved and used by everybody.

I decided to buy a manga book and some manga pens for C and O first. I bought Manga For the Beginner - Chibis by Christopher Hart and some promarker pens.

Manga for the Beginner by Christopher Hart

Manga promarkers

It was like opening floodgates!  They both produced page after page of manga drawings, and still do so most days.

O's manga

I ended up buying a second manga book, so that they didn't have to share, and went for Super-Cute Chibis by Joanna Zhou, which is also excellent.  I also bought more promarkers, but have my eye on the manga pens by Faber-Castell too, which look very good and come in a good range of colours.  You can buy both the promarkers and the Faber Castell manga pens at branches of Hobbycraft and most independent art shops, as well as online.

Super Cute Chibis by Joanna Zhou

From Super Cute Chibis by Joanna Zhou

From Super Cute Chibis by Joanna Zhou

C's manga

Other than manga, other successes have included How To Draw Fantasy Art Warriors, Heroes and Monsters which I bought for C, thinking he might like drawing things similar to his Warhammer figures.  I was right - he loves this book and has been really inspired by it.  The author, Mark Bergin, has a whole range of 'How To Draw' books out in the same series, which look excellent.  C wants to get the Trees and Woodland one next.

How to Draw Fantasy Art Warriors, Heroes & Monsters by Mark Bergin

For O, we bought Let's Draw Happy People by Sachiko Umoto which is just so lovely.  Again, I am planning on getting the other books in the series by the same author.  This book is an English translation of a Japanese book, and I find it very reminiscent, visually, of the Japanese craft books I own.  O adores it, and it lives permanently propped open on her desk.

 

 

O's happy people

Do you have any more art or craft book recommendations for older children?  What books do your children enjoy?

We've come a long way from red satin

Last night I finished the dress for O to wear to our wedding.  It has been a long time coming.

O is a girl who dreams of weddings - she was so excited when we told her that we were getting married ("Finally!", she said) but the excitement wore off rapidly once she realised that our plans for the marriage ceremony were vastly more minimalist and laid back than hers.

For the past few days she has been illustrating her Dream Wedding, to show me how it should be done.  At the moment it stretches to 5 sheets of A4 paper taped together, but I have no doubt it will end up even bigger.  It is most definitely not a minimalist wedding.

The groom is unnamed, but frankly that doesn't matter.  He has a very small role to play in all this.  She has two of her friends, three of her cousins and her brother as attendants.  C was very cross when she drew him wearing a red checked shirt, so she is still pondering what to put two of her boy cousins in.  The friends and her girl cousin are dressed in long white dresses with gold necklines and gold hair accessories.  All the family are there to watch, and all of the girls from her class at school too.

There will be a limousine to transport her from the wedding to the party afterwards.  The wedding feast features all her favourite food - brownies, strawberries, blackberry pie and cinnamon rolls.  Well, why not?

So you can imagine, with her deep enthusiasm for all things wedding-related, that when I asked her what she would like me to make for her to wear to our ceremony she had a detailed description, and illustration, all ready.  It went something along the lines of 'what Pippa Middleton wore, but in red satin'. 

That was never, ever going to happen, on so many levels, and it has taken weeks of delicate diplomacy to find something that both she and I were happy with.  What she chose in the end surprised me.  She wanted this simple camisole dress from my Japanese pattern book.

And even more surprisingly, she wanted me to make it with some pink cotton printed with roses (by Tilda), from my fabric shelves.  This fabric is much more to my taste than hers, so I was surprised but delighted.

The dress is very simple and quick to make, but annoyingly came out far, far too big for her.  This is odd because everything else I've made for her from the book, in the 140cm size, has fitted her beautifully.  So I unpicked the side seams and re-sewed them at the top with a whopping 3.5cm seam allowance rather than the 1.5cm it should have been, grading out to the 1.5cm allowance about half way down.  I also added a pleat into the front, to stop any gaping around the neckline. 

As so often happens with fudges alterations to dress patterns, I have ended up liking the amended version a whole lot more than the original.  My re-drafting of the side seams has given the dress much more of an A line shape, and the pleat at the front makes for a more interesting neckline.

Most importantly, however, it meets with O's approval, and the arguments about red satin have finally been put to rest.

Easter Day

Today has been the coldest Easter Day I can remember. We woke up to the first snow of the winter here in London. Actually the spring equinox was a couple of days ago, so in fact we have had no snow all winter but instead some right at the beginning of spring. How mad is that?





So to keep ourselves warm and toasty we abandoned our plans to go treasure hunting and decided to stay indoors all day instead. It has been a lovely, mellow, family day. This is what we have done.

Eaten vast amounts of chocolate.

Drawn, coloured, cut and glued a collage to go on the kitchen wall (having been inspired by this brilliant book). Its kind of a farmyard, but there happened to be an elephant visiting as well on the day the picture was drawn. O, who has limitless patience, glued on 47 separate flowers, and I got into trouble with G for glueing his birds on upside down without realising. C drew the sweetest little chick for our flock of hens.







We read books and played board games.

And just before teatime, we waved G off as he left to stay with his parents prior to his first triathlon of the season at dawn tomorrow morning. I think he might be cold.

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Monday update:

Thank you on G's behalf for your kind wishes. It was indeed snowing but the race went well. In a triathlon you do the swim first and then do the bike ride and run in whatever you wore for the swim. Happily, G wears a tri-suit, but he said that there were some men running around Bushey Park in the snow in Speedos this morning. And now you have that delightful image in your heads, I shall wish you all well for the week ahead.

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