WOYWW 482

Better late than never… It’s been rather a busy day and I’ve only just had the chance to get this post sorted.

Here’s my studio today.

Chaos reigns eternal. No change, except a bit more mess. I did manage to tidy up my wools a bit, though, over on the other side.

I’ve been busy again with the embellishments for my scarf. I finished the butterflies and have started making some crochet flowers. I shall just keep going until I think I’ve got enough! They are fairly quick to do, and relaxing while watching TV.

I’m glad I made a mistake with one of the butterflies and only did 6 “petals” instead of 8 – when folded over to create the butterfly, it makes a slightly smaller one, of a different shape. Serendipity, and nothing like a bit of variety! The larger flowers are done in several layers, and are quite 3-d.

Kitties

The kitties had their annual kitty MOT this week, and the first of the annual boosters of their inoculations. They were so good! They didn’t make a sound, either when the needle went in, or when they suffered the indignity of having a thermometer shoved up their bums. They looked slightly anxious but the lovely young Polish vet was so gentle with them, and she spoke to them softly, and gave each one a stroke after it was all done. They have gained so much weight since last year – last August, Lily weighed 1.33 kilos and she now weighs 3.3 kilos so that’s a gain of a whole kilo! Ruby was 1.23 kilos last year, and is now 3.6 kilos so she’s gained even more. She remains the heavier of the two, and is pretty solid! The vet said their weights were healthy and they shouldn’t gain any more without being overweight. They are eating well, and getting plenty of exercise running around the garden.

Here’s lookin’ at you, kid!

Kitty chorus – feeding time at the zoo!

Health Update

I still haven’t got an appointment for my CT scan to see if I really have developed another hernia (I’m pretty sure I have), but the support garments lady is coming to see me on 11th September for a fitting, which is progress.

The man from the company that supplied the power assist system for my wheelchair was down in our area yesterday and serviced my wheelchair for me. Good to go for another year.

Sourdough

Last weekend I made my best sourdough bread ever! I am following a particular Youtube video and this really seems to work.

Fantastic crumb this time – look at all those lovely traditional sourdough holes!

I made this loaf with half-and-half white and whole wheat flour instead of using wholemeal rye. I’m not sure if the improvement was due to this, or my improving dough-handling skills.

I have just started another batch, and this time I’ve divided the wholemeal half into half-and-half wheat and rye, to see how that goes. I do like the flavour of the rye.

Busy weekend ahead

This week, from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, I am attending a Christian conference, non-resident, as the place is just up the road from us. I have been asked to sing and I received the list today – they want a lovely lot of songs, including a few from my repertoire which I haven’t sung for ages. I had a long practice session this afternoon and they are still a bit rough round the edges, but I may have another go this evening, and will certainly set aside some time tomorrow for further practice, and I think they will be OK. My friend is also singing, which is great. I’ve booked in for all the meals except breakfast, and my hubby is joining me for the first and last meals. It will also be a lovely opportunity to meet up with several old friends.

I have also been asked to bake the challah bread for the Friday evening meal, so I’m going to do that tomorrow as well, and work on my sourdough throughout the day. The sourdough doesn’t need a lot of work, but it needs quite a bit of attention – several folding sessions at two-hourly intervals etc. so it’s fairly time-consuming in that I have to be here, tied to the kitchen timer! There should be a nice baking smell in the house tomorrow.

Fermentation

My kombucha is going very well indeed. This time I set aside 6 bottles for second fermentation, with raspberry puree, which is delicious. The Scoby (Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeasts) – the “dead jellyfish” that you use as a starter, has grown a lot and it’s doing a fantastic job. This fermented tea is so delicious, and has so many health benefits. I start a new batch on Fridays, and start the second fermentation of the previous batch at the same time – this is ready in three days.

I have also made a small jar of fermented dill cucumbers just to see how they worked. After three or four days on the kitchen counter, they are sensational. Definitely something to do again. Absolutely no effort required – I just cut up the cucumbers into strips, stuck them in a jar with some dill and chopped garlic, and topped the whole thing up with brine, covered it and left it to its own devices. I just had to “burp” the jar morning and evening to let the CO2 escape. It’s now in the fridge, but I don’t think it will be there for long!

The other day my hubby saw me at work in the kitchen and asked, “Are you working on your liquids?” – not drinks, haha! He said this in a rather dark tone of voice as if he was suggesting that they were the product of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.

Other food

My hubby has started bringing in fast quantities of apples from our tree. His brother was over today and he confirmed that they are Bramleys – we didn’t know what variety they were. They are very good apples. My hubby peels and slices them for me, and then it’s up to me to do something with them. This year I’m determined to be a bit more adventurous than just stewing them. I’ve already fermented some, but my hubby doesn’t like those much. I am going to make more apple butter in the slow cooker this year, and I’m going to attempt to dry some. I don’t have a dehydrator but understand you can get good results using the oven on its lowest setting. I’m not going to have much time to attend to this for a few days, though.

I haven’t done much other stuff in the kitchen as my recent cooking days have yielded lots of freezer fodder and we’ve been noshing on that. I’m making a salad for tonight, including a sweet potato salad that I made this morning with fresh herbs from the garden, and a mixture of mayonnaise and home-made yoghurt (now being made from an heirloom culture I got online – fabulous). Once my bought mayonnaise is all used up, I’m not buying any more. My friend who got me started on fermentation gave me a recipe for her fabulous mayonnaise made from kefir, and that’s definitely the way to go. I saw a Youtube video last week where the woman said, “Read the labels on the back of foods in the supermarket. If you can’t pronounce any of the ingredients, don’t buy it!” Lol!

Have a great week, everyone.

WOYWW 481 Felt, Crochet and Sourdough

I can’t believe another week has flown by… We are nearly at the end of August, for goodness sake.

Still no movement on the studio front apart from tidying away my disaster of a felt box which I had discovered was all wet because I hadn’t emptied a bottle of soapy water and it had leaked all over everything. It’s all now cleaned up and dried and put away so there’s a slight improvement in floor space on that side of the room.

I have been continuing to work on felt embellishments for my striped scarf.

I have made several little calla lily lookalikes, and I’ve also started covering the white cores with coloured fleece, as you can see on the left in the photo.

To add a bit of variety, I thought I’d do a few crochet embellishments as well, so after a quick search on Youtube I found some very nice flower patterns, which I haven’t started yet, and this delightful Dutch video on crochet butterflies – even though I don’t understand Dutch, the filming was so clear that I was able to follow everything, and I’ve written out a pattern that I can follow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh1uEIyN0rc&list=PL-OKjxuL-AQjnRsxxRNohlLOr1oAF1Y7s&index=7&t=0s

I have completed one, and am working on the second.

They are a bit lumpy but once they’ve been steam pressed, they will be fine, I am sure. They are such fun to do, and don’t take long.

Sourdough

I decided this week to have another go with the sourdough, following the very good video I mentioned last week. Because my first attempt seemed very dry compared with the baker’s dough on the video, I thought I’d try increasing the hydration of the dough by 10 percent, which was a total disaster – when I turned the dough out onto the table towards the end of the process, and left it to rest, when I came back, it resembled a pancake and was practically flowing out of the door!! There was nothing I could do about this and I was really fed up by this time, as it was the end of the day and I was tired, so I binned the lot.

The day before yesterday I had another go, this time reducing the hydration by 5 percent and the same thing happened. I thought it was a shame to waste good ingredients, although bread flour isn’t that expensive, so I scooped it all up, and decided to make it into sourdough crackers which are made of excess sourdough starter with some added flour, coconut oil, an egg and some additional salt. I can’t remember but I don’t think I added the egg, but I did add some coconut oil and another teaspoon of salt. The cracker recipe says you have to leave it to rest for several hours, and when I came back, the dough was rising all over the place so I thought, what the heck, I’ll bake it as bread and see what happens! I didn’t take that much care over the folding and shaping, so I didn’t expect stellar results, but it did produce a loaf, and as anticipated, the crumb was much more dense than that of true sourdough.

It tastes pretty good, though.

Yesterday I thought I’d have another go, and this time use the Youtube baker’s recommended 65 percent hydration again, which I’d done the first time I’d tried his method. I thought that on that occasion the crumb was a bit dense because I hadn’t exactly mastered his method of folding and shaping, so this time I took extra care over this.

Initially the dough did resemble his much more – on my first attempt it was so dry, which I put down to the fact that the rye flour I mix in has a higher absorbency – I thought I could compensate for this by increasing the hydration but after two failed attempts, this obviously wasn’t going to work. This time it seemed a lot less stiff to start with, and I thought all was going to be well. However, with each folding session, it seemed to get more and more wet, until at the turning out onto the table stage, I knew it was going to spread again, and so it did. I was getting so desperate with it at this stage that I thought I couldn’t possibly waste any more dough, and I’d bake it anyway.

As happens every single time I bake sourdough, the final moulded dough sticks to the cloth and will not turn out cleanly onto the baking sheet or into the casserole I use as a Dutch oven. Pulling the cloth away destroys the integrity of the boule and spoils the top surface and because the skin of gluten that you work so assiduously to create is broken, there isn’t enough oven spring and the bread does not rise sufficiently in the oven. I have tried normal bread flour to dust the cloth (not recommended because it’s too high in gluten and sticks like glue), rice flour and semolina (both low in gluten) but everything sticks.

Yesterday’s effort was a total disaster. It stuck big time to the cloth despite copious amounts of semolina – there was only one small central area which didn’t stick. The trouble is, when you flour the cloth inside the bowl or banneton you use for the final proving, the flour won’t stick to the sloping sides but slides down to the bottom.

Worse was to come. I took the lid off the casserole half way through the baking as instructed, and when I came to take it out of the oven I noticed it was rather overdone. Then I couldn’t get it out of the casserole because it was stuck fast! The whole thing is terrifyingly hot so there wasn’t much I could do except leave it in there to cool off a bit. It is still completely stuck. I shall have to wreck the loaf to get it out. Grrrr and double grrrr! I don’t know what’s going on…

The baker on Youtube is a lovely man who has answered everyone’s comments on the video, so I think I’m going to ask him for some help! I’m obviously doing something wrong and am wondering if it’s something to do with the rye flour. If I have to abandon this, I shall be rather sad because we do love the intense flavour of this.

So I think the latest effort may end up being sourdough croutons!!! At least there are lots of variations in the sourdough universe, and whatever I do, and however unsightly it may be (crumb too dense, top looking like a lunar landscape, whole loaf looking like a squashed flying saucer, etc. etc.) at least one thing is consistent – the delicious flavour! I am so determined to get this right, though, and will NOT admit defeat!!

Other fermentation

On Monday the three days required for the second fermentation of my first batch of kombucha (fermented tea) were up, so I put the bottles in the fridge. Cooling a carbonated liquid helps retain the gas in the liquid, so opening the bottles tends to be a somewhat less explosive experience than at room temperature. Yesterday I opened the first bottle, and released the wire clip very, very, veeerrrrry slowly, with the bottle in a bowl in the sink and my eyes tightly closed like a kid watching Doctor Who from behind the settee, and it was pretty lively even so! I strained the liquid into a bowl and saw that as the Youtube video had said could happen, it had grown a little baby Scoby (Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeasts – the culture used to ferment tea into kombucha). (in the photo, you can see it on the surface of the mango one on the right, and in the raspberry one, it has got stuck in the neck of the bottle. Goodness… it will probably shoot out and get me in the eye when I open that one!!) Unfortunately I couldn’t keep this because it had flavouring in it (in this case, mango puree) but I had no conscience about putting it in the compost bin because Scobies make excellent compost to feed the garden. The man on the video said if you don’t strain it, swallowing a Scoby by mistake can be a bit of an unnerving experience (like drinking a jellyfish) but it won’t do you any harm – it’s full of gorgeous probiotic bacteria and goodness for your system. (You can feed them to animals who love them! Or you can cut them up and dry them to make dog treats. They need probiotics too.) Anyway, my first batch is delicious – I can’t taste too much mango, but it tastes rather like cider. I haven’t tasted the raspberry one yet. In addition to drinking it as is, I am also using it as an ingredient in a rehydration drink I am making as a change from St. Mark’s Solution (a rehydration drink designed by St. Mark’s Colorectal Hospital in London for ostomates) – I drink a litre of this every day. I’ve been making up the new recipe with the brine from my fermented apples until the kombucha was ready – all adds variety to the spice of life! I think it’s delicious, but when I offered my hubby a taste, he pulled a face!!

Kitties

From being ultra teenagerish and stand-offish, suddenly Ruby wants cuddles all the time in the evening once they are in from the garden and have had supper. When not on my lap she likes sleeping on the back of the settee behind me. Last night Lily purloined her favourite spot and for a couple of hours they were happy up there together. Is this the new latest place? Lily seems to have abandoned the hammock!

Here they are on the outside of the kitchen window, in the vain hope I’ll open up and let them in.

And here’s Ruby cuddled up with the teddies after my hubby brought them (the teddies, not the kitties) in from the sitting room window.

Lily is loafing around the TV. She is fascinated by the screen saver that comes on if the DVD player goes into standby. Lily is a bit of a TV addict anyway, and particularly enjoys wildlife programmes.

Hospital appointment

I have done a blog about this in detail, but suffice it to say here that I saw my surgeon last Thursday, and the stoma nurse. It is possible that I have herniated again… I suspected this and told him, and after examining me, he couldn’t be sure so he’s booked me in for a CT scan (awaiting appointment for that). If I have got a hernia again this will be the biggest bore ever – it will mean I went through ALL THAT at the beginning of the year for nothing – further major surgery, followed by infected haematomas and the beginning of sepsis and coming close to death. It will be much more difficult to deal with now, because of the presence of the mesh, and also I have already had the hernia repaired twice. Oh grrrr… Anyway, I’m not going to worry, but wait and see what shows up, and if I have got a hernia, I think my surgeon will agree with me to leave well alone, get adequate support asap (stoma nurse arranging appointment with support garments lady – my existing ones now 18 months old and probably too stretched to work properly any more, in addition to my having lost weight), and hope against hope that it doesn’t cause another obstruction. They reckon that between 50 and 75 percent of ostomates will get a hernia and it’s a very difficult problem to deal with.

WOYWW 477 Cooking Again

Still nothing on my desk. This week has been quieter and less busy than of late, and I’ve taken advantage of this in order to rest a bit. It’s been so hot! Up at the top of our garden there is shade from the apple tree and it’s very pleasant, but down in the patio it would be unendurable to sit for even five minutes!

I had a cooking day today, hence my lateness in signing up to WOYWW – I originally didn’t intend to join today but thought you might like to see my efforts even if they are kitchen-related instead of studio-related!

I had a big Tesco delivery first thing, and as usual, washed the fruit and veg and trimmed the latter so it wouldn’t take up so much room in the fridge. I always blanch the trimmings and freeze them, and when there’s enough in the bag, I can make soup, so nothing is wasted. In the bowl are today’s trimmings – quite a lot! I used to throw away the stalks of broccoli and the tough upper leaves of leeks but sliced up and cooked slowly, and then liquidised, they make excellent vegetable soup; they are full of goodness, and there’s no waste.

While I was preparing the butternut squash, I suddenly wondered if it was possible to eat the seeds. I checked online, and found that you can – they are related to pumpkins and I regularly buy those to put in the bread. Maybe now I shall use squash seeds instead, and save myself the expense! I separated them from the fibrous pulp (which also went in with the vegetable trimmings!), washed the seeds, and dried them on kitchen paper, ready for roasting later.

Here are most of my ingredients, ready for me to start cooking.

I recently discovered “Brothers Green Eats” Youtube channel – these two brothers cook amazing stuff in a tiny kitchen, and I’ve got loads of ideas and advice from their channel. This week I watched a video where they cooked several dishes that could be put in portions in the fridge or freezer for an instant ready meal full of goodness. I was keen to try this, and this is what my efforts today were all about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-2YVb_nPPM

Here is the finished meal, plated up and ready to eat.

Fridge and freezer fodder! What we didn’t eat for lunch today.

From top left: slaw made from shredded cabbage, carrot, sliced radishes, spring onions, sliced mango. To prepare the vegetables I used my VeggieBullet (see photo of ingredients, in the background) which shreds and slices in double-quick time – literally seconds! Bag of fried chicken thighs. Before cooking I boned these, and made stock with the bones, which was used to cook the bulgur wheat. The chicken thighs were fried skin-side down (no added fat) until they were crisp, then turned for a few minutes to finish cooking the meat. Two jars of sauce, the first being a light dressing made from lemon juice, white wine vinegar, olive oil, almond butter, a dash of French mustard, fresh coriander, dill, a little honey, chopped spring onions and a little vegetable stock, blitzed in my high-speed blender. This was used to dress the slaw. The second jar contains a quick barbecue sauce made from tomato ketchup cooked with some paprika, vinegar, a little ground cumin and cayenne and a touch of brown sugar.

Second row: Bulgur wheat cooked with some chopped spring onions and peppers, using the stock from the chicken bones.

Third row: Roasted vegetables – butternut squash, sweet potato, carrot, celeriac (par-boiled for a few minutes in the microwave to soften), broccoli and broccoli stalks, onion, leek, courgettes, garlic and peppers roasted in toasted sesame oil with some chilli flakes, cinnamon, ground cumin and paprika, and a sprinkling of toasted sesame seeds, chia seeds and brown flax seeds.

Finally, the squash seeds, roasted. I mixed some chilli flakes, ground cumin, ground coriander and cayenne pepper in a little olive oil and tossed the seeds in this before roasting them on parchment paper in the oven. They are super-delicious – really crunchy and with quite a spicy kick! Much better than crisps. The trouble is, each time I walk past the bowl, I have to eat some. They won’t last long!

Next time I am going to roast them plain, and save them to put in the bread. Maybe I’ll never buy pumpkin seeds again!

Talking of break, this is the batch of sourdough I made at the weekend. Marginally better, but still spreading too much. I am going to try with a slightly less hydrated dough, and definitely keep an eye on both the first and second proving so that it doesn’t over-prove.

The structure of the bread is good – the holes could be bigger, but they are shiny as they are supposed to be, and the flavour is excellent. I’m getting there, slowly!

Esmeralda is behaving magnificently, which is great. She is now in her new routine of being fed twelve hours or so before I make the bread, and allowed to grow at room temperature, and after I’ve made the bread, she’s fed again, and put back in the fridge for another week.

I made a better batch of kefir cheese this week as well, taking longer to strain the kefir through the muslin, and gently agitating it periodically, to encourage some more whey to drain through. I didn’t squeeze the bag because it just makes kefir come through into the whey.

With some of the whey I made some lemonade. I added some basil leaves (this is a fabulous combination for a lovely, cold, refreshing summer drink) and blitzed it in my high-speed blender – which was a mistake! It generated huge quantities of foam which took ages to disperse. I think this was caused by the protein in the whey. Next time I shall make the lemonade and blitz it before gently stirring in the whey. You don’t really taste the whey, but it’s adding that extra layer of goodness and lots of gut-friendly bacteria. Can’t be wrong.

Kitties

Not much activity this week. It’s been too hot for much vigorous play but there has been some big game hunting in the jungle (chasing butterflies in the flowerbeds!) without too much success, fortunately for the butterflies. Lily continues to be a Trolley Dolly all on her own. Ruby has gone right off the trolley and now prefers to sleep right outside the bedroom door where she is in danger of being trodden on, and she she is being vigorously dissuaded from this – we have to remove her 5 or 6 times before she finally settles on my hubby’s box of old clothes. They get their little phases for favourite sleeping places and let’s hope that Ruby’s latest choice is short-lived. I told her I only had to put my big foot right on top of her once, and there’d be no more Ruby. It’s funny, but these kitties are never very impressed with anything I say to them. They just give you that look, and go on doing whatever it is you don’t want them to do.

Here is Lily drinking from the bird bath. So much for my hubby’s efforts, putting a nice bowl of fresh water out each day so they don’t get thirsty.

Butterflies

I keep telling the kitties it’s OK to chase the white butterflies (these tend to lay their eggs on people’s precious vegetables!) but not OK to chase the pretty ones. They don’t see the logic of this at all.

Last week I managed to capture this beautiful butterfly, which I later identified as a comma, on our buddleia bush. Isn’t it handsome?

This year, we have far more butterflies than we’ve ever had before, which is a good sign. Buddleia is always a great attraction for them, of course. I found what I think was a red admiral in the bedroom last week, and scooped him up with a chiffon scarf and shook it out of the window and off he flew.

Hopefully this coming week, I might actually achieve some art. Who knows?

This and That

Cooking

Another busy day. I had hoped to complete my cooking yesterday but there were various visitors during the day and that put my schedule out so I had to do it today as the chicken had defrosted.

I made a Middle Eastern chicken tagine with saffron and hard boiled eggs. Unfortunately I didn’t photograph it. I will try and remember to do so when I serve it. The cooking today was freezer fodder so not served up attractively enough to photograph anyway. This recipe had instructions to colour the peeled hard boiled eggs with water in which saffron had been steeped, but this didn’t work – perhaps my saffron isn’t as yellow as it should be; I’ve noticed a distinct lack of colouring from it before. Anyway, I added a teaspoon of turmeric to the water and that seemed to do the trick – they came out a wonderful rich dark yellow! The chicken is served with the eggs between the chicken pieces. I cut the eggs in half longwise. Finally, the dish is sprinkled with blanched almonds fried in olive oil.

I didn’t want to waste the turmeric liquid so I decided to go ahead and make some bulgar wheat as well, to go with the chicken, and I added this coloured liquid to the stock in which the bulgar wheat was cooked, making it come out a nice yellow colour. Once cooked, I added pine nuts fried in olive oil and soaked raisins.

These dishes have now gone in the freezer.

I also finished making yesterday’s vegetable soup by blitzing it in my high-speed blender. It is utterly delicious – it really makes a difference having a decent stock as a basis for it, and this time I used the bone broth I made last week. I’ve made a huge bowl of really thick soup which will need diluting with further stock when it is served, but in the meantime in its really thick state, it takes up less room in the freezer.

Middle Eastern Meal

Last night we went to my friend’s for another Middle Eastern meal, following on from the one I cooked for her last week. She has the most beautiful kitchen, not large, but quite quirky and full of character, and with a lovely warm and welcoming atmosphere. When we arrived she had laid the table ready with the first dish of food which was bulgar wheat served with lettuce and other accompaniments – she showed us how to make little parcels with the lettuce, and it was utterly delicious.

Doesn’t this look absolutely beautiful?

When we’d got started on that, she brought out the lamb kibbeh. I had been longing to try kibbeh – it’s in my new Claudia Roden recipe book but I haven’t made it yet. Another really delicious dish, this time served with freshly squeezed lime.

Baby tomatoes, Greek yoghurt, olives and kefir cheese (this latter brought by me) to accompany the dishes.

Also to accompany the dishes: pitta bread and a cucumber and yoghurt salad something like Indian raita. This gives a wonderful cool balance to the spiced food – not that this was heavily spiced, but as with most Middle Eastern food, it was delicately spiced so that you got all the flavours, and no one flavour was overwhelming.

For dessert she had made the most fabulous sticky and sweet baclava. These are her two photos.

I haven’t attempted this yet either – it’s a time-consuming process, but the results are well worth it!

To finish our meal, I had brought along my Turkish coffee set, and the coffee all ready to make up. I bought this set in the souk in Jerusalem back in 1998; there are six cups in all, each little brass cup having a white china insert. It is supposed to be on a brass tray but for the life of me I can’t find this at the moment!

To make the Turkish coffee (I got this recipe from an Iraqi junior doctor who was working with my dad before I got married so probably late 1970s/early 1980s), you take a scoop of highest-roasted coffee beans, and about 4 whole cardamom pods per person, and grind them to the finest dust possible. Place this in a small pan with 1 teaspoon of sugar per person, and add water, allowing space for it to boil up without overflowing. Put it on the heat and let it bubble up, immediately removing it from the heat till it subsides; repeat this 3 more times, then decant into the coffee pot and serve. It is very strong and very sweet, and thick, with the grounds still in it. The addition of the cardamom adds an even more exotic twist, making the coffee taste almost like a liqueur. It’s fabulous.

Kitties

Out in the garden all day again, and joining us when we sat up at the top eating our meals.

Lily drinking from the bird bath!

I made a video of this, but haven’t had a chance to edit it yet.

Lily was very annoyed with us this evening after supper when we wouldn’t let her out again, and kept up her crying and stamping her cross little paw for 10-15 minutes. We persuaded her to go on the trolley eventually, but for some reason they’re not that keen all of a sudden. Ruby decided she’d prefer to sleep right outside the bedroom door just where I’d tread on her so this has been vigorously discourages several times during the course of the evening, putting her firmly with her sister and telling her to stay put on the trolley!

Our Garden

Our garden is looking very pretty at the moment, thanks to my hubby’s hard work. The lawn is very brown from lack of rain, though, and the beautiful white climbing rose is now over, but there’s still plenty of colour.

As you can see in the previous photo, all the geraniums he planted this year in the herbaceous border are now in flower.

The large buddleia. Both buddleias are attracting lots of butterflies – some unusual varieties too – far more than we had last year. I have started video-ing them and once I’ve got enough, I’ll compile them together.

Pots of geraniums on the patio and along the path below the steps.

The lovely herb garden my hubby made for me. I often potter out with my scissors and cut them for my cooking.

Knitting

I finally managed to block the multi-coloured socks I finished a while back and they now look quite presentable.

I shall take them to church on Sunday and hopefully someone will take them and give them to the homeless, or hang on to them till the winter – not sure if they are doing the same project again this year but someone is bound to be able to pass them on for me. I’d have finished them last winter if we hadn’t entered that time of ongoing crisis for several months!

Another Outing Tomorrow

Off to Hope Cove with our walking friends tomorrow. I haven’t been before, and apparently it’s very pretty. More pictures once we’ve been!

Card for a Centenarian–Box for the Card

Having completed the card yesterday, today I worked on embellishing a box for it, as it is too thick for an envelope.

The box was in my stash, and originally contained some samples of stoma supplies! (Nothing goes to waste chez Shosh…)

I painted the bottom, sides and edges of the top with black acrylic paint.

Inside the box, I sprayed it with some pink shimmer spray that I’ve had from when I started papercrafting, many years ago!

I noticed some had got on the bottom of the box and I really liked the effect of it on black (something I’d never tried before) so I ended up spraying the whole thing with it.

I thought the inside needed something a bit extra, so I painted on a thin layer of soft gloss gel medium diluted with water, and sprinkled on some variegated copper gilding flakes, dabbing them into place with the paintbrush.

I wasn’t really happy with it, so I made up a wash of gold acrylic paint with some iridescent medium and painted that on. It was really shimmery but the brush strokes showed more than I wanted, and this was particularly obvious on the lid, unfortunately.

Here’s a detail of the effect. You don’t really get the shimmer from the photo.

In the end, I covered the inside of the lid with some of the paper left over from making the card, first distressing the edges with Evergreen Bough and then Forest Moss Distress Inks. This improved the look of it.

Here is the card in the box. It will be wrapped in tissue paper.

The front of the box completed. As with the card, I added some stickles to the butterfly’s body, and to the centres of the flowers – Holly, and Magenta. In this photo, they still aren’t dry.

I used scraps of the cards and paper used for the card. The circular die cut was one of several in my stash that a friend sent me ages ago. The flowers were more left over from the Floral Mini-Album, and the butterfly is another die cut from the set I used for the card. I used the same two ribbons, and where the “Congratulations” gold card meets the decorative paper, I added a thin strip of gold card from my stash, trimmed when making some other project in the past.

Here is a detail of the floral embellishment.

As with the butterflies on the card, I lifted the wings of this butterfly and secured them in place with a blob of Pinflair gel glue under each one, to stop them being flattened.

Now that the card is fully dry, I can return to it and show you the finished result. Here are a couple of detail photos showing the topper and embellishments.

The sentiment on the inside of the card.

Finally, a photo of the box, the card and the embroidered piece, all for a remarkable lady whose 100th birthday we shall be celebrating with her at her party tomorrow.

I can’t believe I’ve completed this lot in under a week! The trouble is, apart from making bread, that’s all I’ve done this week, and everything else has been neglected!