Thing #3 - mutant muffin

I promise I'm not turning this into a food blog. But the fact is, I like food and I like cooking.

I fancied some lemon and poppy seed muffins like the ones I used to get in Starbucks when I worked in London, so I made a batch of these. The recipe is from this book (which is excellent, by the way). This one got dislodged from its place in the tin in the oven and turned out a bit... odd. Almost as if it had a nose.

It was still yummy though!

Thing #2 - a fabric flower

Yesterday on Thing A Day, bittyandbunny posted some gorgeous fabric flowers. When I saw them I immediately wanted one for myself, so tonight I set about making one. Here it is. I want to make another one, a huge oversized black one.

The fabric was some nasty polyester lining that I was never going to find a use for - nice to figure out a way to make it into something I like.

Thing 1 - Oatmeal biscuits (or cookies if you're American)

This is my old weighing scale. I've had it for about six years, and prior to that, when I lived in Ireland, I had a very similar but less pink one. It's always served me well. I dump a few ounces of flour and sugar and so on into the bowl, mix it up by hand or with the aid of an electronic implement, throw it in the oven and it turns into scones, biscuits, cakes, pastry or whatever.

Unfortunately, pounds and ounces have recently become extinct and all my newer cookery books give the measurements in metric only. My mind doesn't think in metric, and apparently my eyes don't see in metric either because the metric measurements on my old pink scale are impossible to see. I made some blueberry muffins yesterday from a Nigella cookbook and they turned out lovely but I ended up with terrible eyestrain from trying to see where 125g was on the dial.

There were two solutions to this problem - either I sat down with a calculator and a pencil and converted all the recipes back to imperial, or I bought a new scale with a big, easy to see display designed for the (nearly) blind. I went for option two. Here's my new scale which I bought yesterday.


Obviously I had to try it out, so I made some oatmeal biscuits tonight. Yum yum. They're from the Be-Ro cookbook, and if you'd like to try them (and I strongly recommend you do) the recipe is here.

So here's my first Thing for February. Oatmeal biscuits. And now I'm off to make a cuppa.

How I will get my mojo back.

Thing a day is starting again! Registration opens on 24 January and I will be signing up. Last year I managed to post something every single day in February apart from one and it really kept me motivated so this year I hope it'll help me get my inspiration back. Are you signing up this year?

I thought I'd show you a Thing I made recently - a crochet garland. It was really for Christmas, and I made it with sparkly yarn from Lidl in gold and dark red, but I liked it so much that it's staying up all year! Also see the snow? It was much worse than this. I had five (!) days off work when I couldn't get out because of snow or ice.

And see my little bonsai on the windowsill? It doesn't have a lot of growth yet, but it's developed some new leaves since I got it. I've always been fascinated by bonsai and I just signed up for a day-long beginner class next month and I can't wait. Watch this space, I'm sure it'll be one of my Things next month because bonsai are definitely creative.

I'm still alive and here's what I've been doing.

Oh dear, it has been a long time, hasn't it? Every week I keep thinking "this week I'll definitely post something" but it just hasn't happened. It's been a busy and strange few months. We've moved from London to Wiltshire in search of a new life away from city stresses... except it hasn't really worked out like that. First I struggled to find a job, and got rejection after rejection for jobs I was qualified for and had relevant experience in, and to be honest receiving so many rejections is absolutely soul-destroying after a while so I felt really rather poo. Then I did find a job, but it was in Oxford, which is about an hour's drive away through the most horrible traffic imaginable. Most days it's absolute gridlock. And I don't get home till around 7pm by which time I'm too exhausted to do very much.

So basically I sit in front of the TV knitting socks (which I'm churning out like a one-woman production line, by the way). About the only thing I seem to have any energy for is cooking, which I've been doing in copious and unhealthy amounts, hence my expanding waistline, but the recipe for the muffins in the photo above actually came from a Weightwatchers recipe book and I'll have to make sure I make more recipes like that if I don't want to end up the size of the house.

I seem to have lost my mojo for drawing and painting. Has anyone seen it anywhere? Please send it back if you do find it because I really miss it. I'm determined that one of these days I'll pick up a pencil again.

Why is that all baby shoes are cute?

I don't tend to coo over babies the way lots of women do. I'm just not that terribly interested in them. Cats are far more entertaining.

However, what I am interested in is that my lovely friend and former workmate is pregnant with a healthy baby after many complications and several miscarriages and I am very very happy about that. So happy, in fact, that I knitted him or her some booties from leftover sock yarn.



Sorry for the bad photos, I snapped them quickly as I was leaving the house, before giving them away.

I don't know what it is about baby booties and shoes (especially those tiny little Nike trainers) but they are all incredibly cute. I can't resist them.

Odosketch, and how not to do perspective

Odosketch is a very fun little online sketching program. You have to sign up (which takes about fifteen seconds) and then you can save your sketches and publish them on your blog or wherever. (It embeds it as a Flash thingy though so I've just taken a screenshot instead.)

I can't find the pen for my graphics tablet so I had a little doodle with my mouse. Have you ever tried drawing with a mouse? It's VERY difficult! Here's our beloved car, a 14 year old Fiat Punto. It's covered in scratches, but I think it gives it character :) In real life it's bright green.

Now I want to go out and draw it properly, with a pen/pencil/crayon/whatever that I can actually control! And when I find the pen for my Bamboo tablet I'll have another go at Odosketch and see what I can come up with.