31 Aug 2005: can't. . . think of. . . title. . .
Whew. I made a pit-stop (an out of the way one, that is) in Covent Garden on my way home. I had planned on going to The Bead Shop, but stopped at the Cath Kidston store on my way. There was a small sale on, which meant a few things were simply 'too expensive' rather than 'ha ha ha ha ha!,' but I managed to finally check out the bolts of fabric at the back. Usually they're guarded by a very helpful employee, which means I can't go near for fear that I might have to speak to somebody. Also, since everything's so pretty in the store, I'm always afraid I'm not allowed to touch certain things.
Anyway, the employees were busy at the till, so I took the opportunity to admire the bolts close up and even stroke a few. There was lovely oilcloth on sale for �17 per metre, which I passed on (and now I really wish I hadn't!), but I did come away with the fabric in the picture for only �11 a metre (originally �35?).
I'm going to use half a metre to make a seed guard for the birds' cage (they won't mind the girliness of the print, I'm sure), and the rest will be stored in the fabric cabinet for a rainy day (which could be tomorrow! Or the day after! This is England, after all!). Although I'm very attached to my brown corduroy bag, I really wish I could make it again, lined with the Cath Kidson fabric. I might have to make a matching one out of lighter corduroy and put it in the shop.
And that, my friends, is that.
p.s. -- Even though I spent a long time picking out specific beads at The Bead Shop, I photographed the beads from the grab bag I bought, because they're so pretty and varied. I'm tempted to put them in my mouth, but I think I've passed that stage of my life.
p.p.s. -- 'I made a pit-stop in Covent Garden on my way home.' -- A phrase I wouldn't have thought possible to utter a few years ago.
28 Aug 2005: seaside and crafts and birds
Lovely Leigh on Sea. We went back again, if you can believe it. This time, we rode the c2c train from Fenchurch Street (only 42 minutes -- it takes me that long to get from here (London) to Highbury and Islington (also London)!), and we took the mermaid princess with us (one would assume her natural home is the sea, after all).
It was high tide, so I was able to capture photographic proof that all you American wise-guys should think twice before declaring something an empty lot, ready for retail harvesting. You see, every few hours, it goes from this to this. A side by side comparison:
While in Leigh, I bought the fabric for this bag for my mom (who shouldn't look if she wants to be surprised!). She asked me to make a bag like mine (which I love), only bigger. I'm not used to working on this slightly larger scale, so I hope my mom will like it.
Oh, how sad. The birds have a 16" strip of fabric in their cage, and Frankie finally managed to get it to the nest, after hours of work. I tried to take a picture of it hanging out of the nest, but it fell down the second before the shutter went. Sad. Oh well -- it keeps them busy and stops them from trying to rip apart the paper that lines the floor of the cage.
Speaking of things ridiculous and bird-related, Frankie and Ira have become the umpteenth animals to train me. I feed their never-ending hunger for nesting materials by sharing my fabric scraps with them, and we've gotten to the point where I can hold a scrap through the bars, and one of them hops over to take it from me.
Ira, in particular, has figured out that 'the lady' means 'coveted scraps.' He hops over to the nearest perch when I stand by their cage, and he get very excited if he can see my hands. You might've thought that birds don't have different expressions, but he leans down and quickly inspects my hands with one eye and then the other (silly side-of-the-head eyes).
It's sweet, really, but the problem lies with feeding them treats. They don't like anything I put in their millet clip (except millet, of course), but they're happy to eat from my fingers. I wind up standing by the cage with my arm held up while they leisurely snack, taking turns and occasionally going for a sip of water. With any luck, they'll be happy to eat their treats out of one of the empty food dishes once they know the treat's not evil, though I'm sure they're fine with the current situation.
23 Aug 2005: yawn.
Rob's worried that the internet now thinks he's lazy: sleeping until it's nearly gone ten and letting me make breakfast for him and all (actually, he might be fine with my making breakfast for him). Well, internet, revise your opinion.
Saturday night, our downstairs neighbours had the gall to throw a festive summer barbecue in the garden, playing loud music and shrieking drunkenly. Rob and I are more of the stay-inside and listen-to-Alan-Titchmarsh-talk-about-the-origin-of-the-word-spud variety, even on a Saturday evening. Neither of us even drink alcohol. Shock! Horror! Gasp!, etc.
Anyway, the loud music kept Rob up late, which was why he had to sleep in. Not so with me. I slept through the music, the same way I fall asleep with the bedside light on every night. I've even been known to fall asleep with the massive air conditioner blasting away two feet from the bed. I can't help it; I'm just so tired.
And that's what Rob was. Tired, not lazy.
21 Aug 2005: Blogging can be like drinking
Blogging can be like drinking water: you don't do it as much as you should, but sometimes when you start, you just can't stop. That said, I'll probably go silent for a week now. Can never tell with these things.
Like some little birds I know, I've been very busy today. I woke up early (from a very disturbing dream, which, strangely enough, featured the bizarre character we spotted at Foyle's last week) and set to finishing my big craft room organizathon. By the time Rob woke up (some three hours later), I was finished. I made pancakes for him (with blueberries) and a fried egg/processed cheese/tri-tater concoction for myself (his breakfast, my early lunch).
Since then I've been reading and clipping magazines (does anybody in London need any recent issues of Country Living [UK and American] or Country Homes? With some missing pages? No? Okay, then, I'll just throw them out). Then I made sugar cookies:
I had all the basic baking ingredients but nothing fun-basic (chocolate chips, food colouring, cinnamon), so sugar cookies it was. Half the cookies are frosted with vanilla frosting; the other half are hazelnut-chocolate. I'm always on the lookout for smaller recipes (smaller yield, that is) -- I saw a cookie recipe once that recommended halving for only 50 cookies. Fifty cookies! I've gotten very bad about not measuring accurately, but this is quite a convenient recipe for making only a dozen:
6 tbsp butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 small egg
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 cup flour
a sneeze of salt
Blend the first four ingredients, then add the flour and salt and blend until mixed. Wrap the dough and put it in the fridge for an hour. An hour later, start the oven preheating at. . . 185C (good ol' 350F should do it). I rolled the dough out to just under 1/4" thick. I was able to cut twelve round (2.5" diameter) cookies from the dough. Bake in the middle of the oven for eight minutes (more, I'd imagine, if you don't have a fan assisted oven).
The frosting is made from:
1 cup powdered/icing sugar
1/4 cup butter
1 tbsp of milk? 1.5? I just poured little by little until it was creamy enough -- not too much milk, anyway.
1/4 tsp vanilla
I used half of this to frost six cookies. Then I blended in a couple tablespoons of Green and Black's hazelnut chocolate spread (fancy Nutella) for the rest.
Just so you don't forget about the birds (ha!), a picture of a very damp, slightly blurry Ira. He was very enthusiastic about his bath this morning. The cleanest bird in all the house:
21 Aug 2005: more bird news, i'm afraid
The finches are no longer afraid of new things, so long as the new things in question can be used as nesting material. The only problem is that they'd rather not have to carry more than one strand of thread in their beaks, which results in much dropping and refetching of materials.
Each morning for the past few days, I've put a modest pile of fabric trimmings at the bottom of their cage (the clean part), and when I've returned home from work, all the scraps are gone. No scraps, only proud looking birds. They've been very industrious today, as the above picture demonstrates.
And since my mom wondered where the birds live:
Notice how I can't seem to find one perfect storage system and stick to it. Oh well. At least everything is in something at the moment. I've seen these Magiker bookshelves (from Ikea, obviously) being used in others' creative spaces; namely, I remember Claire contemplating buying some for her studio. I also saw them featured in a Country Living/Country Homes/Cottage Homes type magazine, with fabric panels tacked behind the glass doors. I'm really eager to try this (using double-sided tape) on the two units of mine which have doors. Nobody needs to see my ever-growing mountain of fabric, anyway.
20 Aug 2005: time for an after-breakfast nap, i think
Mmmm, jam and clotty cream. This is my special Saturday breakfast, enjoyed, you might be appalled to hear, before the clock struck 7am. Clotted cream and strawberry jam were made for each other, whether you apply them cream-then-jam or jam-then-cream (which, according to Alan Titchmarsh, is a long-running argument).
For deprived America-dwellers, clotted cream is firm and pocked and yellow at the top, as it looks in the picture, but underneath it's pure, smooth, artery-clogging goodness. Mmmm. . .
19 Aug 2005: crafty corner
It's been an overcast, rainy day since I woke up. Even with my lamp on, the crafty room is dark. But my desk is cleaner than it's been in months! So what do I do? Take shadowy photos in the yellow lamp-light? Yessir!
My lovely clean desk. I like to keep it sooo clean. It never gets messy, never. Click the above image to enlarge.
When I was in the states, I found this 'vanity tray' in Target's bathroom section. I love the little rose/ribbon detail on the edges, but I don't have a vanity.
What I do have is a lot of wall space. I fixed some picture hangers to the back (very carefully!) and put it on the wall for use as a shadow box. And shadowy it certainly is. Right now it holds my mini sausage dog in a jacket, a photo taken in Windermere (one of my treasured photos I developed myself), a little ceramic sheep, a paper cut-out, a ceramic mother horse and foal, the original tiny mouse, my crochet monkey in a dress, and a corduroy clutch.
I've been meaning to post about those last two since I made them. . . but I haven't. I should add the clutch to the shop, but I really like looking at it.
I bought this old medicine cabinet off ebay (it's very small; olden days people must not have been addicted to so many prescription drugs). I sanded the old dingy paint off and started to paint it white. I actually coated the whole thing, but it was my first time using gloss paint for metal, and it was thick and drippy in some spots.
It sat wrapped up waiting for some more sanding and painting until today. I decided the uneveness wasn't so bad -- definitely not as bad as just letting it sit, useless -- and touched up the worst areas and put it to work. I'm so glad I did; it's great for hiding little cluttery things, and I love the crappyness of the mirror. It's something I'd expect to see somewhere else and then dream about for days. Instead, I've got it for my very own.
Lastly, my magnet board from Ikea. Even though we hung it months and months ago, I only had a couple things stuck to it; I don't know why. When I came back from the States, I had a few things I wanted to be able to look at (the mini quilt with the fruit-dyed fabric, one of the lovely Victorian-y cards I bought, a magnet from the Walker Art Center, etc), so I cobbled everything together. It's much more inspiring to look at now, which was the intended purpose in the first place.
There are a couplefew things in the photographs that I've made but never mentioned, namely because they weren't my ideas. Obviously, many crafted items are inspired by bits and pieces one picks up along the way, but sometimes I see things and think, 'I want to do that!' So I do it, but I don't show it around, because I don't feel like it's mine to show. I think/hope that's the right thing to do; have other people come across this dilemma?
18 Aug 2005: 50 extra points if i buy more orange juice!
I ran a couple errands today after work: got some treats for the birds (both inside birds and outside birds), bought flowers to take photos of for a book cover, picked up a few random groceries. I was going to extoll the wonderful deliciousness of M&S's bakery products (sorry, France, but they have the best croissants I've ever tasted), but when I got home, I'd gotten my Tesco voucher in the mail.
This is sure to be one of those things I look back on and think, 'Oh, so young and naive, to get excited about that,' yet I am so excited about this. Tesco signed me up for their club card when I registered to see if they'd deliver to us (they do, but we still go to the store), and this is the first voucher I've been sent. £3.50! And they track your purchases and send you coupons for extra points when you buy, say, Benecol drinking yogurt. And I do anyway -- it's so easy! Those Tesco folks is geniuses. And I don't mind.
Another thing waiting for me when I got home was Ira, who was proudly carrying a piece of linen I'd put in their nest. Neither of them had been inside the nest, as far as I knew, yet here was little Ira hopping from perch to perch, proudly showing off his great find. I went to check on them after they'd gone quiet for the night (getting earlier every evening), and -- what was this? Had they both disappeared, squeezed through the closed door of their cage and flown the coop? Nope, they're just sleeping in their nest. Sweet little birds.
10 Aug 2005: always with the finches
Frankie and Ira want you to know: millet is not scary.
Oh, you might have heard the rumours, but they'd like you to know that there was absolutely no flapping around and avoiding the otherwise-coveted real-branch perch. No, no, not because of the millet. That was due to an, erm, eel. A perch eel. Because Frankie and Ira have always known that millet is tasty seeds. And not to be feared. At least, that's what they say.
07 Aug 2005: sewing and sewing and sewing and finches
Phew. Well, I don't know about you, but I had a very productive day. First off, I finished the polar bear and mouse for an order going to exotic Paris, France:
Then I made the cushion covers I'd been meaning to sew for ages. I used the fabric I got from Ikea a while back -- each cushion has the pattern on the front and linen on the back. Simple, but nice.
Then! I made a new bag. You might think I don't need a new bag, but you'd be wrong to think that.
Even though I didn't use a pattern for this bag or this one, they're made the same way. I put a magnetic clasp in this, but I think it has a much nicer shape when it's open. I feel like I should fill it with flowers or fruit fresh from the market.
In other (more bird-y) news, the finches are doing well, even though nobody cared enough about them to leave a comment saying, 'Oh, neat finches!' or 'How cute!' or 'You can pop 'em right in your mouth! Yum!' Whatever.
That's Ira in the photo, but Frankie is funnier, so forget about that picture of boring Ira. I put a bit too much water in their bath today, and Frankie seemed nervous about hopping right in. He splashed water up with his beak, but turned around and around on the bath's perch, trying to figure out how to get a more thorough cleaning. After sliding halfway in, backwards, a couple times, he finally hopped in, bobbing up to his chest with his little chicken legs sticking straight out below him. He hopped out and went in again, so it couldn't have been too bad.
Mmm, clean finches.
06 Aug 2005: tweet-n-a-scrabble-scrabble
Hooray! It's bird day!
I told the girl at the shop that I wanted one fawn and one chocolate, if possible, just to be able to easily tell them apart. She came out with two in little carrier boxes and said, 'The light one is female, and the dark one is male, although we can't guarantee that.'
Yeah, right. Society finches are monomorphic, meaning you can't tell a male from a female just by looking at them. I was hoping for a male/female pair, as that might be fun, but I knew it would be down to the luck of the draw. Unless she saw one lay an egg and the other sing, she had no idea what she was talking about.
This was proven true by the fawn, who, about ten minutes after settling in to the new cage, sang us his little song. I had decided that the first to out himself as a male would be named Frankie, so Frankie it is. The chocolate hasn't said much beyond little finch whispers, but I think I'll wait a couple days before assuming it's an Evelyn and not an Ira.* Ira sang his song about an hour later.
They're both sitting on the wicker nest at the moment; Evelyn/Ira is gently preening Frankie's face from time to time, so I think it's safe to say they're buddies for the moment. We'll have to wait to see whether they're ready for a more serious committment.
* I could guess that it's a female, as Frankie has been quite enthusiatically singing, but I'm not sure if that could just be to establish his territory. Societies also sing to other males from time to time, and if that's his thing, I'll just accept it and make sure he knows we still think he's a good bird.
02 Aug 2005: leaving -- yes -- on a jet plane
I'm getting on a plane this evening and will be back in London by the morning. The above photo was taken in Chicago, shortly after I was issued the visa granting me permission to stay and work in the UK. I think I look like a photo in a brochure: 'Once you have completed the arduous process, you will be presented with your visa. Happy travels!'
My dad says he can read my mind/expression, and it says, 'I can't wait to get out of this silly country.' If that's true, then the guy behind me is definitely thinking, 'Man, I wish I had one of those. Stupid America.'