"E" is for Elephant

My girlfriend fell pregnant very shortly after my own son was conceived. Since she lives West of Sydney and I'm south, we're both in kind of black holes so far as the transport situation is concerned. So I was really excited to get to meet her and her beautiful little boy in the city, today!

I made him a little present that I whipped up in the last two or three nights.
First is a pair of wide-legged yoga pants - the outside is made from a delicious dark green up-cycled old sheet that my Mother Outlaw donated to me a while back (I'm so plotting a pixie outfit for my boy sometime soon!). I'm also starting to get into the swing of the rib-knit I used for the waistband. It's fun stuff and not as hard as I thought.

But because the recipient is a delicate little petal and needs 100% cotton clothes for his poor chafed skin, I rummaged through my stash for a lining and came up with pale yellow cotton flannel. It's made the pants thicker and warmer than I originally envisioned, but hopefully it will mean they can be winter and autumn pants rather than the spring I was going for! My little boy decided that second shot needed to be helped by his doll. Since photographic styling is not my strong suit, I took his suggestion.

The second part of his project is this sweet little door hanger - I spotted the "E" at a local shop - they only had Es! Which was serendipitous, since my gift is for an Elliott.
I almost cried, cutting up the rainbow ribbon - I pounced on it months back and haven't had the heart to open it till now. And then I cut my pieces too generously and have all these tag-ends I don't want to get rid of.
The elephant was inspired by the beautiful layette decor Tecelinha keeps posting to one of my flickr groups, and this fabulous Ganesha image at Wikipedia.

Gingerbread for winter chills

The year that I turned thirteen I spent a lot of time making gingerbread.

It got so that I had the recipe memorised. With this friend and that, on weekends and holidays we'd gather in someone's kitchen to mix up a batch, covering available surfaces in flour, using up our mother's ground ginger (or, in one particularly memorable and potent batch, scrounging fresh ginger root from the neighbour).
When the bickies were fresh from the oven, we'd scoff as many as we could manage, as fast as their heat would allow. Warm, fresh gingerbread always tasted the best.

I've forgotten the recipe I used, then. But in recent years I have rediscovered my love of baking.

I've baked sugar biscuits and pumpkin. Almonds and cakes. And I always (especially in the depths of winter cold) come back to gingerbread.

This is the recipe I use now.

Ingredients

• 125g butter


• 1/2 cup brown sugar


• 1/2 cup golden syrup


• 1 egg


• 1 3/4 cups plain flour


• 2tsp ground ginger

You can also add other spices alongside the ginger. I like to toss in a teaspoon or two of white pepper and maybe a dash of cinnamon, to make the bickies a bit bitey.

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celcius.

Beat the butter and sugar together until you have a pale, creamy mixture. Then slowly add the egg and golden syrup, beating both in thoroughly.
Add the flour, ginger and bicarb about half a cup at a time, beating all the while, until the dough starts to form a ball.

Cover your bowl and place it in the fridge for a minimum of thirty minutes. This step is important. Without it, the mix is not firm enough to roll out and cut biscuits from.

Now the fun part!
Take your mix out of the fridge. Knead it well and roll it out on a well-floured surface until it's about as thick as a regular pencil.
Cut out your shapes, using a floured bickie cutter, and place them on a greased tray.
Bake for around 10 - 12 minutes, or until golden brown (the edges are usually a darker shade in my biscuits, as an indicator that they're done - my oven does not heat evenly, boo!

Your biscuits will be soft when first emerging, but will harden over the next five minutes or so to a firmer texture. Do not try to remove them from the tray till this has happened.

Reversible toddler wrap dresses

This has been my major preoccupation of the last month - hence the lack of updates. It's also something I've been holding off on, firstly because I knew documenting the project was going to be somewhat epic, and secondly because I didn't want people to stumble across their daughters' first birthday gifts online before they'd been gifted.




These are four fully reversible, crossover-back dresses/tunics - these pictures are the two sides of each dress. I patterned them myself, working out kinks as I went along, and I am unbelievably proud of them!

I got my measurements and basic outline from a button down the back tunic I got at a garage sale and made a mock-up out of old sheets. The lovely Mummy to one of the little girls who would be receiving let me borrow her daughter to check that my size and pattern was right (Thanks Tracey, and thankyou to my lovely patient model, Lucy!)

This is the first dress I then made (Lucy's Mummy likes to bake).

One side is printed cotton, with silver glitter decoration on some of the cupcakes. Unfortunately you cannot see this, because the weather here has been despicable lately, and thus the lighting is trashy. That, and I need more practice taking decent shots of my own handiwork.
The other side is pale purple polyester dug out from my stash (I bought several metres years and years ago!) which had a nice weight and matched the purple on the cotton. On the front of this side I hand-stitched a circle cut out with a cupcake.

The back two pieces cross over, and it's all sewn together like a simple Gordian Knot (perhaps I should call it a Gordian Knot dress?), which is what keeps the garment on. I'm possibly proudest of this detail, as it means there are no press-studs or zips to catch on sensitive skin or have to wrestle with whilst holding a squirmy child still. There's also no buttons for the small recipients to suck on and possibly choke.

Since two of the dresses are made from quite busy printed cottons they didn't get any sewn detail, but the last dress was made from red and neutral tone linen-cotton blend that had me salivating in the shop but is very plain.
I left the red as it was, since it's such a fantastic colour, and spiced up the neutral side with a little freehand embroidery in backstitch and running stitch. The more I do it, the more I'm enjoying exercising my embroiderer's needlework skills, these days!

Happy Mother's Day!

This is my first Mother's Day ever. My baby boy just squeaked by the date, last year.
So what goodies did I receive for this special day? I got a nasty cold. That's pretty much it.

My Mum will be receiving mail with something OTHER than cold germs though (lucky thing).

Last time I was visiting, I noticed her using a very faded Coca-Cola pot-holder for her hot things. Since being ill has left me somewhat short on time, I wanted a fairly quick and easy project I could whip up for her, and this was perfect. The inside stuffing is a couple of layers of old towels - my MiL gave me a whole bag of them a year ago, and I am slowly making my way through them!
The outside is two different pieces of fabric, scraps from some of the major projects I've been working on lately (more on those in a few weeks). I found the wooden spoon with colander holes for noodles at the local ALDI (Mum loves making pasta dishes), and we're done.

Ooh, bakey bakey!

Excuse me if I'm excited. I have just discovered Bittersweet, a Vegan baking blog. Since I'm living largely dairy-free these days for the health and happiness of my son these days, the sweet recipes over there are filling me with glee. Dairy-free fudge! Egg-free chocolate cupcakes! Nomnomnom!

Tile magnets

Seems like every real estate person and their plumber is posting "free" magnets into my mailbox, for their advertising to sit on my fridge door.
I had a huge backlog of these things taking up valuable display space - we're talking doubles and even triples, and ads for services I already use (Australia Post? I'm looking at you and your ridiculous "notepad" shaped THING) or am not likely to need for many years and really don't want reminders of (local Bevans office? Good luck ever getting my business again for anything!).

A sheet of tiles from the hardware store, some acrylic paint and a spray of trusty old clear enamel, and I have some gifts for a Wiccan friend.



The paint decided to separate a bit on the meat and it looks a bit mouldy. Maybe that's why it's merry?

Ooh, Crumbs!

I'm not the world's greatest cook, but I do enjoy baking. And after experiencing two amazingly iced first birthday cakes in the past two months I'm feeling like the bar has been set pretty high.
I'm currently googling fondant icing recipes, but I'm also taking great joy in the gorgeousness of the plain old buttercream iced cakes in this flickr stream and this craft blog, that my search threw up.
They look so good it would be a shame to eat them!