Now we are Three.

Small Roar turned three this week. We celebrated with a lovely little party and then spent Monday at Thomas Land, based at Drayton Manor. More to follow on that one.

This is the first year I have made SR's cake myself. I had seen at least three of my friends attempt (successfully!) the Rainbow Cake, in both dollop and line form. This really appealed to me- if nothing else it takes the pressure off making a highly decorated cake. The beautiful personalised cake topper from Sarah Designs covered that for me, too.

I used Delia's all-in-one sponge recipe (from her Complete Cookery Course), a set of gel icing colours and my Grandmother's sandwich tins. Struggling against a monster of a migraine and aided with liberal doses of codeine and caffeine I set to work. I used the tutorial and icing recipe from Whisk Kid and lots of moral support from friends who had already made the cake...

Come the day of the party I cut into the cake and...

It was worth the hours of baking, £19 on icing colours and kitchen covered in blue icing for the moment when I held aloft the first piece like a newborn Simba and heard the appreciative 'oooohs' and 'aaaaahs' and one 'she has too much time on her hands'. 

This cake will leave you seeing through time with a numb tongue, but looks amazing.

So, the title of this post. Now we are Three. Three years of being a family, of growing together and teaching each other to grow. Three years of being three.





No sew button bunting

I found myself, at 7:30 am, sitting infront of a pack of felt wondering how on earth I was going to follow up on my impulse-buy notion that it would make excellent and cheap birthday bunting.



By 10:30 I had made the garland above, plus two more long strings of bunting without lettering. Here's how:

BTW- I worked this out all by myself with the help of tea and codeine. If it is the same as someone elses method then hey, great minds think alike. And so do we.

 
I started off with:

• scissors
• 2 12 sheet felt packs, £1 each from Poundland
• yarn
• yarn needle
• jar of random buttons
• tin of pins
• pva glue
• small brush
• letter stencils, traced from a pattern book and cut out.

Take your sheet of felt.

Fold in half.

Fold in half again and score about half an inch with your fingernail at the crease to leave an indentation.

The indentation will mark the point of your triangle.

With the sheet still folded in half, take another sheet of felt and lay from the outer corner to the indentation:

Cut along side the edge to make one side of your triangle.

Take the felt  sheet and do the same on the other side.

When you cut from indentation to corner again, you will be left with three felt triangle bunting flags and extra felt triangles from the edges. Keep the edging offcuts for later.

Have a cup of tea.

You can now use the offcuts as guides for your other bunting flags. Fold each piece of felt in half first so that you cut three flags at a time.

I was making this bunting for Small Roars birthday party, so wanted to add his name to a section. He has a name that you rarely find printed on anything outside of leftwing political biographies. As a template for the lettering I used the alphabet available in Cath Kidston's 'Make' book.

Traced onto paper:

And then cut out to use as templates.

I matched the flags with a contrasting off cut for the name section.

Pinned the template to the off cut. Cut out, and stuck to the flag with pva glue. You could applique, use wondaweb or hand/machine sew if you're cleverer than me.

Repeat.

This is the point to mention this is not meant to be bunting of any longevity. It is quick, cheap, cheerful and made in a hurry. If I were to make pretty bunting, I would use nicer fabric, pinking shears and my sewing machine but this is the anyone-can-do-it bunting with most of the materials available in your local pound shop. ;)

Then I was stumped. How to link it together without ribbon, cotton tape, ricrac or extra fabric? I looked at the never ending ball of red acrylic yarn. I looked at my button jar.

A plan formed.

It's not sewing so much as threading. I reckon a three year old could do it, so it can't be difficult.

I took yarn, yarn needle and button.

I made the length of yarn three times the width of the flags laid side to side.  I simply threaded it through the first flag, right side up.

Threaded a button, and passed the needle and yarn back through the felt to the back of the flag.

Then I loosely threaded the yarn back through at the other top corner of the flag:

Threaded another button, threaded needle and yarn to the back of the work and joined the next flag by starting the process again.

I had millions of buttons:

And here it is!

The rest of the flags ( I got about 40 from the two packs, and didn't use the black sheets of felt) I strung with buttons and yarn, but no letters.

Not bad for a couple of hours of making it up as I went along!

Art help!

I am just musing over our bedroom, as it pretty close to how we want it (impractical stripped wooden floor aside, I'll have to make do with carpet). There is, however, a bare wall. It's too close to the en-suite door to hold shelves, so a large print would work perfectly. This is the space:

Please ignore the ugly fan (and carpet)!

The artwork already on the walls are these two framed prints, and I am starting a collection of hearts over the bed:

So, what will work? Obviously I have a thing for muted shades of white with the odd red splash, and literary/ scandinavian themes...

This is still on my 'I want' list:

Literary map from The Literary Gift Company. It is beautiful, in the right tones and reflects a large part of my life (literature).

BUT I also have a thing for folk art. Especially American folk art, like Clare Rojas...



(Pic courtesy of Ikon gallery)

See those colours? Shapes? Figures? patterns? O. M. G. That's the kind of work I would love to own.

I don't know whether the map would work somewhere else in the house (craft room maybe?). I am searching for some Rojas-lite-esque prints, but with no luck.

Any ideas?

Oh dear, a month has passed...

Time is evaporating at the moment. I leap from weekend to weekend in 7 league boots.

Things that have happened:

I have grown more stuff. The peppers were meant to be sweet but are actually spicier than the jalapeno's that they share a pot with. Lovely though.

The pumpkins are taking over the garden. I have 3 plants- one is a small kitchen variety and the other two were from Blackheath Market so lord knows what they'll grow into. The two unknowns are currently 9 feet in length and still growing. I keep catching Dr Roar standing at the top of the garden eyeing them menacingly and threatening them with shears.

I continue to win at baking. This was last weeks garlic and basil focaccia, tweaked from Jamie Olivers basic bread recipe in 'Jamie's Kitchen'. Instead of the olive & tomato topping that Jamie suggests, I whizz up sea salt, black pepper, olive oil, fresh basil (and just about any herb I can get my hands on to be honest) and a metric f*ckton of garlic, and then pour it over the pressed-into-a-tin-with-holes-made-in-it bread dough for the second proving. Then bake and eat warm.

Small Roar and I have bene creative this summer, while the playgroups are closed. We have made miniature gardens...

.. A plaster & paint alphabet and number set....

... and played about in art galleries (Ikon toddler mornings are fabulous & free. Next one is early September). We've had many playdough, cake baking, sandpit, paddling pool and nature walk moments too. He starts Nursery School in September and our play-all-day routine will change to school 5 afternoons a week. I'm a bit sad that his 'babyhood' is now over, but so excited about the next step of the journey.

Speaking of which. Behold, the box of many (icing) colours. I have a plan. It involves cake and food colouring and Small Roar's 3rd birthday (which is only 9 days away!). Not too encouraged by this...

 
Erk. Good job it's not being used in GREAT QUANTITIES at a childs birthday party then... ;)

Finally, I continue to keep sane due to this:

So glad I conquered my inner defeatist and learnt how to knit. I heard an interesting documentary on Radio 4 about how there's been a middle class shift to 'home creation' as opposed to 'home making' where women (and men) of liberated means focus on their children, home and living space as a place to encourage creativity and security through the re-assessment and re-emergence of traiditional hand crafts. Might be sociological claptrap, but interesting nonetheless.

There have been more developments on the fertility front, but they deserve their own post and are still very much in a state of flux. Bah.

 

The first harvest.

The first fruits (and veg) of my labours are ripening and making their way to my kitchen table.

This week has brought beetroot, radish, rocket and cutting celery. The salad potatoes are ready this weekend, and about 12 peapods are swolllen in a 'pick meeeee' manner.

Small Roar's 'butterfly garden' wild flower bed is beginning to bloom and smells amazing. The snapdragons make me smile and really do have the most lustrously textured petal of any flower I have seen. The deep red are like velvet and the pale pink silk, bright yellow like crisp cotton and burgundy like cordurouy. An amazing plant.

I finally have Sweet William planted. My favourite flower. I love the fact you can just leave it to do it's thing...

The carrots, onions, icicle radish and runner beans carry on growing. The large potatoes are starting to die back so another harvest is not far off. I have aubergines to plant out, and a thornless blackberry waiting to fill in the empty bed at the far end of the garden.

Last night I lay on the grass until darkness fell, just listening to the whole thing grow...

I leave you with a little visitor we had. How can something so devestating to my plants be so utterly fascinating?

Creeping up on me...

..is the grey mould on my honeysuckle. Caterpillars on my strawberries. Greenfly on everything.

The plants started to grow and vine and climb and then.... mould and fur and grey. I have been unleashing a caterpillar carnage every morning on my strawberries and have abandoned organic gardening to attempt to control the sport cycle of the grey mould.

The greenfly however... they can't be treated until the chillies, peppers and strawbs have finished flowering. Flicking them off one by one while muttering 'littlegreenbastards' under my breath is proving both time consuming and detrimental to mental health.

The force that through the green fuse...

And so, to the garden.

We inherited a square lawn, a border of decorative stones, a paved patio and a rubble strew site of a long deceased shed from the former tenants. The garden had not been touched since being laid by the developers ten years ago.

The challenge is to create a garden with height, colour and variety on a tiny, tiny budget and with absolutely no experience whatsoever. At this point I feel the need to genuflect before the great and glorious Monty Don and the newly formatted Gardener's World, which has been invaluable to a green fingered n00b such as myself. *moment of contemplation on the benevolent botanical bohemian and all who follow him*

It took us 3 months to clear one length of the garden of decorative stones. Ugly, ugly things and concealing a not insignificant amount of cat shit. Then we had to hydrate the parched, packed, clay like soil and hope to the Great Monty that whatever we plant in it will hold.

So far that border contains 4 lavender bushes, a voracious thyme, a cheeky mint, a valiant oregano, a lush Rosemary, wildflowers, anemones, begonias, sunflowers, fuschia, cornflowers, snapdragons, sweet pea, honeysuckle, clematis, phlox and 3 pumpkin plants. *wipes brow* A divan base was turned into a vegetable bed where carrots, beetroot, onions and rocket fight bravely against the onslaught of the Cat Bastards. Tomatoes and cucumber flourish in a cold farm, potatoes (two varieties) are going mental in their planters, the petit pois have the most amazingly delicate flowers and are snaking healthily up their supportive canes, radish are poking their heads above the soil and chillies reside indoors in a large trug with some very healthy sweet pepper. Tubs of geranium, anemone, lobelia, busy lizzie, cottage pinks, strawberry and creeping alpines complete the line up against the fence and under the windows. Small Roar has a tub of cornflowers and two tubs of sunflowers sending up their sweet shoots in his own garden trug.

Most of the veg has been grown from seed in a B&Q value propagator on a windowsill. Some of the plants in the border and tubs have been gifts from people who found my enthusiasm endearing. I've been given seeds, bulbs and seedlings by those who have too many of their own, creating a mental 'leftover' display in my garden.There is something incredibly liberating and nurturing about sowing, growing and propagating from scratch- too see a thriving plant bearing fruit, or a vegetable put down strong roots. When your body fails to produce a life it is also a healing process to plant, grow and sustain life in a garden. Incredibly cathartic really.

On that note, Dylan says it best.