Getting some sewing done

I've had a bad track record sewing in Spain - after all, the kit I started there in 1983 only got framed this year...

So this time I thought I'd tackle something easy and took an Ehrman kit that I'd picked up at a car boot the other week. It proved ideal - I normally prefer to do something where I can make decisions as I go along, but I am enjoying having a project where you simply sew where the appropriate colour has been painted on the canvas. It's a bit like painting by numbers! The only difficulty is that the painted canvas areas for two of the shades of green are very difficult to tell apart - to my surprise, I found it easier to see the difference in the early evenings, rather than bright sunshine. Since getting home, I've printed out the photo, which is proving a help too.

I did a little every day, while listening to a good book (I especially enjoyed the ubiquitous The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Lindsay Davis's Falco story, A Body in the Bath House) and watching the world go by.

I'm making steady progress - though it's probably hard to see what I've done from these shots, taken on 2 September before I started, and on the 14th.





In fact. I've liked having the painted pattern so much that I bought some acrylic paints from the supermarket yesterday and am going to try designing a canvas myself!

A virtually computerless holiday

I'd intended devoting some attention to this while on holiday in Nerja in Spain, but unlike previous years we couldn't pick up any free wifi on the apartment's balcony. So I'll have to catch up now.

There were plenty of internet cafes - and indeed bars - with cheap or free wifi, but I found that was always eager to switch the laptop off the moment I'd finished work-related tasks, checked my email and made the odd free voip call.

One location was a fairly serious cybercaff packed with computers - we're members there and it is very efficient, but we tended to favour a new and smaller place, run by a friendly Estonian family who have a sideline in selling beautiful Estonian wooden mats etc (several of which have accompanied us back as souvenirs or pressies).




There was also a very friendly cafe, Bagels & Tapas, where we did try working once but it was hard to concentrate while drinking cold beer and eating their excellent chips! Instead this became our preferred place for making phone calls via the laptop - free via VOIP Cheap - though of course you need to spend money in the cafe to access the free wifi to make the call!

In fact I really enjoyed being without constant web/email access - there was so much more time in the days! I'm aware how much time I've spent (wasted) in front of the computer since getting home, surfing, emailing, sorting photos etc. Time sort of zooms by, and sitting down at my desk for a minute turns into an hour. So I'm determined to learn the lesson from Spain - being in front of the computer is fine when I'm working, but I'm going to start setting a kitchen countdown timer to 20 minutes when it's for something more aimless!

Harder than building real bridges?

As I'm interested in both games and civil engineering, I couldn't resist buying a game called Viaduct at a recent car boot.

It looked quite easy - you throw a dice and then place or remove pieces accordingly, to create a continuous viaduct running across the board.



Having tried it for the first time yesterday we found that it's surprisingly difficult to achieve the aim. The pieces always seem to be precisely the wrong length to fill the required gap and you have to be pretty efficient in your route, or you run out of pieces. I can see why people on the excellent Board Game Geek site didn't think it was a great game and only gave it an average of 5/10 but I must admit that I did enjoy playing it anyway, even if our resulting viaducts lacked a certain elegance...

Enjoying the fruits of various people's labours including our own

We've had some good days out recently, including two relatively local trips last week to meet up with various friends holidaying in the area.

One day involved a trip to Ely to meet a friend who was house-hunting in Cambridge. We visited the cathedral and then some antique shops as well as a pub and an award-winning tea shop. To my surprise I found a box of new miniature knitted clothes for dolls and bears tucked away in one of the antiques shops and so bought a dress as well as two jumpers as I was fairly confident that these were the right sizes. However do people manage to knit things this small? They turned out to be a perfect fit for two of my bears and the red jumper and hat are ready to be given to one of my god-daughter Poppy's bears.



Poppy also loves little bears and recently gave me Georgia and Gerald to join my clan. They are pictured with one of the chairs that Poppy made a while ago so that my bears would be comfy. They also brought some tasty bear-sized food with them in the form of teensy jars filled with amazingly detailed corn, grapes and pretzels - again, I can't imagine how people can make such intricate things.



The other day out was with friends who were holidaying in Holt. We went to Felbrigg Hall's Chilli Fiesta - the Technomage being addicted to Mexican food. It was surprisingly busy, despite mostly horrible weather (thank goodness for the large copper beech tree that afforded shelter for our picnic) and there was a good range of spicy produce. We don't often buy things like this when we see them in delis as we can make many of them ourselves more cheaply, but it's nice to support local producers, especially when you can buy direct.



I chose Jules & Sharpie's lime & green pepper jelly - as that was a combination we'd never come across - and he picked Cambridge Chilli Farm's Nagalade (ie a marmalade made with very hot naga chillies) as it's a variety we're less likely to grow ourselves. We rounded our purchases off with some Lymn Bank Farm cheddar in extra strong, onion and black pepper varieties. We've bought from them before and very good it is too. To wash it down, we got lashings of Breckland Orchard's ginger beer with chilli and the final purchase was a dozen Fresno chillies as our chilli crop is a bit feeble this year.

We attempted deep frying eight of the Fresnos - coated in batter and stuffed with cheese - but the batter wouldn't stick so it was a bit of a fiasco. Must do some reading to work out what we did wrong. The remaining four joined some freshly harvested tomatoes and oregano from our garden as well as some shop-bought onions and garlic in a rather nice spicy salsa last night.






We also sampled our first home-grown potatoes, some Pink Fir Apples, which the Technomage described as "some of the best new potatoes I've ever had". They really were excellent - tasty, firm and delightfully knobbly.



However, I think I harvested them a bit too early so perhaps didn't get the maximum crop. I hadn't realised they were maincrops and not due to mature quite yet. Luckily, several more plants are still growing in other pop-up bins so there are more to come as well as some Charlottes. And we've still got the teensy ones left to eat from this batch.

Back to sewing

I've been neglecting sewing of late but am feeling re-inspired after my purchases at a car boot sale in Kennet on Sunday.

The latest project of many projects that I'm neglecting involves 25 squares, the idea being that 13 will have a flower and 12 have a plain colour in a textured stitch. But this is requiring quite a bit of concentration in copying designs to graph/squared paper in addition to the effort in keeping count while I sew.

So I couldn't resist buying an unused preprinted Ehrman kit called Spring when I saw it at the car boot and got it for £4.50. It'll be ideal for when I don't feel like concentrating and should also be good practice for seeing how to do the shading of flower petals properly.



My other sewing-related purchase was a bag of 17 skeins of Anchor Tapisserie wool for just 30p including several in colours I hadn't got and seven in shades of grey for a project I've got in mind to start and then neglect at some time in the dim and distant future.

My most nostaligic purchase at the car book wasn't sewing related - it was three empty third-of-a-pint milk bottles for £1, bringing back memories of infant school break times. I remember that I used to hate it if I ended up with a warm one that had been standing by the radiator!



Kennet is a really excellent car boot, if a little difficult to find as:
a) we muddle Kennet and nearby Kentford and generally head for the wrong one
b) the signposting is confusing so we take a convoluted route
c) it's only once a fortnight therefore we generally try to go on the wrong Sunday.
It's a year or so since we'd been there and was just as good as we remembered - last year's star bargain was a new DAB radio for £3. I also came back this week with half a dozen lovely strong perennials, all favourites of mine, as well as some bamboo to help keep my tomatoes upright and a couple of stocking fillers for my Mum's birthday so it was a good haul.

Disposing of the final things from the back of the pantry

The Mouse Incident led to us unearthing all sorts of jars and packets lurking at the back of the pantry - mostly unappealing soups and sauces, odd ounces left in the bottom of bags of pasta and a surprising number of packets of brown rice. (I periodically fancy brown rice salad, hoping to recreate one I used to buy from a health food shop. I never get round to making it, continue eating Basmati or easy cook white for normal purposes, forget I've got the brown and buy some more next time the fancy takes me.)

A crate of things has been sitting on the worksurface for weeks (months in fact) pending use or binning and yesterday we finally got round to throwing out the things we no longer fancy, such as a jar of African black-eyed bean relish seven years out of date, an equally old and rather odd sauce for couscous and couple of undated jars of other people's chutney in jars that hadn't been filled quite full enough. The revolting corroded state of the lid of one of them confirmed the wisdom of our decision that the bin was a better destination than our stomachs.



But the very old things did yield some pleasant surprises, in particular something called Symington's Table Cream.



It sounds like something from a bygone era - and indeed I came across this 1950s ad online - but it was a mere three years and two months out of date, so it's certainly from this millennium...



It turned out to be rather nice. But I better not buy any more (assuming it's still made) or it'll probably sit in the pantry for another five years...

My lovely new rug has been taken over

I thought that my beautiful new rug was just for me, positioned as it is on my side of the bed....



...but my dozens of miniature Little Gem bears seem to have other plans...



They apparently think that instead of one 6' by 4' rug for me, I've bought them 117 little individual colour co-ordinated ones...





And have all staked a claim...











...though one multicoloured bear didn't know quite where to sit ...



I'd been looking for a colour block rug for ages and can highly recommend the company I ended up using - Apple Rugs. The rug was much cheaper than the same one elsewhere, they replied to a query straightaway even though it was a Sunday (the other firm never repled to the same query) and the delivery was very speedy.

A new use for Suffolk Weekend Time

I'm distraught at the idea that I can only repeat my daily mantra "the days are getting longer" for a couple more days. June always seems far too early in the "summer" for the run-in to autumn to begin.

I think the days getting shorter would be a lot more bearable if it continued to stay light in the evening - it seems such a waste that it's light at 4-something when I for one don't take advantage of it.

When we first came to Suffolk, we were generally only here at weekends while working in London. Getting up at 6am on a Monday was horrible, so we invented Suffolk Weekend Time (SWT), which involved putting our watches forward on a Friday evening so that the Monday start was at a much more civilised 7am.

It might be a tall order to persuade the powers that be to adopt an additional nationwide hour change in June, so I guess we'll have to go it alone again. SWT - renamed Suffolk Double Summer Spanish Time - will be introduced in our house on a trial basis from June 21st. So even at the end of August the sun won't set 'til 8.49pm, giving a nice long evening in the garden in the sunshine (one can but hope). OK, so it won't rise until 7.11am but that doesn't bother me as I'll only just be stirring to consciousness...

Bemoaning the faults that develop in digital cameras

The Technomage's old Canon digital camera has just stopped taking pictures - or more precisely it's started taking psychadelic shots like this.



This prompted us to run through all the problems we've had with the various models we've owned over the dozen or so years since we started moving away from 35mm. All but one still remain in use and have given years of service - but virtually all had a trip to the camera doctor relatively early in their lives.

Our film cameras were relatively trouble-free - in my 20 years or more of using Yashica SLRs I can recall only one fault, while he had no real problems with his Olympus ones. My beautiful tiny Minox 35GT was perfect - but then it got stolen. Even my lovely 1960s Kodak Retinette 1B needed only occasional servicing and I bet it would still work if I ran a film through it now.

But digital is another matter...though luckily we've managed to get most faults fixed cheaply, under warranty or under a product recall notice for a known problem.

My Nikon Coolpix 950 was a top of the range, £750 camera when it was launched in 1999 (I paid about £450 once prices had dropped). Its selection dial failed - fortunately just inside the warranty period - but since then it has been a great camera, especially for special tasks - particularly 360 degree panoramas, macro and copying 35mm slides and negatives. Its swivel body design is a classic that I wish would be reintroduced on something with a few more megapixels.

All three of my / my Dad's gorgeous tiny Sony U models - U20, U30 and U40 - have been back to Sony for free repair having developed the same known CCD fault one after the other. But again, they still take decent pics and remain in regular use (and are often admired - they too have a great design).

Then shutter button popped off my two-year-old Sony H5 recently though we managed to get a new part for a fiver from Hong Kong and - fingers crossed - it seems OK now.

The Technomage's first Canon was an A5 - its battery compartment failed and it now lies broken in a drawer. His second was an A90 which decided to put a spot on all pics and so the money was refunded by Argos and he replaced it with the A95 that has failed today. Luckily, I spotted the similarity with effects of the Sony CCD problem and it turns out that Canon has a similar free repair programme and so should fix it.

So that just leaves his new Canon SX20-IS, which seems very robust...but only time will tell.

Don't like woodpeckers anymore

We'd been delighted in the last week or two to see a greater spotted woodpecker coming regularly into the garden and feeding from the fat balls.



And we've been equally delighted that blue tits have returned once again to the nest box outside our kitchen door.

But we've just come back from a couple of nights away and to our bewilderment noticed that the opening to the nest box has grown dramatically.


Before...



After...



We've come to the conclusion that the culprit must be the woodpecker - we don't think a squirrel could get up there very easily. I wonder how long it took it to enlarge the hole? Wish we'd been here - we'd have been rattling on the window to scare it off. I know it's all part of nature and the woodpecker has its own young to feed etc etc but we're very fond of our hard-working little blue tits and would rather the woodpecker stuck to the fat balls.

Fortunately both adult blue tits are still in residence - and still arriving with mouthfuls of juicy caterpillars, so we can only conclude that at least one of their young is still alive.

Next task: to go and top up the fat ball feeder in the hope that the woodpecker will be satisfied with that...and then build a new nest box for next year - this time reinforced with lots of steel mesh...

Méthode Sodastreamoise

Heston Blumenthal's Feasts series on Channel 4 makes very entertaining viewing even if 99.9999% of his astonishingly imaginative ideas are beyond the reach of us mere mortals.

As I'm not up to edible wallpaper and food that hovers, I was delighted that one of the items in his 80s Feast could be replicated in seconds.

All we had to do was put some wine into our Sodastream, press the gas button a few times and there it was, miraculously transformed into "champagne".



Heston had got busy with the fizzy on some of that 1980s classic, Blue Nun - and found that the city workers he tried it on tended to prefer it to Champagne! Our attempt involved the remains of a bottle of Aussie Chardonnay and perfectly acceptable it was too - and a lot cheaper than most fizz.

We've long been fans of the Sodastream, preferring our soft drinks (usually high-juice squash) to have bubbles but not wanting to buy bottled fizzy water. However, it's getting harder and harder to buy the traditional gas cylinders as Sodastream is now primarily based on a different system and switching would involve us in considerable investment in new equipment.

For now, we've accumulated about eight of the original cylinders and exchange any empties for full ones whenever either of us visits the dentist. The nearby Robert Dyas at Chancery Lane in London is one of the few places in the known universe that still stocks them and long may they continue.

Going to the pictures in a town without a cinema

We don't seem to get to the cinema very often these days. About 15 miles away, there's a multiplex and a much nicer smaller cinema (recently taken over by Picture House and refurbished) and we make occasional visits further afield to an IMAX for spectaculars like Avatar in 3D or Star Trek, but we often lament the fact that there's nothing closer to hand.

Or at least there wasn't. But we're now able to have a change from films on TV and see them just a couple of miles away - albeit only once a month - and it's all thanks to an excellent scheme called Suffolk Digital Cinema, which loans out the equipment to local communities and points them in the direction of where to hire the films.

We'd been aware of it for a while and had originally looked into signing up our little village, but concluded that the audience here wouldn't be big enough. So we were delighted to find that the nearby leisure centre now puts on the films. We missed the first two or three for various reasons but showed up on Friday and paid our £3 each to see Hairspray, which we knew little about - it turned out to be very good fun.

The screening was very relaxed and friendly. There were probably about 30 people there, half adults and half girls of about 10 or 11 - who gave up on the chairs and mostly went to lie on the floor at the front, which isn't something you can do at a normal cinema!

A new sewing project

I've just started a new cushion cover - one that I can design as I go along, to suit my whims and avoid the boredom of having a project where everything is predetermined. There will be 25 identically sized squares (with narrow black borders) and the idea is that half will have a flower, with the rest each being just one or two colours done using the textured stitches that I tried out on samplers.



One square will be a sunflower - I've done a practice version of that one already.



The others will be initially based on designs from various books - particularly some that my parents' neighbour, Auntie Dorothy, kindly gave me earlier this month.



I've also copied out a few flowers from one of her other books and am trying to pick an easy one for the first square to give me confidence. This one is possibly a bit small as it's only 25 holes wide whereas the squares are about 50, but I've others to choose from.



Once I've done a few, I hope to try designing a flower myself from one of my photographs...but that may be a bit ambitious! To help with planning, I've splashed out a whole £2 on 36 crayons and 40 pens. I don't think I've ever had such a large set of felt-tips before and would have loved them when I was little!

Big plant and big plants

I've been very negligent about this of late, in part because of spending the week before last in Germany at a very big exhibition about construction and mining plant...



As well as being a very big plant exhibition it had some very big items of plant...



I then came back stuffed full of a cold, so vegged out last weekend and didn't at first notice that I had a very big plant of my own here. An old amaryllis bulb that had been starting to show signs of renewed life had had put on an astonishing foot or so of growth in just a couple of weeks and two magnificent red flowers about 7" across had appeared.



I wonder what made it come to life now? I'm sure it's at least two years since it had flowered - I've completely ignored it during that time but I'm determined to look after it better now in gratitude for its display! Letting the leaves grow through the summer and then putting it in the dark seem to be the next steps, according to Direct Bulb's clear instructions.

The other rather alien plant lurking in the conservatory-type room (not grand enough to be an actual conservatory) is this.



It's a groundnut/peanut that I planted a few weeks ago and haven't yet got round to moving to a bigger pot. Not convinced that it's going to be a cost-effective way of getting peanuts (as the value ones in Tesco are only 27p) but it promises to be interesting!

Taking a mouse for a walk

Our Easter weekend was somewhat disrupted by the discovery that, after a gap of a few years, we had a wood mouse visiting once again.

This time, it wasn't content with setting up a maisonette in my bedside diary cupboard - shredded notebook on the top shelf as a nest, with a larder down below containing lots of the wheat from one of those heated pad things you warm in the microwave (must have taken her dozens of trips upstairs). Inexplicably, that mouse also removed the earbud bits from some rather jolly turquoise headphones left dangling on the floor - which completely flummoxed me when I tried to wear them the next morning. Perhaps she wanted speakers for a sound system?

Anyway, this time the mouse discovered the pantry. When we found 'traces' on day 1, the Technomage reinforced the door with tape, bits of wood and wire mesh - but to no avail. By next day, it had bypassed the traps, nibbled more of the door frame, got in again...



...and stayed there, causing a certain amount of leaping-out-of-skins as we caught sight of a sudden movement.

A chance conversation with a pest controller at a car boot sale yesterday introduced us to the idea of honey as the most irresistible cuisine for mousies, so three traps were primed and left in the pantry, with the door blocked from the outside by a sheet of steel wedged in place by two heavy biscuit boxes full of piggy bank change.

Success! There was a very nervous looking little mouse in the smallest of the traps this morning.



We duly put the trap in a bucket and - mindful of warnings to avoid releasing it too close - set off across the border to the next county (actually only a few minutes walk but with the river as a useful extra barrier) where we opened the trap and admired its cuteness, with those lovely big eyes that wood mice have...



We watched as it then sized up the bucket walls...



...and to our amazement then jumped out and on to freedom.



The saga isn't quite over yet, as on Sunday we had to empty everything out of the pantry to dispose of or clean as appropriate - so the kitchen is still piled high, including many long-forgotten purchases. We had for the last few weeks been trying to run down supplies - cue old tins of mandarin oranges, strange flavours of cous-cous and rather odd curry sauces - but have found even more to use up now. Yesterday's Sainsbury's red pepper soup was still surprisingly edible despite being eight years out of date!

More cheese biscuits / biscuits for cheese

My second attempt was OK (made with flour, butter, Tesco's value soft cheese and a few bits of olive) but the consistency was more like pastry than biscuit.

The Technomage-cum-Chilimage therefore decided that it was his turn, and he, naturally, picked a spicy recipe. This is the one he used - Cheese Thins, from Chocolate & Zuccini. He used cheddar and made zillions. We topped a third with a few salt crystals, a third with a spicy mix and left the rest plain.

He reckons these are the first biscuits he's ever made, and jolly good they are too.



We scoffed four each while the tray was still too hot to touch but have showed a little bit more restraint since then - can't see them lasting very long though...

They are actually much cheesier than the original aim. Having lots of cheese is of course is a Very Good Thing and makes them very scrumptious, but we still want to perfect something that still leaves scope for putting cheese and chutney on top to serve, whereas these are just great on their own (though we're about to try a few topped with olive tapenade).

We've still got half of this batch to bake, but then the next attempt will perhaps be based on these but with less cheese and maybe a little oatmeal to see what that does to the texture.

I like this kind of cooking...very wicked....

The gang's all here

All four of our neighbouring Jacobs ewes have now had their lambs and it's clear why the one we called Chocolate looked so large when she was expecting - she's had triplets!



However one is very tiny and a bit wobbly...





so we're hoping that it is able to thrive despite having to compete for milk with two bigger siblings.



But it does at least seem to be getting the hang of gambolling!



The twin lambs that arrived first are growing fast....



...and the two single ones seem very content too.





Now we just need to decide what to call them all - a good thing about Jacobs sheep is that it's easy to tell them apart!