Helen From down the well is taking part in The Colours of Africa Challenge. The challenge is to create an A4 sized piece of textile art, which will be used to raise funds for a nursery in South Africa.

Click HERE for all the challenge details. The deadline is December 2009. Do-able. I’m doing it, won’t you?

It is school holidays, and thus I have not been stitching.

Scrap Heap Challenge

I have been moderating the Hall Family Inaugural Scrap Heap Challenge. Every day the boys make something from crap and craft items around the house; no dismantling of appliances or toys allowed. Moo is involved too, but is doing more girly 4 year old appropriate challenges like cutting snowflakes out of paper.

The dining table is scrap heap central and looks like a bomb has hit it. Every night we eat tea in front of the telly and watch the show. Our standards of family life are rapidly slipping. The kids think this is great. We have had the amphibious vehicle challenge; the bathroom floor was/is still awash. Today is catapult day. What have I started?

The Bread and Butter Appreciation Society.

We thought we would have a go at making bread and butter from scratch. We did grow some wheat once, but the birds ate it all. So we bought some wheat to grind it into flour, and we bought some cream to churn into butter. We did the butter two ways – half the cream in a glass jar and marble (child powered), the other half in the Kenwood Chef. Surprisingly the glass jar method was almost as quick as the electric. Moo helped me pat the butter into shape, and voila! Butter!

The wheat grinding – in a mortar and pestle and between two rocks – was less successful. Hours of noisy, messy, child powered grinding produced some gritty greyish looking muck, so we used wholemeal flour from a packet instead. Which is of course, what I had planned all along, but I thought it would be interesting for them to realise that food doesn’t just magically appear. Jimmy read out the bread ingredients – is that all there is in bread? – Moo helped measure, they both kneaded the dough and Tom took himself off to polish his skills as an illustrator (his current plan for a career).

God’s other son

Tom and I had a very confusing discussion yesterday about God’s other son, John. We are not religious, but I have explained as much as I know about various religions, so they can be religious when they grow up, if they so choose. Anyhow, we were driving along and -

Tom: I thought God’s son was Jesus?

Me: Yes, why?

Tom: the sign on the church back there said God’s son is John

After much back and forth, arguing doctrine (lack of knowledge never stops an opinionated argument in this family), I work out he means the Baptist church on the corner. Now I don’t know much about Baptists, but I could pretty much guarantee they don’t think there is a second Son of God. Much confusing, rather heated, discussion ensues, accompanied by Moo singing (badly) her version of the ‘Baby Jesus song’ (Silent night), until we drive back past the church where Tom shows me- with that ‘you are such a dickhead, mum’ attitude – the incontrovertible evidence:

For God so loved the world he sent us his son John 3.15

A full stop would not go astray, Mr Baptist Church Sign putter-upper.

Da Vinci

We went to get a bit of culture into us at the Da Vinci Machines exhibition, but Moo was not included in the price of a family admission. Given I don’t think a 4yo girl would get much from the exhibition and be worth the additional cost, Moo and I broke ranks and wandered around the (free) Art Gallery looking at the Renoirs, Picassos and such. Moo was very well behaved, but I wish she was quieter. At one stage she had a teenage girl in giggles, as she stood with her headed tilted on the side and announced: ‘I think the Art Gallery put this up sideways’. According to Matt, the exhibition was pretty disappointing – light on and not worth the money. We all had more fun at the museum afterwards looking at the Charles Darwin exhibit, the stick insect babies, and some Aboriginal grinding stones – which looked a lot more like grinding stones than the ones we found in the garden for our experiment.

So, with all the school holiday shenanigans, I doubt I will be blogging much for the next week or so…

Sharon at Casaubon’s book has written a nice piece on handwork. Warning: she is wordier even than me, but a good read, nonetheless. J

Wordier than I am usually, anyway.

And a big thanks to my mate Doreen for the lovely threads and needlework kit she sent me!

…but you can’t beet a root.*

recipe

We had beetroot stacking up from the CSA veggie box, so I decided to make a beetroot and orange salad for dinner.

This is exactly what it looks like: orange, beetroot, red onion, olives, coriander (cilantro), rocket (arugula), and Darwin lettuce (a slow to bolt, heating tolerant variety, available from Eden Seeds). This was topped with toasted pine nuts and a small amount of BBQ lamb steak, finely sliced (not pictured). The kids ate it all except the rocket and onion. I served it with Turkish bread and homemade hummus on the side.

Pink wee free white house

While I am very please to hear the Obama family have started a veggie garden at the white house, I was disappointed to hear they aren’t growing beetroot, because the President doesn’t like it (or so Peter Cundall wrote in Organic gardening magazine). I will have to send him the recipe for this salad. It’s great, mate – but maybe he doesn’t like pink wee.

A dyeing failure

I thought it would be interesting to see how well beetroot dyes cloth and thread without a mordant. It stains t-shirts and cloth napkins with ease. It didn’t work. The colour washed out – with only a ’shadow of a stain’.

* This is an old Aussie joke. Aussies (generally) love beetroot – especially on hamburgers. A root is a rather crass term for sexual intercourse (sorry net nanny – I’m at it again). It can be used in much the same way as one would use the F word, or the word shag. eg: Geez, mate, your truck engine’s rooted. Or, Wanna root? It’s rather red-neck.

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Warning: This is a non-textile related post. People annoyed by Prius driving, solar panel installing, humanure using (I’m kidding), composting toilet installing, tree hugging neo-hippies should stop reading now and come back another day. (Not that we own a Prius – we don’t have that much money.)

The weekend of tree planting went very well. So well in fact I doubt I can wring any amusing anecdotes from it.

Ancient history.

Last year Matt and I bought 15 acres of agriculturally marginal farmland near Urbenville in Northern NSW – a two hour drive from Brisbane. We bought it because we have been priced out of the Brisbane housing market; because it fulfils a long held dream to plant lots of trees; and it will be somewhere to retire to, or hide when the earth collapses under the pile of garbage humans produce. This is the shed we built:

The grand tour of the ‘mouseleum’

There were a significant number of dead mice and at least twice as much mouse-poo in the shed when we got there. Matt had mouse-proofed the shed with expanding foam, and had trapped a number on them in the shed, obviously. pee-eeuww.

The bedroom (Jimmy and Tom are required to share the foldout sofa bed) and the living area (which is where the tractor normally lives).

The Pantechnicon of dreams

It was a bit muddy underfoot, but not raining. We took spare clothes and made the first change of clothes about 30 minutes after arriving. The kids found the one largish puddle, and Jimmy decided the best way to ensure he wouldn’t fall over was to pull Tom down with him. While berating him for his foolishness and finding them both clean clothes I noticed Moo (who had witnessed all this from the sidelines) deciding to wade into the centre of said puddle, and promptly fall over. So, because we did not have a pantechnicon of spare clothes trundling behind us, I hung all the wet and muddy clothes on a clothesline and recycled them dirty onto the children as they (clothes and kids) dried. The gumboots were worth their weight in gold.

This is not something I often say…

…but I was wr…wr…wr…wrong when I told Matt I didn’t think we needed a tractor. Bloody hell the soil is clay-ey. At home we have sandy, dead, water repellent shit, but at least it is easy to fork a bit of manure and compost through it. Matt spent ages with the augur (see above photo) on the back of the tractor digging large holes, which we subsequently back filled. We then dug small holes in the centre for the seedlings, packed the clay back around the roots and mulched with a combination of sugar cane mulch (local organic waste) and grass we had slashed in the surrounding paddock. We then used the super-dooper tree guards we bought from the greening Australia nursery. It took about twice as long as I thought it would. Everything always does.

Alfresco.

We ate our meals, al fresco. A bit too bloody fresco, if you ask me.

The toilet and other ‘facilities’

I am always struck by the notion that when camping, I always strive to make everything as comfortable and homelike as possible, to the point where I wonder why I bothered even leaving home in the first place. When we first started camping on the block (when we built the shed) all I wanted was running water instead of having to fill containers. Now we have a water tank installed near the shed we have running water on tap, but I’m thinking it would be nice if it was heated, and attached to a shower.

Similarly the toilet – at first it was a hole in the ground. Then Matt made a toilet from an old kitchen chair and a toilet seat. Luxury. But now I’m thinking there must be something better…

By the way, Matt dug the toilet pit with the augur this time and it made a rather large hole. Which was handy from a speed point of view (Matt can never understand why I insist the toilet is the first thing he needs to do upon arrival) but meant the toilet seat was perched rather precariously over the hole. It added a certain frisson of danger to doing a wee in the dark, but one I could do without. Visions of red-back spiders and/or snakes curled up under the seat don’t help either. I’m sure if I fell in, bum first, Matt would rescue me, just as soon as he stopped laughing.

Helpful children.

By dint of taking no toys, a few books and no TV or electronic games (or electricity for that matter) we had three willing helpers. Moo helped by drying dishes (not something she does at home, mind you); she thought it was ‘fun’. The boys collected mulch, sorted out the tree guards, collected firewood, made cups of tea in the billy. They actually enjoy helping, which is good. And there was plenty of time for them to muck around.

I recently bought Eco colour by India Flint. Wonderful, inspiring – not that I’ve done much other than wander around the garden poking plants and saying hmmmmm…

Today we went shopping at the Greening Australia nursery at The Gap (I’m glad I don’t live at The Gap – I couldn’t give my address without sniggering. But it would be better than living at Mount Mee). I bought some native indigo (Indigofera australis). Check back in 6 years or so for the harvest.

Indigofera australis

We are going tree planting this (long) weekend. We are taking gumboots (wellies), raincoats, and spare clothes. Who said I was a slow learner?

85 tube stock of native, indigenous, plants.

I’ll tell you all about it next week, hopefully this time sans
vomit and shit and tears…

No. It’s a Bag!

From: The Encyclopaedia of Crochet techniques by Jan Eaton. It supposed to be made in stripes using scraps of yarn from the (as yet nonexistent) stash. I decided to use a single variegated yarn as. The fact that the variegation on the stripes works so well is dumb luck (and the other side of the bag looks worse).

Reading: Kate Atkinson. One Good Turn

What a great book. I have read all but her most recent novel; she is a fabulous writer. Case Histories and One Good Turn would be, in my opinion, her most accessible novels. Emotionally Weird was my least favourite, but I must reread it. Behind the scenes at the museum was the first of her novels that I read, and it thrilled me. If you click on the links you can read extracts from each novel. Oddly, I rarely read fiction written by men, and I rarely listen to music by women, but…

Listening: Lily Allen. It’s not me, it’s you.

I generally don’t listen to music by people born during the 1980s and 1990s. Mainly because much of the music I like was being written in the 1980s, or the 70s, and sometimes even the 90s. But I make an exception for this chick; especially as she puts the apostrophes (see here and here for why this is Very Important J ) in the right place on her album covers.

I made the mistake of listening to this in the car with the children (I should have checked the CD cover). Tom has not wet his pants for a good five years, but, oh boy, he came close, he was laughing so hard when he heard the song ‘fuck you‘. He said: ‘it’s like an angel singing swear words’. As you can imagine, my language is exemplary, so they had never heard the word before.

Stitching: crochet. I can increase and decrease. I can do shells, popcorns and bobbles, and I can work ‘in the round’. I can even almost follow a pattern for a bag. I told Matt this was a beret for his birthday. He was not impressed.

I’ve started a new quilt; machine pieced squares using all the batik, hand-dyed, and faux hand-dyed fabrics I own. Some of these were gifts from friends (Hi Marg!). Others were mistakes – ‘I just know this is going to work with…oops’, and others were irresistible purchases when I was sure that quilting was going to be the crafty ‘thing’ I would focus on for the rest of my life.

I have the machine set up in my ’studio space’ (HA) so I can do a few whenever I get a chance. This pathetically small area is why I am not using the embellisher, or drawing or anything else. Once I have packed away the sewing machine and set up the embellisher I’m exhausted and need to have a lie down with a Bex (do these still exist?) and a cuppa.

I discovered something too. I discovered that the ¼ inch foot on my sewing machine does NOT produce ¼ inch seams. (Remember please that we use metric here, so I am not as familiar with an inch – or six – as you may be). I have made maybe 10 quilts and every time the blocks were not the correct size I always blamed my poor (quick and dirty) rotary cutting skills (I use the term skill loosely here). However I was very accurate with my cutting this time (perhaps practise does make perfect?) and yet when I put the first block together the last two sides were too long. I was flummoxed, and unpicked and measured and re-stitched and swore and scratched my head. And then it hit me – the SEAM is not ¼ inch – add another 1/8^th of an inch. DOH! I can’t work out what 1/8 plus ¼ inch is – how on earth do kids in America do math, poor little buggers) – covert to metric like everyone else, you fiends.

Of course I am so used to relying on the stupid foot that I kept forgetting to subtract the 1/8 inch so I have designed a bespoke (how I love this word) 1/4inch marker for the machine using a bit of sticky tape and a post-it note flag, and a permanent marker line on the foot itself. Problem solved. I have also worked out why I could never hand piece and machine piece on the same quilt and get the same size block.

Instead of showing you the next 6 inches of crochet, I thought I’d wax lyrical about lunch. We spent the morning at the Manly Farmers’ markets, on the Moreton Bay foreshore. Luckily they are only on once a month, as we manage to spend more than the fortnight’s food budget on gourmet, artisan and (occasionally) organic irresistible food. Mostly we have a fairly standard diet – meat and veggies, chicken and veggies; salad; chickpeas; lentils; rice. I manage to knock up rissoles and veggies on a depressingly regular basis. Rissoles are a cross between a meatball and a hamburger patty. The Returned Servicemen Leagues Club (RSL) is also known as the rissole club– slur RSL quickly. I won’t tell you what some crass people call them, but it rhymes with rissoles and starts with an A…

But occasionally I get the urge to go all Nigella Lawson or Maggie Beer or Stephanie Alexander. Actually more like the last two than Nigella because I don’t think I look like I want to have sex with whatever I’m dishing up, or tip my boobs into the meal. So I get all excited about regional produce, organic this and artisanal that. I usually get over it pretty quickly, because I have to cook 21 meals a week (don’t we all) plus snacks and there is just so much time one can spend in the kitchen without chucking a wok at a wall. This is why I don’t have a food blog. Anyhow…

We had lots of fresh local fruit and veggies already from the CSA box. But we bought strawberries, apples, kipfler potatoes and broccolini. Matt didn’t get the memo about regional food and bought Peruvian asparagus. But I guess Peruvian asparagus farmers have to eat too, and I won’t bother banging on about food miles to him or you.

A loaf of wholemeal, multi-grain organic sourdough, plus a $5.00 (gulp) 100 gram tub of Gympie Farm cultured salted butter to go with it. Yes – $50 a kilo is extremely expensive butter, but we aren’t re-enacting Last Tango in Paris here, just enjoying proper bread and butter as a treat. The butter is in the top left hand corner, centre photo. Apparently Australian butter is more yellow than European butter, because the cows eat grass all year ’round here. So I’ve read anyway. This butter is the bee’s knees; the duck’s nuts; bloody good stuff – made by a Frenchman called Camille. He makes good (award winning) goats cheese too, but they have been classed by our plebeian children (and Matt) as ‘too goaty’. We bought marinated olives and Kingaroy Cheese triple cream brie, plus Matt’s current favourite Hot Ranga sauce. (A Ranga is an orang-utan or someone with red hair. Matt is a Ranga.)

We had to chuck a few prawns on the Barbie. We do not call them shrimp here, even though Paul Hogan, in our most famous tourism advert, suggested it long ago. I marinated some supermarket Danish fetta in olive oil, lemon zest and juice (from our tree), local garlic and lemon thyme from the garden. It was pretty good. I also made mayonnaise from scratch, using eggs straight from under the chook – I guess a chook’s bum is similar to room temperature (womb temperature?) I don’t really know what the mayonnaise making fuss is all about – it is pretty easy really. Not as easy as opening a jar, but it was only 10 minutes or so of whisking 2 egg yolks, oil and lemon juice together. No biggie. All the whisking was good for my inchoate tuckshop lady arms too (otherwise known as bingo-wings).

My favourite part of lunch was the tomato salad (tomato, olive oil, slices of garlic and basil from the garden) with the bread and butter. Oh, and I was quite keen on all the washing up afterwards, too.

I made mini strawberry pavs for tonight’s pudding with the leftover eggwhites from the mayonnaise. Food wank over. Now I need to get my hand off it long enough to get dinner sorted. Rissoles, anyone?