Salty Caramel Cupcakes

I *promise* this is not becoming a food blog but I have to rave a little about this recipe for Salted Caramel cupcakes:

If they don’t look good enough already they have this little secret in the middle:

They took me absolutely hours to make, I even made the sauce from scratch.
But they are the best thing I have ever baked:

in this one you can see that delicious caramel poking out the bottom… mmmmm:

Over to you:

• Have you ever tried salted caramel?
• Do you consider ‘baking’ as part of your creativity?
• Have you ever tried this recipe?!

Leave a comment; I’d love to hear from you!

International HOP Swap

First the stashbusting sew-a-long then the Map the Sewintists the next stage is participating in a blog swap!

Rachel at House of Pinheiro is hosting an International Craft Swap!

Rachel has paired me up with a person and I am going to make them a little something based on the information about that person I’ve been sent.  I just *hope* they will like what I make!  The theme is: nautical.

I got the information about my partner this week and I have until the 5th of April to get my item made and sent.  The rules state I should also include a little gift, maximum £3, or equivalent value.  We are being encouraged to use stash fabrics if we can too.

Here is the information I sent about myself, the stuff in italic is the writing frame from Rachel:

Information to help your swap partner make you a treat (favourite things, colours, interests, hobbies, likes and dislikes, any allergies etc)
Favourite things – my sewing machine, sunshine, books, great food
Colours – warm colours generally but am really excited to see your ideas so don’t be limited
Interests/hobbies – sewing, acting (amateur dramatics), travelling to warm places, organising things (!), cycling, films and being utter rubbish at knitting!
Likes and dislikes – I adore sweets/candy!  As for dislikes, I am very accepting and would feel delighted with anything made with me in mind.

Just to harp on with my ‘aren’t we lucky to all be part of this amazing community of sewists’  business – how nice is Rachel to organise this?  People are so kind.

So another giant step in to the Sewing World – I am so excited!

Over to you:

• Have you ever participated in a blog swap?
• Any ideas for what I could make on the nautical theme?
• What would you hope to receive on such a swap?

Leave a comment; I’d love to hear from you!

Bacon Meats Cake

This is not going to become a food blog – mainly because I don’t do the cooking at home. The joys of being married to a Modern European Man means that he does all the cooking. I think he might actually do the cooking because he can’t lower himself to eat my British culinary exploits – but if he does think that he is savvy enough not to share those thoughts with me!

Since I’ve had this blog I have been sharing my exploits on linky parties which are invariably populated by North Americans and I have seen an awful lot of food creations linked up. One thing which has caught my eye has been Bacon Cupcakes. Now my initial reaction is probably the same as yours: “this is wrong” but people are absolutely *raving* about these things on the blogosphere. Just to put this in historical context, we British used to mix meat and sweet stuff in pies in the 1700s – our Christmas favourite Mince Pie began this way:

So a few weekends ago I gave this a go. Now just to be clear, these recipes are not for a kind of ‘breakfast muffin’ where you have a deliberately savoury item mixed with something sweet to give a little flavour twist. No, these are full on sweet treats to be eaten as a pudding or dessert. Hmm. Interesting notion. I browsed lots of recipes and plunked for this one:

I also was quite taken with the candied bacon on these ones:

So I decided to put the two together.

As I was making them Mr Frog kept popping in to look over my shoulder. One minute I was cooking bacon, the next I was whisking a cake batter. On each return he began to look a little more concerned; this is a man who culturally eats frogs’ legs and snails. I began to worry.

Speaking of wrong, this is a photo of the frogs legs consumed at New Year at our friends house in France a few years ago – they were cooked before eating.

So, I’d cooked, candied, baked, whisked and was ready to assemble and… it still felt most strange.

Here is what they looked like:

And the verdict:

They weren’t unpleasant, we certainly weren’t gagging after each bite. They were just, well, wrong. The bacon tasted nice but gave an utterly wrong texture to the cakes and the stuff on the top was just too conspiculously ‘meaty’ even with all that sugar. The icing on its own was lovely, but just too sweet for the cake. It is probably a blessing we didn’t enjoy them, the calories in those things must have been through the roof!

If you are ever considering something unusual and thinking – ‘well I like all the things that have gone in to it, I am sure I’ll like it’ – you might want to reflect on my experience here!

Over to you:

• Have you had bacon cupcakes?
• What strange food combinations have you tried?
• Does this combination sound utterly wrong to you?!

Leave a comment; I’d love to hear from you!

privacy versus community

I am very careful with my online privacy.  I have seen colleagues and friends get in to scrapes on Facebook and other online media through injudicious sharing online; the sad thing is these people have broken no laws but almost anything, when displayed in the wrong way, can cast you in a poor light.  I strongly agree that teachers need to be role models, but also vehemently stand up for our right to be three dimensional people outside work; the balance is difficult to strike and I don’t pretend to always get it right.  Even if you don’t have a job which requires you to be perceived in a specific way, there is still something nice about having the control over which parts of you are shared with different people.

I have been reflecting on this because a new craze has come across the sewing community – mapping where we seamstresses live!  A blogger I didn’t know, another sewing scientist, came up with the idea and I saw it referenced somewhere last week and I have to say my initial reaction was ‘no way’ based on the above.  There were hardly any pins and I just thought this would never take off.  I also thought I wouldn’t want to share that level of detail with the information superhighway.  But it seemed to get bigger and bigger and bigger with so many of the blogs I read (and proverbial ‘‘big girls’) signing up.  They also, tantalisingly, were suggesting that it could lead to sewing meet ups in the local area from the information shared – this was getting truly exciting…

So I visited the original post and was amazed – it is now so full of pins!

View Larger Map

As I looked at the world view I suddenly started getting a bit emotional about the enormous worldwide sewing community we are all part of.  I thought it only exists because we all ‘put ourselves out there’ in terms of what we create and give to each other – inspiration, support, instruction, camaraderie, and more.  I saw myself in stark relief – so busy climbing up on my proverbial high horse being a drama queen that I was very nearly trampled to death by it.  What a stubborn old mule; I’m on the map.  Are you?

What do you think?

• Do you jealously protect your online identity?
• Are you on the map?
• Have you found anyone nearby thanks to the map?

Let me know, I’d love to hear from you!

Stashbusting update: February

I am still ploughing away at this stashbusting business.  I know I am meant to have identified the fabrics I will be using up and I haven’t actually got around to that, erm, sorry.  But I am doing the monthly challenges, this month was ‘making for others’.

February is my Step-Mother Nancy’s birthday and she adores cloth napkins.  I don’t really enjoy making napkins, there is just so much accuracy required along with lots of pressing and they look really easy to the recipient when in fact they take ages to make.    But I know she would really enjoy them, and actually use them so relented.  It also gave me a chance to give my new serger/overlocker a spin using the rolled hem function.

I wasn’t sure of the best way to corner a rolled hem napkin so I googled and who is the top link?  Only my favourite Craftsy instructor Amy Alan with this free tutorial!

The fabric I used was a two metre length of quilting cotton I bought at a Christmas sale for £5 a metre.  I got eight enormous dinner napkins out of the two metre length (they are 20 inches across which I think is pretty huge).  I made four for Nancy and four spares which will probably end up being given to my lovely sister Helen who was commenting how much she would like a set of napkins when I saw her over my birthday weekend.

I made a little drawstring bag for the napkins to live in with a stripe of the napkin fabric across it and the drawstring made from a tube of the same material.

My Dad and Nancy live in the USA so these bad boys were sent off today to Lynchburg, Virginia.  I hope she likes them!

Next month the focus of the stashbusting is: Impending Seasonal Change. Regardless of your hemispherical location, the weather will be changing soon…what will you make? Something fun for the coming spring, or something cozy for fall?  

I am linking this post up with the Stashbusting linky party

Over to you:

• Are you participating in the stashbusting sew-a-long?
• Are there any projects you just don’t enjoy making that much?
• Any ideas what I could make in the March category?

Leave a comment; I’d love to hear from you!

Review of Beginner Serging from Craftsy

I bought this course after being utterly wowed by sergers/overlockers, but also totally overwhelmed at the same time!  I know Craftsy, and love it, so it was the first place I looked for some quality learning.  You can buy the course here for £26 full price – but if you hang around there is usually an offer on various courses.  I got the course for just £12 with a voucher I bought with some Christmas money.  Craftsy aren’t paying me for my views.

The instructor – Amy Alan

The first thing you need to know is that Amy has an absolutely lovely way with her!  She has this really warm way of speaking and often puts a little laughy smile on the end of sentences – particularly ones which might make you go ‘eeeek!  How the hell am I going to pull that off?!’  This style suggests she has experience of teaching in real life and she is anticipating the look of dawning terror on her learners faces at just the right moment.  She also personifies everything – the screwdriver is ‘this little guy’ and for something else ‘he just comes up on the thread guide’ are two examples but the course is peppered with them –  it makes it seems like we are getting to know a new friend rather than mastering a piece of machinery.  This style has the effect of making everything feel achievable and made me really enjoy the actual instruction, not just the learning.    She has a blog and I have started following her after this course – I am a fan!

The platform – the app in particular

I love Craftsy, the quality of instruction and the price is just fantastic as I explained when I did my block of the month write-up .  However, in order to have online instruction lots of crafters have invested in portable devices like tablets to access the internet as we work and sadly Craftsy is not delivering well on these platforms.  Last summer they brought out the long awaited Craftsy App, which is an improvement on using the website which was unbelievably limited on my ipad.  However the app crashes – often.  It also has completely different options available to you depending on whether you are viewing it in landscape:

or portrait:

I like to watch in landscape as I have a little stand for landscape viewing, but I can only read the discussions and add notes when it is in portrait which is utterly impractical.  You also have no thirty second rewind.  The thing that *really* gets me though is if your Ipad goes in to standby when you’ve paused a video the app doesn’t remember where in the video you were and starts again at the beginning of the lesson.  This is unbelievably annoying as generally you have paused it at a difficult part of the make – to have to mess around to find your exact place totally breaks your flow.  I really think this is an area they need to work on so they can take their instruction to the next level.

Understanding your machine and threading

In the opening lesson Amy has three machines, an entry level Brother, a mid-range Janome (this is the one I have!) and a Bernina:

She goes through all the features on every machine and you tick it off when you find that item or control on your machine and she demonstrates a lot of the settings on all three models.  This is an excellent way to start as it means you can eyeball and touch each feature meaning you have a reference for all the future lessons no matter what machine you are working on; clever idea.  I actually wish I had bought the course earlier so I could have watched this lesson before I even went on my exploratory shopping trip to work out what I wanted from a machine so I would be able to see what you get in each price bracket.  This lesson also features threading in lots of detail.  There are a few things I am not happy about with this generally excellent course, and this is the first one: she demonstrates the rest of the course on the top of the range Bernina.  How many people who have never used a serger before would go out and buy a top of the range model?  The tuition would have been more effective if she had used at least the mid-range one, or chopped and changed between the three.   There are several minutes devoted to using the automatic needle threader on the Bernina – surely such a machine specific feature doesn’t need this level of detail?   The instruction remains good but it would be better to have seen all three models.

Basic stitches

The course teaches you about all the different types of stitches and how the stitches are formed which is great.  It is coupled with very detailed information on the tension settings for each stitch type in the course materials i.e. it says whether the tensions settings are going to be medium, high etc.  She also helps with diagnosing tension issues.  The class goes through loads of stitch types: overlock, flatlock, rolled hem, narrow seam, wrapped overlock on four, three and two thread serging.

The class has you trial each stitch type and create a ‘stitch book’ so you keep a sample of the stitch and write down all the settings for later reference:

What an excellent resource to keep and refer to for the rest of my crafting life.  The template could have a few more boxes to record details like fabric type, blade up or down, layers of fabric, stitch finger engaged or not.  I have scribbled these on but they would have been nice to be included as they are discussed on the course.  Here comes probably my biggest criticism of the whole course – she doesn’t tell you what each stitch type is for.  I was so wrapped up in my lovely learning journey that I didn’t even notice at the time!  This is a pretty major flaw – after completing this lesson, I was about to begin sewing a knit dress up (Tiramisu anyone?!) and as I was setting up I suddenly thought – which stitch do I use for this?!  I know working through the projects in the later lessons uses a lot of the stitches but you need a ‘typical use’ or the advantages and disadvantages of the different stitches.

The projects

One really lovely thing about Craftsy courses is they teach you a technique, then you do a real life project to test that out.  The projects for this course are a zippered bag:

ruffle apron: (in background)

striped knit scarf: (on model far left – there was no close up of this – real shame)

I have to say at this point that although I have watched these lessons I have only completed the bag project – I just don’t like the other projects, sorry!  I would never wear a ruffled apron and the scarf isn’t my style.  This doesn’t mean I will never complete the latter projects, just at the moment I don’t want to spend a considerable amount of time creating something I won’t enjoy too much.  I like that these projects are completed wholly on the serger, no reference to a normal sewing machine at all.   Across the projects you use nearly all the stitches she has shown you which is a really practical way of practicing them; although as I have already explained I would have preferred more clarity than this.  There is a real reliability on the paper course materials without too much exemplification for the ‘away from the serger’ bits.  The fact it doesn’t even properly show you what you are going to make on the video in the case of the apron and the scarf is pretty disappointing and might be why I don’t feel inspired to make them.

In summary

A lovely course which I would recommend for those who have just bought a serger, or even if you are thinking of buying one.  You come away with a stitch book which will be a constant reference companion and up to three projects cleverly constructed entirely on your new machine.  There are some flaws which don’t detract from the learning value but do stop this from being an outstanding course.  The bugs in the platform remain for ipad users and do need sorting out but I do love Craftsy, so won’t be put off.

Over to you:

• Was this review useful to you?
• Have you taken this course?  What did you think?
• Is there anything you’d like to know that I’ve left out?

I’d love to hear from you – do leave a comment!

Open letter to the Gods of Knitting

 

Dear Gods of Knitting,

Why have you forsaken me?  The Gods of Sewing aren’t half as picky.

I know I only began to follow your enlightened path as a cheap, portable craft but this was such a slip; now I am ashamed to have shown you such disrespect.  But since then have I not made amends?  Buying rainbow hued needles, countless stitch counters and miles of marvellous yarn; does this not show my subservience to your might and glory?  Yet still you block me.

The untold hours I have spent learning your intricate ways.  Immeasurable time has been devoted to your sacred text – You Tube – where I’ve rubbed needles with fellow Sisters in Stitches to wallow in your purls of woolly wisdom.  P, K YO, Sl SSK – to the untrained eye merely a terrible round in Scrabble, but to me, your sacred language shines through.  I have revelled in Ravelry, been drawn in by the passion of your disciples, and awed by the thousands of projects tantalisingly marked ‘beginner’.

What do I get in return for this devotion?  Scarves whose edges roll up.  Downright uncomfortable socks.  Mittens with dirty great holes in them.  This inventory of misery doesn’t include The Forgotten Ones which have been dissolved on the altar of common decency.  Oh you bewilder me!   When I know, and can consistently perform, each stitch and technique in a pattern why does it turn out like a rag?  The gentle pluck, pluck, pluck as stitches are ripped away is the soundtrack of my torment.

I cannot gauge how these short rows of text will be received. Will it be yarn over?  Am I to be cast off?  As for requests, I make one: pick up my lowly knitting spirits.  Let me no longer be laced with disappointment, but allow me to wrap, and turn, in glorious knitted projects.  Please, let me slip knot in to the crooked hook of crochet…

Yours faithfully

Hanny Bobbins

http://hannybobbins.wordpress.com

Daring birthday projects

At school, I see teenagers who do really silly things in an attempt to keep up with the ‘cool kids’. Sadly those girls who will never keep up with the popular crowd often embarrass themselves trying to fit in and it all ends in tears. These wretched young ladies should have been more prominent in my consciousness when I asked Gillian to give me a sewing dare. I’ve been following the sewing dares discussions the ‘big girls’ have been blogging about for weeks but haven’t had the courage to engage…until now.

I need to warn you: I think I’m developing a little blogging crush on Gillian. She is just so lovely and not remotely cliquey. Instead of just giving me something generic she came over and read my blog posts and even commented on one. What a thoughtful lady.

My dare is:

Make a knitting bag for my projects using my new overlocker. Either zip, drawstring, or otherwise.

In anticipation of the glorious serging gift I am expecting for my birthday I have now bought the Craftsy Online Beginner Serging Class. Then, unbelievably, as I was scanning through the lessons I found one of the projects the course teaches you to make is a box bag which I could enlarge and use for my knitting – now that, my friends, is fate!

As my birthday coincides with the half term break it means I have a full week off work to immerse myself in sewing! I’ve been off work ill with another Crohn’s flare up so have been planning my projects so I don’t have to leave the house all week I can maximise my sewing time next week. My cousin Ian would mock this attempt to ‘organise’ enjoyment and call me a ‘fun fascist’, this is great term and utterly apt for me; I do love to organise. My first project will be to work through the above course, but after that I have two more projects in the proverbial pipeline:

Day to Night Top by Maria Denmark

and

Tiramisu Knit Dress by Cake Patterns

Cake patterns has recently held a thirty minutes a day sew-a-long for this pattern so I am buoyed by the chances of success with the additional help. I thought long and hard about whether to go for the physical Tiramisu pattern or the download. The PDF was just over £8 and the printed one £12 plus postage and packaging. I generally prefer the professionally printed product but calculated I could get the Maria Denmark one aswell for the same outlay by downloading the Tiramisu, so in the end there was no competition. Sadly I am having a complete nightmare printing this pattern to the correct scaling. I’ve spent an hour on it today before emailing Steph today with lots of screen shots to explain the problem. I really hope she gets back to me quickly as I want to get all the ‘pre’ work done so when I get my overlocker on Sunday I can get straight on.

Can you imagine how bad it would be if Mr Frog *didn’t* buy me that overlocker now?! It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Over to you:

• Are you participating in the sewing dares craze?
• Is planning for ‘downtime’ a contradiction in terms?
• Are you a “fun fascist” like me or are you a free creative spirit?

Leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!

Quilting: you can’t cut corners

At the beginning of my sewing journey I found Craftsy and I really loved it. I adored that I could make all my errors in the comfort of my own home and replay the instructor again and again until I got it right.

In this first wild flush of attraction – imagine me running through the flowery meadow oozing joy whilst holding hands with Mr Craftsy and gazing lovingly in to his eyes – I thought participating in Amy Gibson’s free class Block of the Month would be super easy. It’s not like I’m entirely new to quilting and piecing. I’ve completed smaller projects like baby quilts etc and know some quilting techniques; I’ve even done a bit of free motion and didn’t sew my fingers together. It’s just this would be my first large scale patchwork quilting project. Confidence was high, I repeat, confidence was high. Dear readers, I know you can see my folly.

The first issue was my general approach to long tasks. I was the kind of kid who’d be set a big homework project to complete over weeks and weeks and would start it the night before. I have not grown out of this awful habit. I watched the videos each month very dutifully, I just didn’t actually do any sewing. Finally I bought the fabric at Creative Stitches in Exeter in September and I started cutting the bits in October thinking I’d be whipping up this quilt in no time. I laughed in the face of these weaklings who aren’t hardcore enough to crank out projects in long gruelling sessions like me – ha ha ha. Oh dear. Quilters I can hear your echoing laughs…

First major quilting discovery
It takes bloomin’ HOURS to piece stuff together!
Yes. What a naive fool I was. These blocks are really HARD! I was decidedly less smug already. After all my faux quilting bravado do you know how I finally finished it? I started doing a couple squares every now and again. Yes, quilting brought me what umpteen years of education had not.

So now to the quilting…
Second major discovery
It takes bloomin’ HOURS to quilt a 20 block quilt!
Researching and praticing the techniques before you even get near the quilt top is not included in above equation. You are also absolutely terrified you are going to utterly ruin the work you’ve already done!

Dogwood technique blogged about here

Third major quilting discovery
the bloomin’ thing can’t fit properly in the sewing machine!

So you think ‘ah I’ll do a bit of echo quilting around that square with my walking foot’ like Amy suggests. BUT that means you need to rotate the thing 360 degrees – so at some point the biggest bit of the quilt needs to be rotated into the ‘throat’ of the sewing machine. I’m there stuffing the thing in, then it is so wedged I can’t actually sew. If force fed geese are unethical then the same protections should apply to sewing machines! Utter nightmare. On a more positive note – seriously good upper arm workout! I was ‘feeling the burn baby!’ It took me weeks to quilt the thing, again I was reduced to doing little and often.

Which leads me to…
fourth major quilting discovery
I bloomin’ love my finished quilt!

Taking in to account all of the above I was ready to be much less enamoured with the finished item, frankly I thought I’d be sick of the sight of it, but I really do love it! I snuggle up under it and feel so proud of the journey I’ve been on with this project! What’s more, after all of the above moaning, I am missing having a ‘big’ project going on that I can dip in and out of… I think I want to start another one! Dear quilting friends, is this how it begins?

Here it is adorning my favourite sofa in the lounge, ready to snuggle in to!

Tell me what you think:
Have you ever done a really big project like a large quilt?
Did you participate in the Block of the Month?
Are there any ‘discoveries’ you’ve made in a project which took you totally by surprise?

Leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!

Linking up with Finish it up Friday

Cat eats goat (kid you not)

Here is a summary:

Horatio 1

Goat nil

You may remember the post on this scarf:

You know, the one I painstakingly and lovingly weaved from skeins of Dartmoor fleece at Craft 4 Crafters?

You may also remember that my fluffy cat Horatio is a ‘challenging’ animal (see, I’m a teacher, he isn’t “Bad”). I’ve regaled you with the tale about when he peed on my sewing machine. Well the little sod has struck again…

Picture me bleary eyed one morning on my way down to breakfast and I happen upon this:

N.b these are recreation photographs as if I’d had the camera near at the time it may well have become a feline colonoscopy

And now look at the state of it!

The aroma of the goat locks overcame him, and the die was cast. I put it down to jealousy, anything fluffier than him must go.

I think it is unfixable as I don’t have a peg loom to reweave it, hence me letting him have another go for the photos. Au revoir monsieur chevre; vive le chat touffu.

unbelievably, no animals were harmed in these events

Over to you:
Have your pets ever ruined one of your projects?
Do you know how I might fix this monstrosity!?
Any ideas what I can do to reuse 100g of beautiful ethical fleece?!

I’d love to hear from you!