making – Page 4 – Louisa Parry

3BT – light outside, mushrooms, future warmth

I’ve been meaning to start my own Three Beautiful Things posts since I found Clare’s blog over a year ago but I’ve never got around to it aside from using Twitter for the occasional beautiful things style tweet. I figured I shouldn’t start any more projects unless I could commit the time to maintaining them but while we were in Madrid last week, I thought I should just frickin’ give it a go. Don’t know how long I’ll manage to keep it up but here goes nothing ;)

1. We came back from Madrid after dark last night but the sun is shining when we wake up. I look out into the garden – at the trees, at the beck at the bottom of the garden, at the sky stretching out into the distance – and smile. Nice to see everything is still where it should be after the bad weather.

2. Later on, I venture into the garden with two of the cats, Carla and Boron. We’ve been going on walks together around the garden (and the woods next door) since we moved into the house in October. Left untouched by cats and humans for over a week, a huge cluster of mushrooms has grown on a log. I run up the stairs to the house to look them up in my mushroom identification book.

3. Workwise, I have a bad day catching up on everything – I’m still behind as the afternoon passes into evening but John insists we both stop work anyway. After dinner, I grab some lovely pinky-purply wool from my stash and crochet up a neckwarmer. It’s improvised but it turns out well.

Flatbread with honey & sesame oil

11/1/2009 / louisa / 1 Comment

I wanted to make some flatbreads to go with our lamb tagine this evening but all the recipes called for plain flour & yeast and I couldn’t find any of the latter in our over-stuffed cupboard. I kept the yeast-activating honey from the recipes I found though and aside from that just improvised.

They turned out ace – sweet and tasty in their own right but the taste didn’t overpower or clash with the flavour of the tagine.

Recipe for flatbreads with honey & sesame oil

(I don’t really measure/weigh stuff so quantities are estimates)

About 150g of self-raising flour (since I had some of that)
1tablespoon ish of olive oil
1teaspoon ish of honey
A tiny bit (maybe half a teaspoon) of sesame oil
Some water
Toasted sesame seeds (completely optional topping)

Preheat the oven to about gas mark 5.

Put the flour in a mixing bowl and add the honey & the oils. Mix together (but it won’t mix that well because it’s pretty dry).

Gradually add water, mixing all the time until you get a well mixed stiff (ie, not sloppy) dough. Knead it a bit.

Divide dough into pieces – four for (my) hand-size breads, six for smaller ones. Roll them in your hands to make a ball then squish them out flat on a dusted board/counter. Squish them out further with your palm until they’re, I don’t know, just under 1cm? in height. Throw some toasted sesame seeds on the top if you want to use them.

Lightly grease up a baking tray with olive oil, or if you’re an excitable sort, a little sesame oil. Plop the breads on the tray and put the trays in the oven, top shelf, for about, I don’t know, I’m really not good at this numbers business, 15 minutes? – until they’re cooked but no more lightly brown on the bottom and slightly browning on the top. Leave to stand for a minute then serve immediately or as immediately as you can manage if you’re anything like us.

Making stuff: fiery ginger and honey biscuits

2/1/2009 / louisa / 1 Comment

I’ve been in a bit of a biscuit making phase recently – something I’ve not really done before because the effort has seemed like it was out of proportion with the end product. Then I found a really simple and quick recipe for cinnamon biscuits and made a batch for John in November, and after that a (probably short-lived) obsession was born.

I kinda use recipes and knitting/crochet/sewing patterns as a vague guide – something to give me a rough idea to riff off rather than something follow slavish. I also don’t usually measure stuff out when I’m cooking so the recipe details are estimates based on the original recipe I used for the cinnamon ones.

I made this set of biscuits to take around to enjoy during a night of gaming with Dathan and Gianni. The dough was perhaps the best yet and they stayed in nice cute rounds. They’re crunchy not soft but YUM.

Making stuff: a knitting needle bag made from old jeans

2/1/2009 / louisa / 0 Comments

As my love of knitting and crochet has grown so has my collection of needles, hooks and other related accessories.

I decided I needed a needle bag to keep them all neat but despite digging the sewing machine out, didn’t fancy doing too much sewing. My first thought was to modify an old pillow case – I have a stash of vintage ones for crafting with courtesy of various charity shops – but then realised an old pair of jeans would be even better – lots of built-in pockets!

Vague instructions below but it’s dead simple. The belt is old cheap one that I worn too much and snapped the last 6 inches off the tip — too short for me now but a perfect (if largely unnecessary) accessory here.

I made it and took the photo a few weeks ago – the front pockets are now filled with crochet hooks in one side and short double pointed needles in the other. I’ve got stuff I don’t use much in the back pockets – picking shears in one side, cable needles and stuff in the other – with the main pocket stuffed full of regular needles and circular ones. It works pretty well and I can find everything I need – plus, it lifts of the hooks and is easily transportable too if I ever need to take my stuff anywhere (might add a detachable strap if that looks likely).

The bag hangs on the side of my “craft” unit in our living room – it’s relatively flat and looks comparitively neat compared to the rest of the crap bursting out of said unit/the rest of our house and is, reasonably, cat proof.
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An Eggscellent Idea

29/8/2007 / louisa / 2 Comments

Knitted fried egg in a frying pan

Earlier this afternoon, someone on our recycling blog Recycle This suggested using old frying pans to make fake food art.

I thought “hey! I’m THAT COOL too! I could do that!” so here is my knitted fried egg. John wanted to plastinate a real one but I thought knitting would be more fun. I used leftover white wool from knitting booties for John’s niece and the yellow wool is leftover after I knitted a stripey “bumble beeanie” hat for the man himself a few years ago. I used stuffing from an old cushion and the cardboard for the egg’s base is from a cereal pack.

The egg (which works as a really good frisbee because of the cardboard base) is just sitting in the pan at the moment but I’ll stick it in when I’ve got some velcro — and when I’ve knitted the accompanying sausages. Now, I just have to figure out how to do the beans…

(Click the close-up shot for a bigger version)

Can weaving

25/6/2006 / louisa / 3 Comments

Cut up ginger beer can (weft) Cut up ginger beer can (warp)
This week’s trip to the Love Apple inspired more weaving. Not flyers this time though, oh no. Ginger beer cans.

I made some warp (the upright bits) and weft (the across bits):

And the results are after the “Read more” oojie.
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