Category: Chatting

Working on a baby papercutting today.  This is the latest version.

I listened to Shogun all afternoon while working on it and was tken with the costumes. The Japanese characters looked like Quality Street chocolates come to life. Or Roses. I nicknamed the Japanese girl ‘love interest’ as Strawberry cream, the regular soldiers, the Jaffas, as, very obviously, the orange creams, and there were various chocolate truffles, golden cups and guest appearances from Ferraro Rochas and Raffaelas.

Back to the office tomorrow. Hope my little train doesn’t get bumped off the rails by the Drogheda train. They are often due at the same time on the same track, which obviously isn’t possible. Nine times out of ten, the Drogheda train turns up first. I can only assume the Drogheda train bumps it off the track, face first, into some bushes. My train invariably turns up some 5 minutes after the Drogheda train, rubbing its eyes and brushing bits of twig and  woody things off its face when it turns up.

Nice things in small packages. I made the little label in Illustrator using a rough brush to stroke the outline of a rectangle to surround the text. The text was measured to ensure it fitted inside the new textbox.  I used  a font called Delfinah. https://www.dafont.com/delfinah.font

The pink paper is a mulberry mix. Notice the flecks of gold and silver in it? It’s so pretty.

Jess is enjoying a saunter round the garden more often these days. She takes her time and smells the flowers as she goes along. Gracie is the complete opposite. She runs about like a loon.

There are plenty of yellow poppies. They self-seed and are quite happy doing their own thing as and where and when they want.

These sunshiny poppies brighten the garden. The hydrangeas have lots of buds, alls colouring up, and soon they will pop and be proud, loud, brash and ostentatious as they always are. They’re always surrounded by some flame-coloured  Crocosmia, or Orange Devils. Them and the hydrangeas dominate the front garden. Looks like a lovely garden party 🙂

I’ve done ‘Around the garden and back again’ so until things spring to life and burst with colour, there’s nothing more to see here, folks.

It really is a cat’s life. Here’s Gracie in front of the fire in her little bed.

Zzzzzzzzzzz

The various panels of gingerbread have been piped with icing with some  bits and pieces to have a little flood filling but there’s really not much of that to do. The large panels and trees will go around the cake. Next year I’ll make a square cake and that will make life easier… until then, however…

There were several lessons learned in the making of this gingerbread, namely:

1. Do not use molasses sugar in the gingerbread mix – it doesn’t dissolve in molten butter and leaves lumps like cowpats in the mix.
2. Do not use molasses sugar in the mix because it spoils the colour and makes the gingerbread too dark.
3. Do not bake the gingerbread on foil fused with parchment – it curls up and ruckles the edges of the gingerbread.
4. Use a piping nozzle – No 2 – in a piping bag and don’t be persuaded to snick the end off a freezer bag to make do because you can’t be arsed to dig out the tub of icing equipment.
5. Check the consistency of the icing by test piping on anything before you start on the gingerbread.
6. I know I said to mark out the design by pricking through paper, etc, but really, actually make the effort to do it. I didn’t and made it all up as I went along. Would have been so much easier if I’d made myself some guidelines.
7. There is absolutely NOTHING to stop you from taking a sharp knife and trimming the gingerbread to sharpen the definition of the shapes. I wish I had, especially to trim off some slightly burned edges.

All said, though, it wasn’t hard to do but will cut the templates out from quilting plastic for next year and have a sturdier template to cut around.

So, a very happy new year to you all from the ghost of Christmas Cake Past!