Taking a break from tech stuff today and taking time to enjoy the natural wonders of the world.
A good while ago now, I noticed that a hedgehog was visiting our garden—so I bought a hedgehog house for him/her. Pronoun unknown. 🙂
Then found she had already built a proper and far superior, hibernaculum. So she has already moved in.
The hedgehog house was taken over and usefully repurposed as an Air Bee & Bee.
Yes, it now houses a busy nest of Irish bumbles 🙂
Air Bee ‘n’ Bee
It’s under the cover of bushes— so relatively dry and out of the wind. The hedgehog house has a curled entrance, like a sea shell, so it has a built-in wind baffler. Delighted the clever queen spotted it and saw the potential.
We never use pesticides, herbicides, weed killer, glyphocates in any form whatsoever. The slugs and snails will be organic and healthy for the hedgehog and the flowers clean and healthgiving for the bees (and other garden insects).
The garden is also a home to many Nursery spiders.
Look at that whopping egg sac! The Nursery spider rolls it along till she’s happy she’s found a spot to anchor the sac to until the baby spiders hatch out.
Here’s mummy with her egg sac wrapped in a gossamer cowl. Mummy stays close waiting for her spider babies to emerge.. I do not know what happens to her then…Look closely to see the babies
There are lots, possibly hundreds, of baby spiders that eventually emerge. You can see a couple under the bottom-left leaf. They disperse and go off on their own spider travels.
This is a hebe—it’s very popular with the bees; they love it. We officially re-named our hebes (have a few in our front and back gardens) ‘hebeeshebees’.
So, hope you enjoyed a quick look at my garden residents and feel the love.
My baking mojo has come back after abandoning me for so long!
It all started with 24 lemon cupcakes at the weekend. Best Irish butter, organic, unwaxed lemons, free range eggs (let’s try for happy hens 🙂 ) … of course sugar and SR flour… little to commend them, I’m afraid but they do play nicely with the other ingredients.
Some go into the office with Mr Bee. There’s now a requirement for him to go in once a week after WFH during the Covid years. He takes 10 or so. Six go to my next-door-neighbour. She’s very popular, lots of friends and family visit so a few extra to share with her pals over a cup of coffee.
Mr Bee eats the rest over the week. Not me. Without being too sanctimonious, I rarely eat sugar or processed flour these days. I’ve lost 3 stones since last August by restricting refined carbs (not keto diet) making better, healthier food choices and intermittent fasting. After years of disordered eating, including anorexia and bulimia from my long-ago teens, I have peace. No starvation, craving or bingeing. I’ll shut up in case my halo slips and chokes me.
Lemon Curd. Simple, sweet and smooth as silk. Fresh, lemony loveliness! I savour the smell and the process even though I don’t indulge – with not a single pang of temptation! Here’s how to make it.
Ingredients
110g castor sugar 60g butter 5 egg yolks 2 whole eggs Zest of 1 lemon Juice of 3 lemons
Method
Place a bowl over a saucepan (or bain-marie if you actually have one) of simmering water on the hob. Ensure the base of the bowl is above the water and not immersed. You wouldn’t like your bottom sitting in broiling water, would you?
Dissolve the sugar and lemon juice then add the eggs and whisk and stir till perfectly blended then stir and whisk some more… on and off… but more on than off… for 15 minutes. The mixture will thicken up as the eggs cook and will produce the most glorious yellow sunshiny hue.
Take the bowl off the heat and stir in the butter till it’s blended and the mixture is silky smooth.
Pour the mixture through a sieve into a sterilised jar (to sterilise, wash the jar in hot soapy water, rinse and pop in oven at 160 for 15 mins).
I use a riddler to coax, push and pummel the lemon curd through the sieve. A riddler is a knobbly-ended implement that makes this little job … rewarding …. in some strange way. If you don’t have a riddler, a spoon will do the trick.
Finally, gaze at your jar of sunshine and just enjoy the moment.
Mr Bee will eat it with ice cream, on bread and, if there’s any left, I’ll be making another batch of lemon cupcakes and giving each one a squidge of lemon curd. Use an apple corer to bore out a well from the top of each cake; fill a piping bag with some curd, snip off a corner and pipe it into the cake well. Lemon cake wells…. ha ha.
Happy days to anyone who might be reading this and a warm Hello from me in (chilly today) Ireland.
These are my lovely Tesco Tearaway dungarees; nice but dull. I was getting bored with them. Yesterday, I chopped the hems off, stitched some braid around the bottoms and added a little trim on the bib. To finish off, I got out a fat darning needle and frayed them. Fun for round the house.
Oh so boho.
I finally indulged myself with a pair of colourful DMs. Very happy feet.
They will take a lot of softening up…
Hope you have a happy Easter and a break from work to eat lots of chocolate and watch a Bond movie. Seems to be a bank hol staple in UK/Ireland.
Moser Roth. My favourite chocolate. Bugger the diet.
It can feel a bit like wrestling with a pig. I felt this way about getting back into animation. All those layers. Controlling timings, anchorpoints, sequencing and a big old wallop of mad effects and presets to choose from. Which bit goes where …. and when? Made that flat pack look pretty enticing.
Butching up, I thought : “Wir schaffen das!” especially as my work machine got upgraded to a super spanky Surface Book 3 with pen a week ago and my personal machine got a sh*t-off-a-shovel new graphics card for Christmas. No excuses.
I took a deep-dive into Animate and After Effects and got on with it. Every day’s a school day with You Tube and I kind of binge watched tutorials for both apps and applied the principles as I went. Both apps are fairly intuitive once you familiarise yourself with the layouts and menus. Not massively time consuming and isn’t it great to invest in yourself and develop new skills? Give this year a new set of boots and career path 🙂
As crafts go, salt dough is very easy. You can cut out shapes with biscuit (cookie) cutters or draw round templates. Cereal boxes make for sturdy templates. Salt dough takes a good while to dry – mine were in the oven for some 16 hours on its lowest temperature. Obviously, the thicker the dough, the longer the baking time.
2 cups of flour to 1 of salt. Add a tbs of dry wallpaper paste as well to help prevent mold and make the dough more pliable if you have some.
Mix with water until it becomes pastry-like then roll it out and cut it into shapes.
You can create all sorts of things and hang them up afterwards – just make a hole so you can insert cord or wire to hang them from – or, insert some bent wire into the raw dough (wet the ends of the wire with a thickish flour and water mixture ‘glue’ then insert the wire into the piece) and bake the mount with the dough. I
Basic instructions:
Place on a baking tray in the oven on its lowest setting until the dough is thoroughly dry. Tap the back of the shapes – they should sound ‘hollow’. Try pressing the back – if there’s any yield in the piece it needs further drying in the oven time.
Paint and let them dry – bone dry!
Coat with a varnish – floor, ship or spray varnish, whatever is easiest and cheapest to find, to seal the dough. If you don’t seal them moisture will get in and they will eventually crumble or go mouldy.
Just sharing a little work in progress here. This is the bottom panel for a small decorative cushion I’m making. The hares are cut from a wool fabric and appliquéd onto creamy linen.
Using my template again (Bondaweb onto fabric, draw round template, cut out and iron on), I made a start on a panelled piece. It’s made up from oddments of cream linen because I didn’t have any big pieces left. If you pick out one thread and pull it out carefully (ie, don’t let it snap), you’ll get a straight line that you can cut along and keep the bits fairly well squared off. I did this with all four sides on each panel.
I dampened the joined panels and dripped watercolour paints to give some colour-washed areas.
Been busy making some new bootees and made these sweeties with little running rabbits – perfect for the time of year being so close to Easter.
I have the same rabbit theme running (literally, lol) around the top of the box!
The template includes a panel for the aperture (to be cut from acetate or other clear media). I left the acetate out of the box because it makes it difficult to get a good shot of the bootees inside the box – I always end up with shadows and reflections. A little tissue paper in the box would set them off beautifully, don’t you think?
They are little dotes, aren’t they? These are just plain white with a little satin ribbon but could be embellished with pearl beads and other gorgeous things.
A quick close up of the box. The bootees and box are a perfect fit. Not too tight and not too loose. The template includes panel sides, each a couple of mm smaller than each of the four sides. If you make your box from stock that isn’t quite strong enough, you can reinforce them with the panels. This technique offers an economical way of decorating the box with your best paper while using your plainer stock for the box.
Making the bootees isn’t difficult but I have written up step-by-step instructions to ensure first time success and included them as a PDF.
If you’re interested in buying them, they are in my Etsy (Paper Pictures by Ellie Emyn) shop as SVG cutting files.
What a week – first some lovely visitors. Made chocolate biscuit cake together. Helped A make a beautiful Samsara bird for A to take home to her mum. Went to Skerries and collected some nice, fat rocks for my garden (A and Other went to the local silversmith for the afternoon and had a few hours crafting their own designs in silver). I did it a few years ago. Very absorbing and a nice way to spend an afternoon.
Also, had a bit of a splurge in Dublin (you know I’m a material girl!) – might take pics and show you the jazzy fabric I bought. Not anything I would normally go for but it’s definitely got a real buzz to it.
The visit could have been a disaster. Turned out that A, who thought she would get the results of her MA Aug 10th would actually be getting them on the Monday. Well, nobody slept well Sunday night. The result came by e-mail at 9.00 am the following morning and brought relief, delight and sunshine to the day. She passed! We whooped and all had big grins slapped over our faces for the rest of the day – though the day was a bit shorter than most as we were all pretty much flaked by early evening and toddled off to our beds to catch up on some sleep.
So, a happy week filled with roast turkey dinners, yorkshire puddings, fruit crumbles, lasagnes and spicy chicken saucies with chips. Glasses of wine in the evenings, happy laughter and happy conversations.
All too soon it was time for them to leave. Always a teary moment. Since then, the house has been cleaned top to bottom – just something I do! Keeps me busy and takes my mind off the empty house.
Finally, I sat down, designed the bird and then sliced and snipped away until I became truly absorbed in the process and got myself grounded again.
No More Mondays 