Week 18 - a lot to celebrate

I've been thinking about my blog a lot lately. When I started it, I didn't mean for it to be a dedicated craft blog but that's the direction it took almost straight away. But since having a child, I don't get to craft half as much as I used to, projects take ages to finish and that leaves me with seemingly little to blog about.

I've wondered whether I should just drop the blogging, whether I should take it in a new direction and then I took a closer look at my life and I realised I make things all the time. Not always big, accomplished, crafty projects but I cook, I bake, I fix stuff, I start projects and finish bits of it on a regular basis. So instead of waiting for the end of a project and write extensively about it, I'm going to show you my little every day accomplishments on a (hopefully!) weekly basis. And when I do manage to finish a knit or a sew or a piece of jewellery, I'll write a separate, more detailed post.

If you spot anything in a weekly update and want me to give more details about it, then just leave me a comment or drop me a line and I'll happily oblige.

So we start with week 18... well, with the end of week 17 included. This week has been one of celebrations.

On Saturday 26th April, it was Koningsdag, the Dutch national celebration. In an attempt at bringing up a multilingual child, we have recently hooked up with a network of Dutch people living in Bristol. The Dutch can be quite patriotic and Koningsdag is a big deal to them so we all got together for a family celebration at the Bristol's Children Playhouse. Everyone brought traditional Dutch foods and dressed up in the traditional orange. Our food contribution included orange cake pops, boterkoek (a Dutch take on shortbread) and poffertjes (a sort of mini pancake served with melted butter and icing sugar). All in all, it was a lovely day, our daughter certainly had a fab time.

A very orange buffet

Orange cake pops

We live on the edge of a park with a lovely big pond in it. It's home to many ducks and a couple of swans. I'd observed that the female swan had retreated to her nest for what felt like weeks, a sure sign that cygnets were on the way. My daughter and I were delighted when we saw the cygnets had finally hatched earlier this week. They are so cute and fluffy, absolutely gorgeous!

With the nicer spring weather timidly settling in, Nimue has taken great pleasure in doing some gardening and looking after her naming tree.

This week was also the week of Beltane and we were in Glastonbury as usual to celebrate my favourite festival of all. Celebrating life, love, sensuality and fertility with like minded folks always leaves me happy for days afterwards. As usual, we jumped over the Beltane fire and danced the Maypole. Despite being up well past her bedtime, our daughter clapped along to the songs and was completely in awe of the Maypole dance. I wrapped her up in my Beltane shawl when we were outside and it suited her so well.

On the baking front, I've been making a batch of clotted cream rice pudding. It remains to this day Nimue's favourite pudding. It's pretty easy to make and freezes really well so I make it in batches on a regular basis. For some reason though, I am yet to make a batch where I don't let the milk boil over the pan, I always get distracted at the crucial moment.

So that was week 18! Have a lovely bank holiday weekend folks and until next time x

Crochet owls

When preparing for the birth of my daughter, we decided to go for an owl themed nursery. Shortly thereafter, owls became highly fashionable and they had invaded the high street. We have gone a bit owl crazy in this house and as always happens, people have started joining in by giving us all sorts of owl themed stuff, and I'm not just talking soft toys and gifts for the little one!

At Christmas, I was given two, very similar, owl crochet kits. In fact, I'm pretty sure that though they were sold by different retailers, they have been made by the same company.

In the olden days, when I wasn't trying to look after a toddler and work at the same time, I would have whipped those up in a week or less. As it happens, it took me a few weeks just to have the time to open the box! And another few weeks to complete both owls.

I must say, it wasn't helped by the fact that the instructions that came with them were shockingly bad. If I had been a beginner at crochet, I simply would not have been able to make the owls based on the instructions given alone. Lucky then I'm not a beginner and the end result is, in my opinion, pretty close to the pictures.

All in all, they were fun and colourful little projects and my daughter was keen to adopt them.

Transforming paper plates

There's a few posts I really must write but I keep pushing them back, they're a bit serious and quite emotional and I'm finding it difficult to word what I want to say. So in the meantime, I thought I'd show you what I made at my last WI meeting.

My parents were visiting from Belgium this week so I took my mum along. The challenge was to turn paper plates into flowers. After about an hour of tracing, cutting and gluing, here's what we came up with:

My offering

My mum's offering

It was good fun and it was really interesting to see how different everyone's flowers were.

Onion syrup

I can hear you all the way across the fibre optic cables: EWWW! Well, actually, no! It's surprisingly nice and it's a gentle but effective way to treat coughs.

I'm a mum and there is nothing more frustrating as a mum to watch your baby struggle with ill health, there is so little you can do for them, it makes you feel so powerless. My daughter currently has an almighty cold and at night, she'll cough so much that she'll make herself sick. There isn't much I can give her because there just aren't many meds that are safe for tiny people to take. Anyway, I don't like pumping my body full of chemicals so why should I think it's ok to do so with my child?

That got me thinking, in all my training from way back when, there had to be something I could give her that would be safe and would help, even just a tiny bit. Then it hit me, onion syrup! Onion syrup is really simple to make, it's a really good expectorant and anti-inflammatory and it's perfectly safe for my baby girl. As I have many friends who currently have babies with colds ('t is winter after all!), I thought I'd post a pictorial on how to make onion syrup.

All you need is 2 large onions, light brown sugar (which you could swap for caster sugar or dark brown sugar, whatever you have to hand) and a Kilner type airtight jar.

1. Chop your onions roughly.

2. Put a layer of onion in the jar, then put thick layer of sugar on top, press it tightly. Repeat until the jar is full.

3. Your jar should resemble something like this. Leave it to sit on the countertop for a whole day or a whole night.

4. At then end of the day/night, the sugar will have melted, absorbing all the qualities of the onion. It will look something like this:

5. Using a metal sieve, drain the syrup from the onions. Press and stir with a spoon to get as much syrup out as you can.

6. You should end up with a thick syrup looking something like this:

7. Store it in a clean airtight jar and keep it in the fridge, it will keep for up to a week.

The recommended posology for a child is 1 teaspoon every 4 hours.

Good luck to all you mamas with a poorly baby out there!

Bath bombs

I can't believe another two months have passed since I last posted on the blog! Of course those two months are easily the most hectic of the year, what with Sinterklaas, Christmas, my daughter's first birthday and work's quarterly reports and annual reviews all following each other in quick succession.

So... As always, I made loads of gifts for Christmas but not only I couldn't post about them until I'd given them to their recipient, I've also just realised that in the flurry of making, I've forgotten to take pictures, silly me!

I did manage to photograph my bath bombs though, so I can tell you about them in a bit more detail.

Back in October, I became a member of the Women's Institute. I'd been wanting to join for ages and a branch opened right around the corner, and it's full of lovely crafty yummy mummies, just like me (Well, they're yummy, I'm not sure I qualify for the same adjective). The first meeting we had in November was a demonstration in the art of bath bomb making so of course I had to make some for Christmas! The base ingredients are relatively easy to find - I bought mine from the same people I buy all my aromatherapy stuff from: www.baseformula.com.

I made 3 batches, the first one was to experiment with the recipe, and then when I had that perfected, the next two batches were my gifts, with two different scents and decorations. What I learnt in my first batch is that rubber baking moulds don't make very good bath bomb moulds. You have to pack the mixture tightly in them and the more I packed it in, the more the moulds expanded which meant that what should have been a heart ended up only very vaguely resembling one. In the end, the only thing that worked well was cupcake cases in a bun tin.

Once I worked all the kinks out, this is what I came out with:

I think people enjoyed receiving them, I haven't had any feedback yet on how they liked them in the bath. My daughter definitely thinks they're the bees knees, she loves playing with them while they fizz in the bath. And I take great comfort in the fact that I know exactly what's in them and that they contain nothing that could damage her precious skin.