Dreaming about rugs

I have someday plans to buy a new rug for the living room.  If the ordinary obstacles of everyday life were swept aside (you know, money, availability &tc so forth!), then my shortlist for browsing would certainly include the Gee's Bend rugs from ABC Carpet and Home (take a look here) or Amy Butler's new range of rugs (take a look here).  It's nice to dream...!

"Making Toast" by Roger Rosenblatt

"Making Toast" was in this weekend's Spectrum magazine, in the Sydney Morning Herald, but it originally appeared in the New Yorker here.  It's wonderful, simple, complicated, clear writing, about the time when his adult daughter died suddenly, and her parents moved to live with her widowed husband and young children.  Small telling details, rendered in prose that isn't soppy or over-egged, so you feel all you should in this snapshot of grief and mourning and travelling into the days and weeks after such a death, but without manipulation.
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Worth reading. 
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Spring blossom

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Isn't that beautiful?  Just about to burst!  My favourite sort of blossom (?crabapple) - deep pink buds, paler as they open then white in bloom.

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It was windy last night, and this morning the garden had a confetti of white blossom petals on the grass - not even sure where the tree may be (the one above was photographed while I was Out'n'About); but it's another sign of spring.

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Wattle in sunlight

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Just because it's beautiful.

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Quilt in progress - one from the scraps

Last summer, I sat down with a box of scraps from the previous twelve months, and started sewing.  One result was Scrap Box Jig, one of my entries in this year's Sydney Quilt Show.

Lots of fun there!

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Another result was another Scrap Box quilt that's off being quilted and will be in Australian Patchwork & Quilting magazine early next year:

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What surprised me was that from a not enormous box of scraps (10 litre box, about the size I'd use to hold the fabrics for a single project) I easily got two quilts, a throw-ish size and a bed size.  And I can look at each and name the quilts from which each fabric came.  They're a great sort of memory quilt, and happy ones to look at, with lots of good, cheerful energy.  The fabrics are varied, but I think they work well together.  I didn't try for matchy-matchy as I sewed each block, nor when I assembled the blocks together into a quilt.  Just went with next please! and let them work as they would.  And they did.

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Red camellias

These are from my parents' garden.  Just beautiful.

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Breakfast at a café: II

Different café, different breakfast from another weekend. 

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One way and another, I'd never had Eggs Benedict, despite seeing them mentioned often in books/food articles etc etc.

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Two poached eggs, two slices of Turkish bread, bacon and hollandaise sauce.

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Also yum.  When cut into, the egg yolk oozed delightfully over the bread.  Aaaaaah.

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No lunch required after this one, either: just a spot of tiffin mid-afternoon to tide over till dinner time.

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Breakfast at a café: I

This one landed at the lavish end of the scale for sure.  I don't know if I remember everything on the plate, but it included two poached eggs on thick toast, bacon, a cafe-made hash brown, smoked salmon, chutney, greens, mushrooms, I can see a strawberry...

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No lunch was required.  Unsurprisingly.

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There is something rather nice about breakfast out at a café on a weekend.  Certainly one eats more lavishly than one might at home.  And there's the company, and conversation, and it's all rather civilised, not to mention having the day ahead of you still.
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Here's a recent breakfast:

The best chicken stuffing (seasoning) imho

The best stuffing for chicken I have ever tasted is, in my humble opinion, my mother's recipe.  (Stuffing or seasoning - what you put in the bird's cavity before roasting it).  It's dead simple, and I've never seen a formal recipe for it anywhere, or tasted it anywhere else but when it's been made by Mum, or another one of my family.  It's not one where I can give exact quantities, but you'll get the idea and be able to make it yourself.  Quantities also depend on the size of the chook you're cooking.  If you make too much, cook the leftover in a small ovenproof bowl, but it will probably need less time than the stuffed chook.  (If the stuffing in the bowl burns, that was probably too long...).
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Start by setting some butter to melt - maybe a couple of tablespoonsful?

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You need bread: maybe two or three slices of fresh bread, whizzed in the blender.

A couple of rashers of bacon.  Take off the rinds and chop or whizz the rest (I put the rinds on top of the bird, where they crisp while it cooks and often don't make it to the final plates of dinner...)

Parsley.  I like a bit of this, maybe 1/3 of a bunch (four or five decently bushy stalks) - whizz in the blender, stalks and all (the flavour's in the stalks and the greenery adds green).  Also nice when picked from your garden.

Put all the ingredients in a bowl and mix - the melted butter will bind them together.  You want it just sort of holding together, not sloppy with butter. 

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Don't get fancy-schmancy with adding more herbs, or anything else (except maybe a little coarse-ground black pepper).  Just try this once the simple way.  You can make fancier stuffings/seasonings, but this one, simple as it is, is hard to beat.  Fill the cavity of the chook, and roast it as you normally would (a chicken with stuffing always needs longer than a chicken without).  Another family habit is to cover the chicken with bacon when you put it in to cook.  Take the bacon off when it's nearly done so it can brown up nicely.   See?

Yum. 

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Tranquillity

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I just liked this, the simplicity of the colours, the contrast of the feather's delicacy and the rustic, weathered verandah floor boards.

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Quilt binding essentials

When I'm binding a quilt, some things are essential:

This Clover design is my favourite sort of thimble; this is my second one.  The first (eventually) needed replacing as the leather had stretched too much.  Binding clips (less stabby than pins), thread and a needle (I prefer crowbar-sized ones for binding, just because I do).  The lid is useful too - it corrals the thread and binding clips as I go.  I know some people don't enjoy binding, but I do - usually watching a film or TV program, or listening to an audiobook, as it's not exactly the most complex bit of a making a quilt, but it's soothingly repetitive.  And satisfying when you put in the last stitch.  Oh, and then remember you're not finished, there's the label to go....

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Operation Art

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Operation Art is a brilliant initiative, a judged exhibition/competition in which works by children are selected to hang in children's hospital wards and other public areas to brighten them up and encourage healing in a cheerful environment.  The exhibition of entries tours regional areas: I caught it at the Lewers Gallery in Penrith, where it's on till 6 September 2009.  Definitely worth seeing - I wish I could have photographed the exhibits (a CD of images is available for sale to schools etc).

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Recent travels: Surry Hills

From reading various Australian home magazines such as Home Beautiful, Real Living, and Inside Out, there were a couple of shops I'd had on my to-visit list for a while.  A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to toddle over to that part of Sydney - Surry Hills - and see them.

One was DavidMetNicole (?sp).  Often mentioned in the mags, with quirky vintage items.  Not a large shop; and to me, the prices were high.  The assistant was charming, and I enjoyed browsing, but $100 journals covered in bus destination blinds (much as I love bus destination blinds) are a bit out of my budget.  They had vintage Scrabble tiles, and vintage rubber stamps, and a bunch of interesting things to be inspired by, but I don't know that I'll be returning.  Love the aesthetic, but I think I can find a lot of similar sorts of things from other places, less expensively (they had an identical spice rack to one I'd found in an antiquey-junk shop a year or two ago for $30, marked in their shop at around $90).

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At Doug up on Bourke I mooched and browsed and mentally decorated more than one house I'd love to live in.  Industrial-commercial-rustic antiques/vintage items, and lots and lots of them - dozens of stools, tables, desks, all sorts of items, and at generally acceptable prices (according to my scale).  If I was decorating a house from scratch, this is the kind of shop I'd like to go to for furniture, rather than some shiny-new shop (well, Ikea excepted).  It's the kind of place where you enjoy observing the history of things, as well as the browsing.  They had bus destination blinds too (over $500 each - I'm so glad I picked one up for substantially less than that last year; part of my luck was that the route had historical significance for me but wasn't of much interest to others, as the places are not trendy locations - weren't then, aren't now).

Bird Textile was across the road from davidmetnicole and I invested in some of their scrap packs (which are sold by the weight of the fabric).  Lovely Australian designer original fabrics.

And then I went home, back from the inner city to its outskirts.  Some Saturday I'll plan more and do a bit of a Surry Hills trawl.  There are a lot of interesting shops there, homewares and also food shops in the Danks St area of Waterloo (I drove through that on this trip, but couldn't find parking so I drove on).  Bird Textile had a handy shop-crawl map of Surry Hills put together by local businesses; although it didn't look like they were all within walking distance of each other, and thus parking does become an issue.

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It was a good day, good to get out and about to somewhere different and see and be inspired by new things.

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Fresh fabrics from Australian designers: II: Loot

Loot from the Stitches and Craft Show 2009:

Not exactly fabric, but certainly craft inspiration: Mixtape: http://www.mixtapezine.com/

A pack of oddments and a big fat quarter (love those nests!) from Pippijoe: http://www.pippijoe.com/

A fabric piece (can you see an emerging bird theme??) from Surface Art: http://www.surfaceart.com.au/

The background fabric in this shot (which I've used in all the pictures here) is, like the scrap bundle, from Kristen Doran Design: http://www.kristendoran.com/

Another bird, and some delicious red/cream trees from Ink & Spindle: http://www.inkandspindle.com.au/

A scrap pack and several small pieces (oh my, another bird!) from Cloth: http://www.clothfabric.com/

These scrap bundles were acquired on a recent trip to Surry Hills in Sydney, where I found Bird Textile: http://www.birdtextile.com/

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Note to all these businesses: a quilter like me rather does like scrap bundles/oddment bags and so forth.  Little of a lot collections.  Since these often hand-screened fabrics are generally more expensive than commercially printed/mass-produced fabrics, I like being able to buy a variety of scrap pieces.

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There's a rather nice quilt waiting to emerge from that lot, don't you think?

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I also acquired/assembled this little collection:

...from Amitie: http://www.amitie.com.au/

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A couple of the designers said that the latest thing (owls having been done a lot) is going to be donkeys.  I'll take their word for it.  Think I'll work with the bird theme.  Hmmm.  Reminds me of the daily china around here.  And I think I remember buying some Australian designer bird-themed fabric at the Sydney Quilt Show, too.  It will be added to the mix for the quilt, methinks.

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Fresh fabrics from Australian designers: I

At the Stitches and Craft Show today I spent the most time on the third floor, where the smaller stalls were with wonderful work from craft businesses designing fabric and softies and more.  Here are some of the ones I browsed:

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Mixtape: mixtapezine.com

Madeit handmade marketplace: madeit.com.au

Sprout Design fabrics (Rebekah Chichero): sproutdesign.net.au

Pippijoe printed textiles (Caitlin Klooger): http://www.pippijoe.com/

la rara (Lara Raymond): http://www.larara.etsy.com/

Stencil Gallery: http://www.stencilgallery.com.au/

Amitie quilt fabric shop: http://www.amitie.com.au/

surface art printed textiles: http://www.surfaceart.com.au/

cloth printed textiles: http://www.clothfabric.com/

ink & spindle hand printed textiles (Lara Cameron, Bianca van Meeuwen and Tegan Rose): www.inkandspindle.com.au/shop

kristen doran design, hand printed textiles: http://www.kristendoran.com/

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For a list of all the retailers at this year's Sydney show (with links): click here.

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Stay toooooned for some pics of my loot....they sure have revitalised the Stitches and Craft Show, it had dropped off my radar, but it's now right back on as an August unmissable.  Amitie was on the second floor, as a not so small business retailer: I also browsed Just Patchwork on the ground floor - she has some fabulous jelly rolls cut from shop stock, and they're corkers (I'm going to play with an Anna Maria Horner Good Folks range one).

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I also really enjoyed the only opportunity I've had to see the recent documentary on craft in the US: Handmade Nation.

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What's happening?

Making : what feels like uphill progress; also a little time for this poor neglected (but not forgotten) blog


Cooking : no-brainer food

Drinking : diet Coke

Reading: intermittently execrable, intermittently adorable student fiction.  And then aiming to find constructive things to suggest.

Wanting: an end to unnecessary frustrations

Looking: at photos of Melbourne from last weekend.  I have this quilt idea...

Playing: not much.

Wasting: mental energy on things that won't change

Sewing: is on the agenda for the weekend

Wishing: things that won't change, would

Enjoying: the things the kids say and do

Waiting: for the latest Diana Gabaldon book, An Echo in the Bone (about a month away)

Liking: the unabridged audiobooks of Naomi Novik's Temeraire series.

Wondering: what it would be like to have a dragon like Temeraire as a companion.  The garden isn't big enough...

Loving: family and friends

Hoping: that the films I'm looking forward to seeing - Young Victoria, Julie and Julia, The Lovely Bones, The Time Traveler's Wife, etc, will live up to my expectations.

Marvelling: at the convict-sewn dress worn by Mrs King, Governor King's wife, in the early years of the colony of NSW - it's part of the Persuasion/Jane Austen clothing exhibit at the National Gallery of Victoria

Needing: peace and quiet

Smelling: the perfume I wear every day, Tea Rose by Perfumer's Workshop.  Been wearing it for many years.  Never tire of it - it catches the planty-green of roses, as well as the florals.

Wearing: the necklace and earrings I bought at the Pompeii exhibition shop at the Melbourne Museum last weekend.  They had some really lovely pieces at affordable prices

Following: up reviews of the films above from Roger Ebert and Salon

Noticing: jonquils and daffodils

Knowing: if the jonquils and daffodils are about, then strawberries will smell sweet and taste good

Thinking: too much and to little effect

Feeling: frustrated (I think you've worked that out?)

Bookmarking: more sites than I may ever have time to revisit

Opening: emails, as time permits

Giggling: not enough

 
 
Borrowed the meme from Meet Me At Mike's.
 

"In due season"

You may remember the Will.i.am music video based on a Barack Obama speech.

The Chaser created a spiffing version of their own, based on the (it has to be said) rather less inspiring rhetoric of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. 

Trailer: Julie and Julia

I enjoyed the book and audiobook of this one, so it's on my list (but not out in Australia until October).

Scones. Easiest recipe ever.

I think these are called 'biscuits' in America; to me, biscuits are what Americans call cookies, and these are most definitely scones (uncooked, in the picture below, but keep reading...).



There is something very simple and delicious about a scone, warm from the oven, with raspberry jam and proper whipped cream (not the spray rubbish, which has no guts at all).

I was meeting some travelling family members today, so I made a batch of scones for them to take on their way.

You may have your simple scone recipe, and I respect that.  But if you want my simple scone recipe...I'm happy to share.  Three reasons I like it: the scones taste great, it's very quick and you don't have to rub any butter into flour (which I always found to be something I didn't much enjoy) as the fat is added more cleverly.  This also means a less handled dough, and softer/lighter scones.

ROORUU'S EASIEST SCONE RECIPE EVER

Note: Australian cup measurements are used: mess around a tad with your own measures and you'll be able to get it right.  I don't have measures from other countries, so I can't do assorted versions of this.  But it's not a hard recipe to tweak.

2 cups self raising flour
pinch salt (best left in, it does add to the flavour)
1/2 cup thickened cream*
3/4 cup milk

Oven at 220degC. 

Put flour and salt in a bowl, mix, make a well.  Pour in the cream and milk, mix till it's a soft (still slightly sticky, not dry) dough.  Place the dough on a floured board, lightly flour it (and your hands) then knead very lightly, just turning the top in until the bottom is smooth and you can flip it over and pat it out. 

Line a lamington tin with baking paper and cut out about 12 scones (I like decently sized ones).  Place them touching in the tin (my theory being that they push each other up and have softer sides this way, rather than being individual bullets).  You can do the glaze thing if you want to, but I don't - wastes an egg and I prefer the floury look.

Bake for 12-20 minutes (depends on your oven).

Enjoy.

*Thickened cream contains (in descending order): cream, skim milk, sugar, halal gelatine, thickener, emulsifier, dextrose and a minimum 35% milk fat.  The last item is the key, as this is the replacement for butter in the scones.  If you don't have thickened cream around, use 35% milk fat cream, not skinny.  Mind you, I usually use skinny milk for the milk, as it's what's most often in the fridge.



Yum.

btw, if you use this recipe or put it on your blog, could you bing a link back here as your source?  My source for this recipe was a colleague, Margaret, twenty years ago.  And I'm still grateful.
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You can of course play with this.  Savoury ones, cheese, or spinach and feta?  I worked out a spinach and feta version here.  And, on checking, I've blogged this recipe before.  But what the heck.  It was part of today, it still works, and maybe you weren't reading this blog back then.  Or you just want a scone recipe now.  (I was amused to read how I wrote it then - the same but different.  Also, it wasn't illustrated).

Finally...

Finally, holidays.  My goodness, my Guinness as is the saying of an Irish aunt.  To arrive on a sunny winter's day, the neighbour's new puppy NOT yapping endlessly, one set of quilting instructions written (another one to go...), the day full of possibilities, is a Good Thing.

A while ago my digital camera went bung.  It was repaired under warranty, and now, although the other problem was fixed, it can't be connected by its lead to upload pictures.  You have to have a card reader to hand.  The intermittency of this blog over the last while is partly testament to this hurdle - another bit of equipment to find and fish out... still haven't worked out why Blogger won't let me upload pictures directly any more, so I have to detour through Flickr.  Between these two inconveniences - and a very very very busy time at work - well, hello, I'm here again at the moment. (And I just can't be bothered going through the whole warranty, gone for up to a month business to get this new glitch fixed).  Although don't assume I didn't keep up reading my Bloglines list - I did.  You've all been doing all sorts of interesting things.

It's Tuesday, of course, and it would be a lovely day to spend at the cinema on cheap tickets day.  That would, of course, be if there was anything on worth seeing.  Usually there's something, even if I do end up travelling a little bit to the larger megaplex with enough cinemas and a local demographic that leads it to assume it might want to screen something other than blockbusters for fourteen year old boys.  But no, no joy there either.  I'm looking forward to seeing Young Victoria (yes, Isabelle, it may undoubtedly be piffle, but watchable piffle I hope!), and have promised to take assorted dear and lovely kids to films coming out later this year (Where the Wild Things Are, and Twilight: New Moon - on its first weekend, that promise includes) and if Warner/Roadshow gets its act in gear and releases The Time Traveler's Wife more in line with the US release date (August) than, gods forbid, not until November....then I'll SO be there to see that... but casting my eye over the current cinema offerings, cinema will not be part of these holidays.  Unless I travel to the city in search of an arthouse.  I will see the new Harry Potter film, but assume that right now the cinemas will be crammed to bursting for that one.  So I'll wait.

On the to-read pile is a mix of lowbrow and higher brow and probably medium brow.  Assorted levels of brainpower/attention required, really.  Alicia Paulson over at Posy gets Cozy blogged about The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and Little, Big so I have both of those on hand to try thanks to her account of them.  A nascent book group to which I've been invited has set Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin as its first text (I use the words 'set' and 'text' with some precision there) and luckily the local second hand book shop had a nice copy at a good price.  From my teenlit sources, the prizewinning The Graveyard Book and the megapopular City of Bones have landed on the pile too.  On Sunday, between quilting, I spent time scooting for the umpteenth happy time through The Unknown Ajax and enjoyed Georgette Heyer's wit and characters just as much as I always do.

Quilting?  There are, not unexpectedly, a few items on the to-do pile.  I've just finished a top based on Saffron Craig's Fields range - pretty pinks and yellows - and am doing some perle cotton quilting on the S quiltlet, both for Australian Patchwork & Quilting magazine.  Some mad colours are waiting for the T quiltlet and there are plenty more fabric bundles and designs waiting for my sewing attention.

Lunches with friends, spring cleaning (it's not spring, but that's irrelevant), a niece wants to spend a day sewing a bag....oh, lots to stay busy with around here, let alone ventures and adventures elsewhere.  Went into work yesterday for a few hours, and will go another day, but apart from that, o joy it's HOLIDAYS!
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