A Handmade Life 2

Son 1, fourteen-and-a-half and still to be found lying on the floor creating ever-more complex wooden cities. He waxed lyrical on the subject of Old and New Shanghai when I asked him about this very modern city.

The results of Son 2's beadwork (so far!). He's making loads of little key rings with the aim of selling them at the town Vide Grenier...

Son 1's tin can handicraft, to be sold at the same event.

Can you guess what it is yet?

Celebrating a handmade life...

with Josie Crafter, all though March - see my sidebar for details!Son 2,... and Son 1.

Over the last two evenings...

Food and presents at the weekend...

This post is mainly about cooking and eating - enter if you dare! Ben's birthday was this Monday, but we decided to take a long run-up to the celebrations and have a good weekend of food, drink and presents... Son 1 set the tone by making dough on Saturday, ready to produce his third 'Round the World' recipe - Italian pizza!

Meanwhile, I used the October Country Living recipe to make 'Heaven and Earth' (himmel und erde) for lunch - potatoes and apples with bacon. It was a pleasant addition to a salad-based meal, but maybe I should have used sharper apples.

That evening we ate the pizzas, which were spendid. Son 1 put everything he thought the adults would like onto this one: peppers, anchovies, mozzerella, sweetcorn, pepperoni and mushrooms. I added a sliced organic red onion that I'd bought at the Alterna'town festival that afternoon. The overall effect was delicious!

He produced a second pizza where his half was like the adults' minus the pepper and onions, whilst his brother's half looked rather bare in comparison. What a fussy eater, that brother! However, being specifically catered for like this, Son 2 did enjoy his half of the pizza.

This was Son 1's present to his dad the following evening. He decorated the jar (a useful holder for 'things' in the office) using some wonderful pens which write on anything. I did like his patchwork design! As he'd already got a present, he used the jar as a container for his birthday message instead of a card.Son 2 went overboard on the wrapping (and the tippex 'snail'!) Note the piratical theme - it's important.Aww!

Inside the wrapping was the picture he'd made as a card - a gate into a very spooky wood. Here's a boy who loves googly eyes and sparkly things! Both this and the jar idea came from a great set of craft books which the boys were given years ago - still the source of so many projects. Ben has taken all these things into his office this morning, where they will decorate his desk. Inside these two parcels were the following piano books:The boys love hearing their dad play their favourite music, and Son 1, at least, has the ulterior motive of wanting to learn to play the pieces himself! (Son 2 hates sight reading so much that he's much less likely to try them out.)

So here was my present, bought from one of the excellent Fair Trade shops in Toulouse - there's a very stylish T-shirt inside.Also inside was a book Ben had been thinking of reading - look who sent it to me (via Amazon). There is hope yet for Amazon addicts doing the dottie angel challenge!Rather continuing the orange theme, I made Ben a carrot cake using the last carrots from the garden. Son 2 specified how it should be made, and I have to admit that his variations on my usual recipe were an improvement - in two layers, with thicker icing!Ben picked some yellow rasberries from our rather reluctant bushes, and they made a great decoration.

Happy 42nd Birthday, dear Ben!

On Ben's actual birthday, Monday, we were too busy baking to celebrate much, so it was a good thing we'd gone for the weekend celebrations. His company has a tradition of the birthday people providing crepes, tartes etc, and he always likes to bring something traditionally British. This year he made Melting Moments, which seem almost impudently English to me...and I knocked up some of my very-fast-and-makes-sixty-at-a-time ginger biscuits.
I gather everything went down very well.

Next celebration - Bonfire Night! Always fun with French visitors...

Pretty as a Picture!

There's been a lot of visual prettiness around here recently. My youngest pupil brought me a picture of the two of us today:

Awww!

Yesterday afternoon I found a few of my new purchaces in the ironing pile...

... for a while it became more interesting to gather my nicest French embroideries and iron them...

... than to do the shirts!

The little village scene comes from a napkin holder (at least that's what I think these little bags are):

I've found some beautiful embroidery on these bags, and no-one seems to value them any more.

This beautiful scene, covering all seasons, is half of a wonderful cloth which elizabethd gave me when we met last month.I found this emboridered woolen picture at a VG last week.

This is a teatowel - these could also be one of the things I'd be prepared to sell (thanks so much for your thoughts and advice below, BTW - I am going to take my time to think about it).Its wonderful black background leads us on to the next set of visual prettiness, prepared by Son 1 while he's been off school ill...He's gathered together his origami books, old and new, and used origami paper to make some of his favourite models.This one's a tadpole, in case you were wondering!

Son 2, however, has been inspired by his geometry lessons at College.He had a real challenge producing a design a bit like this for homework, then next thing we know, he's doing it for fun!This is another circle made with straight lines - he thinks it's magic!

A last visual treat for you, but a tasty one for us - breakfast grapes from the vine over Ben's pergola. We finally netted them to keep the birds off.

Goodbye for now and enjoy your Wednesday!

Living in the Past

I do hope that this title has at least some of you remembering Ian Anderson's nifty flute playing! It certainly makes me wish I had that one on CD - it's one of the few I don't have, for some reason!So, Son 1 has recovered nicely, and is back to Living in the Past. These photos were actually taken at the end of term, when he was the only boy in his class to bother to turn up to and dress up for the school's Medieval Party. I think his bowman costume went down well - it was a mish-mash of costumes he and I have put together in the past, and he did most of the work on it himself.
The new medieval/Lord of the Rings project is the construction of a trebuchet. (That's what I would think of as a big catapult, but apparantly I would be wrong in many ways...)
Little post-its have appeared around the house as he has recovered...
A chalk board on the sofa details his plans...

And we have been warned not to attack the collected 'stuff' on the kitchen table.
Meanwhile, Son 2 and I have made flapjacks for the camping trip - I see that Americans call pancakes flapjacks, or have I picked that up wrongly? These UK flapjacks are oaty bars - good for camping or picnics.
In the evening we ate pizza whilst playing Trivial Pursuit. This is quite amusing now, as we have a set of children's questions which are a good level for Son 2, but are a bit too easy for Son 1 (except British TV or sport questions, of course neither of them can answer those...) We came up with a strategy where he began each round with a children's question, and then moved on to adult's questions for science, geography, history and literature as he went on.
Son 2 won, mainly because he is rather terrifying when he is loosing, and Son 1 and I gave him lots of clues whenever he looked miserable. I can see that something is going to have to be done about that...
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So we're off to the airport to pick up Ben very soon, and will be camping from tomorrow night onwards.
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As Liz seems to have guessed, we will be camping without benefits of modern technology, so I will be out of blog contact for a week...
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Have a lovely week yourselves!

24 hours of flowers

We've had 24 hours of flowers here, outdoors...
and in...Yesterday afternoon Son 2 fulfilled his desire to get to grips with my sewing machine - I decided that he was safe to continue my bunting if supervised...He was great - on the technical stuff, as well as the sewing...We got the flags finished this morning!Meanwhile, Son 1 was down at our local lake, fishing with his friend Maxime. They never actually catch anything edible, but it's a great hobby! We took a break from the sewing to go and visit, and to collect more river pebbles...

The leaves are coming out on the trees.The trees reflect beautifully in the clay-pit lake, and the wildflowers are all around.

I'm not a flower expert, but I'll name the ones I think I recognise! I can only name them in English, not in French, though. Can you spot the periwinkles, creeping over the opposite bank of the stream?The streams and rivers are deep at the moment, with strong currents, so we keep Raja out of them.
Although she still finds plenty of water on the meadows!Son 1 was with me and the dog by this point, and we spotted stitchwort.And the little wild geranium, cranesbill (I know most of my flowers from the Flower Fairies - I can still quote parts of the cranesbill poem).Son 1 went off with Raja, and so missed the star of our walk, spotted by Son 2:Back at home, and wishing this blog had smellivision (for old fans of Blue Peter and Simon Groom), our ornamental olive is flowering and perfuming the whole area around the front door. It's the most restful scent...In the evening, Son 1 got interested in the sewing project, although he doesn't sew himself.He also resisted the general hilarity this morning, and declined to be photographed as a 'flower child'. He kindly volunteered Chanel as a 'flower cat', as you see.

We'll hopefully finish the bunting today, and we'll take some photos of its 'launch' in our home!

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