Christmas wishes

I was given a kit with felt animal ornaments last year, and have slowly been making them. This polar bear was my first attempt. There was a deer and a penguin which have both found homes elsewhere, and a less successful fox who looks as if he is wearing black wellington boots, a bit odd.

The snowman was also a kit for needlefelting on a form. The instructions required a lot of hot-glue gun work, which I did without altogether, managing to felt the nose onto the head and the head onto the body, and using black roving instead of sticking buttons on. I also wasn't very taken with the enormously thick brown felt supplied for the hat and scarf, and thought I would rather knit the little bobble hat from Arne and Carlos's Field Guide to Knitted Birds - having knit one for Lorraine I had an idea the size was probably about right. But those tiny pompoms aren't easy.

 

Christmas Wishes

 No Bûche de Noël this Christmas Eve - my sister decided that it would be more prudent if only one of us spent the evening with my aunt. I missed the chocolate aroma filling the house - especially as, having forgotten to buy raspberries to serve with chocolate fondant puddings on Christmas Day, I did a re-think and we will be having little individual Baked Alaskas. 

Peaceful wishes seems to be what I have mostly put on cards this year - it's going to be a different Christmas for everybody, that's for sure. Ours is normally quiet - but there's a difference between chosen quiet and enforced. May yours be peaceful and safe.

The robin reminds me that I will have to find a new source for bird seed, as up till now I have been getting it delivered from the UK to an address in the North. I've used an Irish company  a couple of times before and will use them again in the short term, but once C returns to work in the office and is no longer at home to take deliveries, it won't be as practical. At least I got one last order in before the UK leaves the European Union, so that should see me and the birds through the worst of the winter.

Christmas Wishes

Peaceful wishes for Christmas to all my cyber friends.


Christmas baking - the Bûche de Noël for dessert on Christmas Eve, and a brioche for breakfast on Christmas morning. At the time of writing this, we haven't yet had the brioche, but I took the advice of a workmate to try using some Italian 00 flour (he'd just been using some for traditional soft bread-rolls from the part of the country he comes from), and it certainly rose beautifully and feels lovely and light.

I tried to make the Bûche a little less rich than last year when I used ganache and a cooked buttercream - and judging by C's verdict after eating the trimmings off the ends, I succeeded. I'm still using my mother's original recipe, which actually I think is  American and not French at all, as it comes from The Gold Cook Book by Louis P. De Gouy, who was the chef at the Waldorf Astoria for 30 years. It's my brother who has the book, but I have the recipe on an index card, and so far I've managed not to lose it. I guess, actually, since De Gouy's father was the "Esquire of Cuisine" in the royal courts in Belgium and Austria, it could have European roots.

I added four peacocks to the flock of birds adorning my tree this year - when I saw them in TK Maxx back in November I couldn't resist them; one has taken up a perch for the evening on the log. I appear to have lost the little sprig of holly I made for it a couple of years ago using an Impression Obsession die, so this time I cut a couple of sprays of ivy from Yupo, reckoning that it wouldn't get soggy even in contact with the cake.

The brioche recipe is from Stephen Harris in The Telegraph. We won't be having raspberry compote with ours, I bought some nice jam in a fine-food store.

Merry Christmas

Wishing a peaceful Christmas to you all.

We went to Wild Lights on the 21st - more photos to follow whenever I get a chance.

This year's Bûche de Noël

Hot off the Needles

My niece requested a cream sweater for her birthday - work was busy so it was a few days late, but her birthday was Monday so it really wasn't all that late in arriving - and meant she got two cards, one with the sweater and one posted last Friday.

And I said that now we're into October and darker evenings (and rain and wind and general grey-ness), that I didn't feel it was too early to post some of the Christmas cards I have been making. These look like most of my favourites, though I need to look through my box and see what I forgot to pick out!

The screen ones were both samples for a technique challenge.

And these little pop-up ones were also challenge samples. 

I bought the Tim Holtz snow globe die set with a gift voucher last December, but it's taken me till now to have the time and energy to create a scene with it. I abandoned the snow globe part and  went for a little mountainside village.

One stamp, two looks:

And last of all - some time I posted a photo of  a tree-stump carved as a mushroom, along the main street in Greystones. It has now become a fully-fledged des res, complete with a little garden. 

Happy Christmas

The last two weeks here have been absolutely hectic, I feel as if I hadn't stopped since we got back from Paris (not even any time to edit the photos, that's a holiday task).
As I write this it's Christmas Eve afternoon and I have been baking all morning - melon soup, chicken pot pie and the Bûche de Noel for tonight at my aunt's house, fresh bread for lunch with half the dough being saved for cinnamon buns for breakfast tomorrow, and a Bailey's cheesecake for tomorrow. Now it's time to start winding down...

The first photos are from Midleton on Thursday, all of the library. Thursday was a beautiful day, not too windy and even a little warmth if you stood in the sun in a sheltered place.

Bûche de Noel for Christmas Eve - thank goodness there is some of the chocolate buttercream frosting left over because I would hate to think that I had used an entire four 125g bars of chocolate. At least the cake this year is lighter than the chocolate roulade I normally make, since I came across my mother's old recipe on a filing card somewhere. We had the dinkiest little miniature ones in Paris, complete with tiny little sugar toadstools and little plastic saws/axes for decoration.

Merry Christmas to all my cyber friends.

Old Tree Decoration...

I was searching my hard drive today for a photo from a commercial package. Didn't find it, but I found this photo of one of the little snowmen I made our very first Christmas together. We didn't have a lot of money - C lost his job 5 months after we got married, and it was a pretty bleak time back then as far as the job market went - plus ca change!! This is the first year for a long time that Ireland has had net emigration figures again. Anyway, we did get a little tree, and I knit about a dozen snowmen to help fill some of the gaps. Some of them had knitted scarves, and some were scraps from the scrap-box. (This particular scrap was from a trouser-pocket lining, and there's one with a lovely silky red and black scarf. One knitted one was wool from a sweater that I knit 3 times for my brother. The first time I knit it in real Icelandic wool and Mum shrunk it in the washing machine. The second one, same colours only mohair, he got caught in a lathe in college and it mangled it. The third one I knit in the same colours again with really cheap wool from the pound shop - and he wore it for years!) The snowmen still come out every year, in spite of the fact that they are a reminder of a difficult time.

New Tree Decoration

I had to smile when I saw Lorraine's post this morning with her lovely bird decorations. On my to-do list today was to take a photo of the lovely little Venetian glass ornament I got at the Craft Fair in the RDS last week. Time was when all the crafts were Irish - not true any longer. I went on Wednesday with someone from work, but didn't get to see all the stands. So when C came home on Wednesday night with two free tickets for either Thursday or Friday - well, there wasn't much deciding to do. I'd seen the Venetian stand on Wednesday and had been admiring the beads. I have some antique Venetian glass beads which I wear quite a lot - these modern ones were much glitzier, but lovely. There were a lot of masks too - very pretty but not my style. On Wednesday the stand was so crowded I never saw the tree decorations, so I was delighted on Friday to find that as well as the less nice Santas, they had just one little boy ornament left. I like getting a special ornament each year - but only if it's something I really like, not anything for the sake of something. This little guy will look much better on the tree than hanging from my Anglepoise.

We had a power cut just a few minutes after C got home. It's the second one in just over a week, and this time my computer did not like it, Thunderbird was acting up in a major way. I'd just got about half a dozen candles lit in the sitting room and hall when the power came back on.