April cards

Favourites from April...it seems to have been a good month on the creative front. I'm so pleased that Rangers brought out some more colours in Liquid Pearls, especially some better greens. They're fun to stamp with, as in this Asian card.

I find it harder to send such simple cards as this, in case people think that they've been short-changed, but they'll always get used somewhere along the way.

Tomorrow's project is finishing off a knitted jacket for my nephew's birthday. Rather stupidly I forgot to bring the wool to work this morning - at least I was able to pick up all the stitches for the front bands so it was all ready to start knitting this afternoon. Picture to follow...

Neglect

tr.v. ne·glect·ed, ne·glect·ing, ne·glects

1. To pay little or no attention to; fail to heed; disregard: neglected their warnings.

2. To fail to care for or attend to properly: neglects her appearance.

3. To fail to do or carry out, as through carelessness or oversight: neglected to return the call.

 

What I am, apparently, doing to my blog. And what happened to this hanging basket - although to be fair, it's hanging outside a pub that is a victim of the recession, rather than wilful neglect. And in my case it's lack of time rather than wilful neglect.

We had these Sicilian onions the other day with some lamb chops - definitely on the repeat list. Even though they spattered oil everywhere and left C a big clean-up job on the hob afterwards.

Sicilian caramelised onions
12 oz / 350 g small or pickling onions
2 tblsp olive oil
2 fresh bay leaves torn into strips
thinly pared rind of one lemon
1 tblsp soft brown sugar
1 tblsp clear honey
4 tblsp red wine vinegar
Skin onions - blanch in boiling water first if needed.
Heat oil in a frying pan, add bay leaves and onions and cook for about 6 minutes, turning occasionally, till onions are browned all over.
Cut lemon rind into thin matchsticks (I used zester thingy). Add to the frying pan along with sugar and honey. Cook for 2-3 minutes till the onions start to caramelise.
Add wine vinegar, being careful as it will spit. Cook for about 5 minutes till onions are tender and liquid is almost all evaporated/absorbed.

I used shallots, being what I had. Next time I think I'd just fry the bay leaves whole in the oil - I think you'd still get enough flavour from them, and they were quite chewy and we ended up picking them out. 

 

I promised some owls. I still haven't finished editing my photos, but here are some of the long-eared owl, along with one of the barn owl and the only good one I was able to get of the Snowy. Since the Snowy Owl was still in its cage, and you couldn't get close enough to the bars to really lose them with a wide aperture, it was very difficult to get anything worth keeping.

 

 

Tomorrow - or Saturday - I'll try to sort out a new blog header for May and some of my favourite April cards...

Birds of Prey

I took more photos last Saturday than I'd like to admit to, and not enough of the descriptive boards saying what each bird was. But here are some of the raptors, most of which I can put a name to.

My favourite of all was the little American kestrel - weighing only 4 ounces and half the size of our own European one.

Irish kestrel

Various hawks

Golden Eagle

When C went last year, this was one of the birds that they had out , and some of the Harley riders posed with it. This photo gives a good idea of the size of it. I thought I had a better photo which somebody else had taken - all C had with him was a little point and shoot - but if I do, I can't find it.

I'll be back with some owls...

MIA

I feel as if I've been missing in action for a while. Easter was busy, and then I fell and hurt my arm - it's still sore, but there were only a couple of days when I didn't feel it was sensible to try to get up the ladder to the attic.
Today the weather was better than the forecast earlier this week, so we headed down to Rathwood near Tullow and spent some time looking at the owls and birds of prey, and then had a walk in the woods. We were lucky that the torrential rain and hail downpours all happened when we were either in the car or under shelter. More photos will follow...The little owl is really little - and must also be very light, as I didn't feel him at all when he landed on my back!

The oilseed rape is out all over the place, adding great splashes of colour to the landscape.

Off now to see how well my Salted Caramel Tart turned out - for starters I think I made it a bit large, but I don't posses an 8" flan ring.

Howth

Happy Easter!
It's a grey, rainy day here. We had hot cross buns for our breakfast on Good Friday, but I'm saving a lamb roast for tomorrow.
During the week I had to get a medical for work, and afterwards I walked on over to Howth to visit some relatives. As we were having guests in the evening I wanted to get home in good time, but I still had a bit of time to walk round the village on my way back home again.

I have a few more photos, but I'm still trying to get to the bottom of my computer problem. I'm sure it can't be good to get an error message every single time I shut down; next stop is to try a Windows repair as everything else so far has failed.

I saw this blackbird in the trees yesterday when I went down to the butcher. We were watching another pair hunting for worms in the front lawn this morning.

Cards

I don't seem to have too many favourite cards from March. I think I was too busy trying to fix all my computer problems.

And I did have a lot of fun working out how to make my own pop-up house instead of just settling for using a pre-made template. No point in having several paper-engineering books and not using them. I already know one thing I'd change if I make a parallel cube again, and the pitch of the roof is a lot steeper than I would want.

More birds

I meant to have included these tufted ducks in the last bunch of birds. They were quite far off on the lake, but it's still probably the best picture I have for showing the tufts. There are a lot of them at Farmleigh at the moment.

This pair of greenfinches were gorging themselves on sunflower seeds today - and as luck would have it, just when the sun was out. I need to clean the glass in the back door, though.

This sheep tea-cosy is my latest completed knitting project. I'm currently working on an Aran tunic-style sweater for myself, but I think something for my nephew is going to have to take precedence.

Papillon the Pig on Parade

Back in February Lorraine had a fun idea for celebrating her blogoversary and soon after that one pig flew in to Dublin.

I've never tried anything more complex than decorating simple shapes like boxes, so this was something of a learning curve for me, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Wings were optional but as Lorraine celebrates National Pig Day each year with Flying Pigs, they were to be preferred.

I'd bought some Decopatch tissue paper thinking I could use that, but it didn't take long to realise that this would be easy with a box but NOT with a pig. So back to the drawing board - and the gesso.

After three coats of gesso I used some blue and green distress inks and sponged the body to be like grass and the sky. Still thinking about what to do with the face

Then I stamped foliage all over using Versafine green ink. I added Liquid Pearls in red and gold Stickles for flowers. By this stage I was thinking of using some sort of butterfly for my main wings, so I also added some little butterfly stickers.

I tried several different types of butterflies for the wings - punched, stamped - and in the end, this one, the only large one left from a pack I bought about 8 - or more - years ago. I decided to sponge the face with pink, and used punches to create eyes. I thought she needed something around her neck, so I used some Mizuhiki cord threaded through a little clasp. This had the advantage that I could knot the cord in the back of the clasp and not have the knot show.

Then C suggested that she should really have a ring in her nose: no old brack rings in my cake-decorating box, any curtain rings I could find were too big, but a little gold hoop earring was just about perfect. And I remembered to curl her eyelashes up a bit for her final photo shoot.

I want to post while it's still Saturday the 31st in GMT, because like me Papillon likes to be punctual; but later on all the pigs should be parading over at Paper Vernissage.
Thank you, Lorraine, for giving me the opportunity to participate in this.