February Favourites

Anecdotally, because it's St. Brigid's Day, the 1st of February is the start of Spring in Ireland. I've never bought into that - but even allowing that this is the 1st of March it's far from a spring-like day.

I'll be back later with a few bird photos, but C is working from home today and using my desk, so I won't get time to upload them till this evening. Not that they're great anyway, taken through the window.  We have a small flock of blackbirds in the back garden right now - I should have bought a bag of apples for them but they're pecking away at what I have, along with some breadcrumbs and sunflower seeds sprinkled on the snow.

Recipe time - and a mixed medley

February has been a testing month here - but I thought I ought to get one quick post in before it's time to pick out and share my favourite cards later in the week.

With snow on the way this week, I'm starting with a snowman on our green beside the bus stop. We had a brief evening on snow one Monday night, C was coming home from Swords and said it was beautiful out that way. There was still enough here for someone to either stay up very late or get up very early and create a life-size snowman.

We have also had  a few lovely sunsets. I suspect these actually date back to January. Come next February I'm going to have trouble finding a suitable photo from this month to use for my blog header.

We were in town this afternoon and I spotted this lovely utility box. We were on the other side of the road and the sunshine was quite strong - but we'll be in the area again and hopefully then I can make time to get the bunny and the fox on the two ends of it.

And a recipe: as we needed to be in town by 1.30, we just had a good breakfast. In January I had been making Posy's Russian Black Bread from The Bread Book, A Baker's Almanac (a lovely rye, but time-consuming as it requires making polenta and mashed potatoes before even starting on the rest of it) and C was looking through the book. He made a list of several recipes he wanted to try, and the following is one of them.  We also thought the French Bread with Beer sounded interesting. I was asking a work colleague if he thought that the beer would simply give a sourdough taste with the lightness of a regular bread. At first he said he thought it would also add some extra leavening...and then he asked how old the book was. Well, I knew I'd had it for at least twenty years, so he reckoned that any widely available beer in America back then would have had no leavening effect and be purely for the flavour. We'll try that one another day. This morning we had these, and they're on the "make again" list.

Maple Buttermilk Muffins

1 3/4 cup white flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
2 eggs
1/3 cup buttermilk or sour milk
1/4 cup melted butter or light oil
1/2 cup maple syrup
3/4 cup chopped pecans or walnuts

Preheat oven to 400 F, about 180 C.
Sift all the dry ingredients together.
In a large bowl, beat the eggs till light and slightly thick.
Add the buttermilk, maple syrup and melted butter, whisk to mix.
Add the sifted dry ingredients: blend with a spatula or wooden spoon, stopping before the flour is fully absorbed. The mixture will be rough and lumpy.
Spoon into buttered muffin tins (I just used paper cases), filling about two-thirds full.
Bake for 15 - 20 minutes.
Yield: 12-14 medium muffins.

Hot and warm off the needles

The sweater is more like lukewarm off the needles...I originally knit a lovely cardigan and ran out of wool. The only place I could get another ball was a different dye-lot, and even with just one sleeve knit in the off-wool, it showed. So I ripped it back and knit this, using the off-wool for the ribs. And once it was finished, I had enough of the original wool left to cut the ribs off and knit them down in the original wool, and it was worth the extra work. I made myself finish it before starting my first little bird from the beautiful book Lorraine sent me at Christmas... I think my first "real" bird will probably be the long-tailed tit, but I want to knit another one in plain yarn first just to get more accustomed to the basic bird pattern before adding design into the mix. I had to order double-pointed needles as I didn't have any small enough  (this bird was knitting on size 1 US, and the beautiful birds of paradise knit from embroidery floss call for even smaller ones)- but I have plenty of scraps of wool to knit all sorts.

This one is hanging from what was our Christmas tree this year - I still haven't taken it down, although all the decorations got put away in early January. Just as well, C and I were both sick; fortunately not with full-blown flu, but still enough to need a week each off work.

Since it's nearly the end of January, and since I'm still struggling to catch up with all sorts of things, I'm going to add my favourite cards from the month in the same post.

This one used the last piece of coloured Tyvek in my box of scraps and spares - time to cut another sheet up and  have it ready to play with.

December Favourites

A bit late in the day posting my favourite cards from December - I didn't feel better till the day before I had to go back to work, so not much got done over the holidays.

Gift tag and close-up of the poinsettia, cut from plastic packaging.

This bag was to contain a gift set of 6 cards which had sea creatures on them. 

I liked this next one so much that I kept it and got C to give it to me for Christmas. The one following is the one I made (much earlier in the year)  for him - as he is somewhat of a Grinch. 

I have very few photos (4) from last January - so not much to choose from for a blog header. This is a grey wagtail in the Liffey at low tide.

Christmas Gifts

A couple of outgoing Christmas gifts which were fun in the making.

In hindsight I would have made the little tree canvases in landscape format and made them to hang downwards - so apologies, Lorraine, that this is not as easy to display as it could be. I just jumped in without thinking things all the way through, and then it was too late to change.

Søstren Grene opened near us earlier this year, and they have quite a good range of student-quality art stuff. When I saw these little canvases, I knew I wanted to use them with the Tree for All Seasons - and they were surprisingly easy to stamp on, which was a bonus. I only made a mess of one, which got upcycled into the bird card shared in my November Favourites post.

The snowman sampler was also fun to make - and as always with the samplers, there were a couple of squares created which didn't make the final cut. Thanks, Di, for contributing at least three of the snowmen used on it.

Christmas Wishes

And Christmas cheer; just as last year, the brew team came up with some fun names for our Christmas beer.

Christmas Treat

We treated ourselves to a trip to the Wild Lights at Dublin Zoo - and I was so glad that I got round to booking before it sold out. Since I came home with nearly 200 photos, and culled that down to 75 to upload to an album, I'll share the album link here for anybody who wants to see more, and just a few of my most favourites. I probably took almost as many of them as of everything else put together. Their tails lit up in alternating sequences, so there is a short video in the album too.

The lanterns are made out of some sort of fabric (described as silk), lit from within,  and I was very happy with my first attempt at night photography with my Nikon. Spent some time converting my tripod into a monopod - and as we walked up to the entrance, I heard something fall to the ground. When we got in, I discovered it was the little fitting which slots into the top of the monopod. Although I'd heard the fall, I didn't think it was anything of mine, so I hadn't looked. I've never lost one of those before - and luckily I still have a spare here. And even though I couldn't lock the camera into it,  the monopod was still useful as support to rest the camera on and hold it steadier than simply hand-held.

Look at the end, there were even some mandarin ducks on the lake.