March Favourites...

 March felt like a long month, and although the longer evenings are certainly an uplift, I only have a couple of cards that I really like enough to post here...My favourite is definitely the Tyvek one with the feathers, but the next one was a fun one to make. The theme was tickets, and I keep turning up train tickets from our second-last visit to Monet's garden in Giverny, so I decided to use one of those. Which turned into using both of them as I didn't consider that they were on thermal paper and would react when I tried some heat embossing. Just as well I had two...

Oswald has flown in to his new roost, so I can share him. Luckily I got the back of the cushion cover finished the day before I sprained my thumb - I haven't done any knitting since then, but hope to get back to it next week. With the weather suddenly turning cold again the latter half of this week, I've been glad of my toasty socks - it's an alpaca mix wool, and with the Aran stitch patterns, they are very cosy. 

Botanic Gardens

 We've had an amazing run of weather the last ten days or so - due to end this week. On the Saturday if the St. Patrick's Day long weekend we went up along the coast, but I have no pictures from that. I do have some from our trip to the Botanic Gardens yesterday - and if you have the appetite for more, the full gallery (approx 70 photos)  is HERE. 

Brief highlights follow. Unedited, due to lack of time.  Plenty of  Spring bulbs...the magnolia patch was fenced off so we weren't able to go into it, the one photo here is from the walled kitchen garden. It looks as if they had cut down several of the established magnolias and planted some new ones.

For the first time since Covid, we were able to go into the glasshouses - and I'd forgotten how quickly glasses  and camera lenses steam up! The strelitzia are in the glasshouse for South Africa and Australia. I liked the dead ones, which made me think of the vultures in The Jungle Book. 

This one was right up at the top of the Palm House - and reminded me of an elaborate fascinator

Enjoying the sun - and I had to look twice to be sure it wasn't another bronze sculpture like the one in the other lily pond. 

This was an intriguing narcissus, with alternate layers of coloured and white petals

And this one made us both think of one of those classic origami flower folds. 

Spring is Springing

 We finally had some bright sunshine weather, so I fitted a trip to Farmleigh in on Thursday morning. Unfortunately the walled gardens were just being closed for maintenance when I got there - if I'd known that I might have waited till today which was also a bright sunny day. But that's life.

My eye was caught straight away by a duck that didn't look like a mallard - and which did indeed turn out to be a shoveler. I have a feeling I might have seen them in the Zoo, which is also in the park, and we have definitely seen them in the bird reserve down in Newcastle, but it was the first time I'd seen one here. I think there was a female with it too - they are very similar in colouring to female mallards, so while I was there I just thought it was a mallard, but when I zoomed in on a couple of photos, I could see that it also had the distinctive long bill.

I also got lucky and was able to grab a few photos of a little wren.

Then we have some backlit magnolia buds and a couple of flowers, and a still life someone had created on one of the picnic tables, along with a glimpse into the walled garden through one of the gates.

February Favourites

 Are a bit thin on the ground - like blog posts in February! The weather has been so wet and windy - we had three names storms in a week. I did finish my Aran socks, and the first of a pair of knee-length socks, but didn't manage to get a photo taken. Not much else happened in February. But there are signs of Spring at last, I see daffodils and crocuses along the road on the way to work now. 

I had plenty to choose from for this month's header, thanks to at least one visit to Farmleigh last March. I have gone with a robin.

January Favourites

 ...are a bit thin on the ground. Two were made for C's friend in Maine - the chicken one (which I would have liked to add a sentiment saying "Why did the chicken cross the road", but he wouldn't let me, and one of the birthday cards. The acrylic pour was a bit of a fail because for some reason my white paint went lumpy when I stirred the pouring medium in. I should have ditched it, but I didn't have any other brand to try, and had already mixed the other paints. Most of the pieces I made will work, they're just a bit rough and ready. The colours in this one ended up being perfect to go with the bakery which I had already coloured. 

The header is some snowdrops taken in Farmleigh last February. 

Productivity

 Nearly the end of January, and I don't know where the month has gone. 

I'm working on the second sock of a pair in an Aran design, so I'll wait till I've got the second one finished. I took a break because C wanted a new hat, having left his warmest one somewhere in Maine or New Hampshire. He fusses about his ears so I spent a while choosing a pattern on Ravelry that had earflaps, and then he decided he didn't want them. By the time I'd lined the first one with fleece (which he was adamant he did want, it no longer fit him, so I had to knit another. It was a pattern that was easy to adjust, the coloured strip ran over multiples of 4, and the diamond pattern over multiples of 10, so to adjust the original 100 stitches up to 112 and down to 110 was easy. So, very unusual for us, we have a his 'n' hers. 

In the kitchen - C came across a recipe in Ottolenghi's "Ottolenghi" for a crusty Italian loaf, and he has fallen in love with the end result. It is, apparently, the sort of bread he dreams of buying when we are on holidays in Greece and France. It's a two-day affair, starting with a biga the day before, so it has required a bit of adjusting to my Sunday morning housework routine to ensure that it's not ready to go into the oven at the same time that I am trying to get the kitchen floor washed. I think we had the book out because I had been trying his double lemon chicken recipe, printed in our national paper and originally appearing in the New York Times, I think. Anyway, by now I have typed the recipe out and laminated it, to save having to hoist the book out every week. So far I have been using pasta flour as what I had on hand, but when C went to lodge a cheque at a bank in the town centre yesterday, I went along with him because I had a pretty good idea I would find 00 bread flour in the supermarket there, and indeed I did - the one specially for long slow ferments, so it will be interesting to see if it makes a difference. 

It is also marmalade orange season here. So I looked up various pressure cooker recipes, chose one and was delighted with the end result. It called for cooking the oranges whole for about 15 minutes first. Then they were wonderfully soft and it was easy to scrape most of the white off leaving the peel to cut finely. I used jam sugar so as not to have to boil it for too long, and we ended up with ten tangy jars. C was horrified when I said there was 6 lb of sugar in there, but he did his mathematics and realised that it was actually much cheaper than quality bought marmalade. I used this recipe here, and it was easy to scale up to 3lb fruit. I did move to a larger pot for the last boil with the sugar, having a larger quantity. 

I would make more before the season is over, but I only have one jam jar left! And, truthfully, there is so much blackberry jam in the cupboard from our September expedition that we are set for the year. I don't eat much of either of them. 

The mornings are already brighter - I'm going in to work a little later on Mondays, so while it's still dark I see the sunrise. I stopped the other morning to take this photo - I should probably have stopped about five minutes earlier, but on the bicycle, the tendency is just to keep going. The photo is from last week. It was just as beautiful the other morning - a dense mist rising and swirling under the trees, the sun just starting to show, and the contrails in the sky a deep orange. 

I got a new computer, which arrived earlier than expected (I wanted one with more RAM, and the advised arrival for that was March, so it was a surprise when it showed up in January, even before I had got around to getting an external DVD drive for it. I absolutely love the quietness of the solid state drive, but because I was unable to restore from my backup, I had to copy everything across manually from the backup, which resulted in every file having a timestamp attached to it. Thank goodness for bulk rename utilities! I upgraded to Windows 11 - the only casualty was the scanner which isn't recognised by it but can still be used downstairs. 

December Favourites

 Happy New Year. Not something we tend to celebrate despite Scottish ancestry only two generations back, and I expect to be in bed and asleep before the clock strikes 12. 

I have a few favourite cards from December. The first was for my brother's anniversary.  The third was primarily to use up the selfie frame which I had backed with embossed vellum and it just didn't work for whatever I expected it to at the time. 

The busker with his dog was cut from gorgeous black velvet, and in looking for a simple background, I thought that particular gel print looked a little longer a swirling  pavement.

Despite my best efforts and intentions, I will have no photos from December to use as a blog header when December 2022 rolls around. I've been keeping an eye out, but it's been a pretty grey and dull month, mostly.  And I forgot to update my header for Jan 22 before turning the PC off, so my second job tomorrow will be to see what photos I might have from January 2021 to use as a header. First job is to move my two-day Italian bread recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi onto the day two processes early enough to have it baked by lunchtime.  Right now the biga is rising. 

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.

 

November favourites

...are very thin on the ground, but as we have reached December I'll include a couple of Christmas cards I was particularly happy with.

The blog header is some borage flowers on a frosty morning last December. I was interested to find it in my December folder, as it's in full bloom at the moment. And yet it feels very late to me - I'm sure we saw it in borders in the gardens in Fota when we were there in July. Maybe mine is late because I sowed it too late and it was so dry. Surely a flower used as the traditional garnish for Pimms should be a summer flower. I planted it for the bees, but by the time it finally flowerd there weren't many around.