Yarn bombing bits and pieces

... but sadly it wasn't me!
This morning Pickle-Lily and I went for a walk along the sea front. We paused to watch the RNLI practise rescuing people,

RNLI in action

and found that someone had yarn bombed one of the Victorian shelters and it looked fantastic. They had obviously taken a lot of time over it, and all I can say is 'Such fun!

Along the seafront

This week-end I got my first smart phone and with the technical help of Pickle-Lily ( my 13 year old daughter to new readers) I am now on twitter and instagram . Please come and say 'hello' to me, I'm on as jopicklelily , I'm not sure if you can post links here.
Thank-you to all the lovely Handmade Monday people who visited me last week, and more especially In a Pickle-Lily's own blog, she was so pleased. With my new phone , and the fact that son is off sailing with the cadets next week, I will get extra blogging time next week, and my next post will be the recipe for lemon drizzle cake some asked for, so watch out for it!

The Great British Bake-Off is back!

In our house The Great British Bake-Off is must watch viewing, and on Tuesday evening the new series starts, filmed here in sometimes sunny and sometimes torrential Somerset.
Last Wednesday Pickle-Lily went to Millie Moon's in Frome to do a teenage skirt workshop, you can read all about it on her blog - In a Pickle. I had a lovely browse and came back with a bag of fabric, including some Riley Blake Bake Sale. So in honour of TGBBO I made some baking bunting for my kitchen, but I'm so pleased with it has pride of the place in the hall!

Bake sale bunting

As you can see, it matches the cute little one cup tea set I got from a charity shop a while back, and Pickle the penguin photo bombed my picture!
I've also been busy baking - lemon drizzle cake is cooling in the kitchen as I type and I also made a batch of coffee cup cakes as a holiday treat. I love coffee cake, but no-one else does .. or do they? I was very sneaky and gave one to Mr P-L and No1 son without telling them what it was, and guess what they both liked them!
So here is the recipe just for you...

To make 12 generous cup cakes, you need
175g plain flour
175g soft margarine
175g caster sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
3 eggs
2 tablespoons of milk
1 teaspoon coffee extract

To make
Mix all the ingredients together until light and fluffy.
Divide between 12 muffin cases and bake at 170 degrees (fan) for 15 minutes.
Allow to cool.
You can use this basic recipe for any flavour you like, just change the flavouring.

The icing I used for mine was coffee fudge - again very easy.
55g soft margarine
115g soft brown sugar
2 tablespoons of milk
half a teaspoon of coffee extract

Put all of these into a large saucepan and melt over a gentle heat, stirring. Then bring to the boil and boil for two minutes - keep stirring. Remove from the heat and stir in 400g of icing sugar. I know it seems a lot! Stir until smooth and thick. Then pipe over your cakes.
Yummy!
I'm going to join in with Handmade Monday this week - why don't you?

In a Pickle

My lovely daughter has now started her own blog - In a Pickle. The only problem is that now there are two of us trying to post and use the camera!
Why not have a little peek - you'll find her blog here and you can read about the ra-ra skirt she made at Millie Moon.

In a Pickle

Pick on a penguin part 1

Penguin - pattern by Fuzzy Mittens

As many of you know Pickle-Lily's favourite animals are penguins, and this year we have decided to have a bit of a penguin theme for Christmas. I know it's only August, but most fellow crafters have made a start on preparations! With Mr P-L on a week's holiday, I roped him in with testing the new knitted toy - a penguin of course!

Toys now must be tested for safety, and I am saying here that I am not an expert, but have been using the excellent pack from Conformance. It takes me a while to complete each test but with Mr P-L's help it was much quicker this week, so I thought I'd share some of it.

Firstly, I will introduce the very cute penguin toy P chose. It is one of Barbara Prime's patterns from Fuzzy Mittens . She is very generous in allowing you to sell her designs, as long as you acknowledge her design. I did try and design my own pattern, but I was told it wasn't cute enough!




Choke testing cylinder

The first part of the EN-71 testing is based on mechanical and physical properties. That is how clean it is, how it must be washable, the labelling, testing it as a choke hazard and the torque testing. The pack is very clear on how to do all these things and provides a clear checklist for recording all your results. For all my teaching friends, it's like an early years profile or APP with all the paperwork to accompany it!
Choke testing is done using a cylinder made from card to exact measurements. I was originally surprised by how big the cylinder was, and it has since been a guide to my making.
The torque testing is testing all your seams by taking the toy and twisting it by 180 degrees. This is the part where P decided I was the cruellest mother, by torturing the poor penguin in a such way. We videoed this test as part of the evidence. She decided at this point she couldn't bear watching me and that's where Mr P-L had to help! You really do need two people to do this as one person needs to take pictures or film your evidence.

After the torque test, it was the tension test. This involved 7.2kg of weight hanging from a clamp to test the strength of the seams.

 

The rain came down and the water came up!

Yesterday was  Nunney Street Fair, we went last year and had a great time, as you can read here . This year it was a little different!
The morning was fantastic - hot, bright and sunny weather. The streets were thronging with people, the bands were playing, the knight was posing with his horse and the organ was playing all based around the ruined castle.

The brave knight!

Busy!

Then the thunder came, followed by the lightening and the torrential rain! The rain was so heavy it even lifted the drains! Sadly we had to pack up, and some people lost stock and gazebos, a real shame to what had started so brilliantly.
Still, Pickle-Lily had a super time at Guide camp, and managed to visit Splashdown Water Park on Thursday on the hottest day of the year. I now have the camera back and can start taking lots of pictures of the things I have been making, including, dare I say it, Christmas things!
What have you been up to this week, I am going to join in with Handmade Monday and visit lots of blogs this week as the weather forecast is not looking too good!
For some reason Blogger will only let me adjust and caption the first two pictures when I download them, if you have any suggestions on how I can adjust and caption them all, I would welcome your help.

The power of blog and chocolate cake

As you may have guessed by now I really enjoy blogging and reading other people's blogs ! Sometimes it gets squeezed out in the hurle burly of life , especially as I know a quick five minute catch-up can turn into a couple of hours.
This week I am enjoying blogging as Pickle-Lily is away at Guide Camp and they have set up a blog for families to follow. I checked it to see if they had got there safely - they had, of course , and I'm enjoying the pictures and reading the girls posts. I am not a worrying mum, P has been to camp on many occasions and I know she will be safe, happy and well cared for, but it's good to see her enjoying herself, and have an idea of what she may be talking about on her return!
I also used a blog to create Mr P-L's birthday cake last week.

Happy Birthday!


The idea came from the Crafty Ribbons blog - using the basic chocolate madeira cake recipe below.

You need - for the chocolate cake
250g caster sugar
250g soft margarine
4 eggs
2 tablespoons of milk
260g self-raising flour
40g cocoa powder
1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder

To make
1. Cream the margarine and sugar together until light and fluffy.
2. Mix the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder in alternate batches with the eggs and milk.
This means I stir in about quarter of the dry ingredients then an egg, then another quarter, then another egg and so on until it's all mixed together.
3. Put in a lined 8" cake tin and bake at 140C (Fan) for about 1 hour and 15 minutes.
4. Cool.

To decorate
Pickle-Lily then mixed up a batch of chocolate butter cream, I can't give you the ingredients as she does this by taste, to spread on the top and side. We thought the Crafty Ribbons idea of kit-kats were better for an adult, so it took 18 of the two fingered kit-kats to go round the cake and four tubes of smarties on top. All held together with a ribbon we found.

I'm hoping I'm not too late to join in Handmade Monday - then it is just the case of throwing teenage son off the computer to visit the other blogs!

The Wild Place

Can I reach this...
 

For many, many years we had a family membership to Bristol Zoo Gardens , which is a super place for families and younger children to visit. In fact we've managed to continue visiting it as a student and as a teacher,  we decided to let our membership lapse as Master Pickle is now 15 and far too much a teenager for these places. On Monday the first section of the Wild Place opened, this is an off shoot from the zoo, aiming to be a huge wildlife park eventually, and today Pickle-Lily and I visited it. It's not terribly huge at the moment, but we had a lovely morning wandering around.

It is a few minutes from the M5 and a huge shopping mall but we felt like we were in the middle of the countryside.
We met the zebras and walked through a fabulous lemur enclosure with some extremely cute babies.



Are you looking at me?

 

 

We also took off our socks and shoes and trod the barefoot trail - it included stones, slates, hay, sand, mud (very cool) and crushed grass.
Such fun!

 

 

 

 

As I've already said the Wild Place isn't terribly big at the moment, but we spent a couple of happy hours there. P is already talking about going back when more is added and it seems to be the next stage from the zoo itself. It could do with better signage, so look it up first if you're planning to head that way and it isn't particularly buggy / wheelchair friendly as the paths are compacted hard core. All the staff we met were very friendly and helpful and were asking us for feedback and Pickle-Lily loved the very reasonable archery.

 P.S. After I wrote the original post P said to me, before she went to bed, that it was an amazing day and how do I go better for the rest of the summer? Better get my thinking hat on!