Kitchen Poetry, Friday

OK, so this is sort of cheating for my last Kitchen Poetry day. These aren't strictly speaking photos of my kitchen, but they were taken *near* my kitchen - there's been nowhere near enough light in there today to take a real kitchen based photo. One of Tall Small's spellings this week was kitchen - does that count?

These are the little things I made for Trashy's Rainbow swap; I'm fairly sure my swap partner isn't a regular reader and even if she is, she doesn't know I'm sending to her yet so I should be safe.


First of all a little bit of rainbowy-crystal necklace goodness, because who could resist such cheery sparkles?


And then a felty rainbow covered notebook that gave me such a lot of pleasure while I was making it. I know it's supposed to be bluebirds over rainbows, but my bluebirds looked more like dying ducks so I went with a butterfly instead.


I also included rainbow coloured thread, fabric, buttons and a mini stack of felty squares - hope it arrives safely and that she likes it!

Kitchen Poetry, Thursday

This is a tiny little tin that I have hanging from one of my cabinets, and it was given to me by Emma from Silverpebble, maker of fabulous jewels and scourer of vintage fairs par excellence. I love it, it cheers me up hugely - as does Emma :-) I'm lucky enough to live close to her and get to go bead shopping and tea drinking and giggling and gossiping; the next best thing is reading her blog, and if you haven't, you should!

Kitchen Poetry, Wednesday

There was an interesting post over at A Commonplace Life recently dealing with the idea that maybe in blogging we should try to reflect real life rather than always editing out the messy bits and cropping the untidy corners out of our photos. While I can sympathise with the frustration induced by viewing other people's seemingly perfect houses and immaculate children and endless talents, I'm not going to post pictures of the six empty milk cartons waiting to be recycled into the school swimming pool (dump in a handful of gravel and put them in the water and they theoretically prevent it freezing over in winter). Likewise you don't need to see the three sacks of logs waiting in my kitchen because I haven't yet stacked them and there's no room in the shed and I don't want them to be rained on overnight.

But I am happy to share with you this evidence of my hopelessness:


This is our weather tree. A lovely idea stolen from some inspirational parenting blog that I cannot now recall, the idea is to colour in a leaf each day to represent the prevailing weather - blue for rain, gold for sun and so on.

Well, daily colouring went by the by after about a three days, and we finally gave up even the weekly 'catch up' colouring sessions by February. We made a brief attempt to restart in April, but since then, nothing. And have I taken the wretched thing down? No, it's still there, reproaching me daily for being both a forgetful parent and a lazy housekeeper. Humph.

Oh well. Hope that makes you feel better!

Kitchen Poetry, Tuesday

So, having showed off our (not very shiny) coffee machine yesterday, I thought I should come clean and reveal what I really drink most of the time. I used to have a serious Lady Grey habit - a couple of pots per day, easily, plus frequent cups of coffee = a lot of caffeine. I've given up caffeine many times in the past - when I was pregnant, when I had just had the babies, and when I realised that if I missed my morning coffee I had the most appalling withdrawal headaches that it made me wonder whether it was such a good thing to be drinking so much.

The thing that triggered me this time was a friend whose sister is a nurse telling me about a patient who had such seriously high blood pressure he was about to be medicated, but was given one last chance. "Try giving up caffeine for a couple of weeks and see what happens," suggested the doctor. So, he tried, and lo and behold his blood pressure came back down to normal. Now, obviously this is second or third hand, and we don't know how much coffee he had previously been drinking, whether he had to gave up chocolate too (unthinkable) or even whether he actually existed, but it did make me stop and think about what I was drinking all day, every day.

Anyone who tries to tell you that Redbush tea tastes just like "real" tea is telling a big fib - there's a very definite and distinctive edge to it; but I have got used to it and now I rather like it. Don't worry though, there's still normal tea in the cupboard for visitors!

Kitchen Poetry, Monday

Last autumn, I took part in Kitchen Poetry and was surprised at how many things I could find to photograph in my kitchen. This year, it's being hosted by the lovely Mrs Fancy Elastic and I decided to join in again. A week of daily posting is going to leave me very short of words so please forgive me when I post dimly lit wobble shots and not much else!


This first one is our beloved coffee machine. It's older than either of my children, and has been bunged up with scale and cleaned out more times than I can recall, but it's still going strong. These days it's used mainly at weekends or when people come over, though the Smalls have discovered the joys of cocoa made with steamed milk so it may yet find it has a rather active old age!

There's still time to join in if you feel up to sharing photos of your own kitchen and what goes on therein ...

Inevitability

It was always going to happen. As soon as I'd made one little felt house picture my mental wheels started churning and I realised I needed to make my own design.

Not terribly original - mushroomy elf and mouse houses abound in blogland and beyond - but I am pleased to have conjured this out of my head and rendered it in felt and thread.



Now I need to try to translate some of the other silly images I have into reality. I have some outrageously glittery felt that is screaming out for festive treatment ...

Behind the curve, as usual

I hope all that observe it had a lovely Halloween. We went a bit Martha Stewart this year and carved haunted houses instead of scary faces. It always ends up that the children draw their desired patterns on the pumpkins and I end up scooping out the pumpkin guts and wielding a not quite sharp enough knife while they wander off, distracted by shiny things. We even had our own pumpkins ready to carve but in the end they were just a teeny bit small so they'll end up as pie one day this week.


We went to a huge party with my sister and her family, and bagged quite a lot of sweeties, but not so many that Tiny Small couldn't scoff them all while my back was turned. Little monkey. She didn't give me a single one!