My Creative Space

It's Miss Eight's birthday very soon. Okay, so that technically means she is still Miss Seven, but I have been thinking of her as Miss Eight for most of this month so that's what I will call her for now.

Anyway, as I was saying, it's Miss Eight's birthday tomorrow. She is not having a party this year, rather we are heading away for the weekend, including a trip to the snow. So instead of taking sweets to school to share with her class on her birthday she will be taking homemade snowman craft kits.

(Apologies for the photo quality - I took the photo on my phone, put it onto Instagram which automatically put it onto my Facebook page - and that's where I downloaded it from. I know, "Use the Cloud, Kirrily" and all my photo downloading issues will be solved...but I don't use the cloud and, well, this worked for me just fine).

So today in My Creative Space I have been buying a few odds and ends and putting together these little kits. Just need to finish the instructions now.

My Deceptively Delicious Creative Space

Miss Almost Eight has an amazing palate and will eat - or at least try - any food placed in front of her. And most of the time she will enjoy it too. In my ignorance I thought that it had everything to do with the way I had weaned her onto solid foods and then presented her with a wide variety of foods in those formative early years.

And then along came Miss Four.

"I don't like that, it's got green bits in it."

"I only like the garlic bread if the green bits aren't garlic."

"You can have the rest of this - it's delicious. But I didn't eat it because it's yucky."

"I don't like it...no, I haven't tried it but I just don't like it."

I have been able to fool her sometimes - like the time I processed the lasagne she wouldn't eat the first time around and turned it into sausage roll fillings. "These are the best sausage rolls ever!" Heh heh.

I've done all the right things by the experts - not made a fuss, allowed her to be involved in the growing and cooking of food, kept clear boundaries over meals. And gradually she is becoming more adventurous with her food (as is consistent with her "slow to warm up to new things" personality, as opposed to Miss Almost Eight's risk taking nature). And on the average day her fussiness doesn't bother me because there is plenty that she will eat that is good for her, and she is certainly not wasting away as she easily sits in the 97th percentile for height for girls of her age.

But we can all do with a little boost to our cooking repertoire, can't we? And why not try one that involves more vegetables? After all, even those of us in the family who will eat anything placed in front of us could probably do with more vegetables.

So when my friend showed me her copy of Jessica Seinfeld's Deceptively Delicious I became very excited. Rather than just doing the polite flick through with a "what a great book" comment at the end, I actually looked at every page and became increasingly more convinced that as soon as I was home I would find myself ordering a copy. As well as a copy of the sequel.

And they arrived this week! Hooray! So I think today, in My Creative Space, I will be roasting some home grown beets ready for pureeing for chocolate cake, as well as steaming home grown cauliflowers ready for banana bread. Yep - you read that right, banana bread with cauliflower.

I'll let you know how it goes.

The Perennial "To Do" List

I need to stick to the list.

Enough of the random fabric sorting, skirt cutting and - of late - trawling through archives and genealogy sites to find out whether there are two or four convicts in my direct ancestry.

I have a cork board here in my room and I have stuck large tags to it with this month's projects written on them. As I complete a project I will remove a tag and pat myself on the back. The categories are varied with scrapbooking, sewing, hand stitching, knitting, gardening and writing all having a place. And the hope is that I will stop doing things on a whim - which rarely get completed before I start something else on a whim - and start actually finishing projects.

I need to reclaim all my spare time - knitting while I drink tea, scrapping while the girls are having their bath, writing while the girls watch a little TV, sewing during child free time. And I need to set daily goals for my genealogy work, or that will take all of my spare time (I haven't done it for years but have recently had my passion for it reignited - not good timing when a few days earlier I had declared my need to stick to the list).

As I walk into my craft room and see my newly and neatly arranged fabric stash, or most recently arrived scrapbooking supply pack, or the print outs of long lost relatives' marriage certificates, or the box of balls of luscious yarn yet to be unravelled, I can feel the pull of fiddling and faffing about and starting something new. But then I see the clutter made by all the things half finished and I know that it is definitely time to Stick To The List.

At least for the rest of this month anyway ;).

My Culinary Creative Space

I seem to be living in the kitchen at the moment...but thankfully not sampling too much of what I've been cooking so I haven't had to adjust Maud's dimensions any.

There are causes and occasions happening that have led me to the kitchen. I have been baking up a storm for lunchboxes here at home, but doubling the quantities to help fill the lunchboxes of some friends who are a little short on time at the moment.

And now I have a pot of bolognese sauce on the boil which will be split into two or three portions - one for a pasta bake for a school family who have found themselves in some tricky circumstances, one for Spaghetti Bolognese Pie for a Pie Night with friends tomorrow night and any left overs will be for a hot weekend lunch.

Above you can see last week's dessert for Friday Night's Dessert Night - individual apple crumbles that were To Die For. We topped them with choc-chip ice-cream and the choc-chips went all melty and absolutely divine.

There was hot lunch for a visit to the new nephew (and his parents, of course) and also a choc-cherry slice and lemon delicious slice for a morning tea at a local school tomorrow...and so the list goes on.

So I'm afraid that the craft room (which really needs a new name) has been somewhat neglected of late. Although I have been doing a little fabric strip rolling...

And here's a self-indulgent picture of Miss Getting-Close-To-Being-Eight performing in front of a couple of hundred people on Tuesday night for the Winter Music Recital. She did absolutely brilliantly - of course :).

How is your Creative Space going this week?

Sewing on a Whim in my Creative Space this week

The first good news is I only have the zip and hemline (which I think I will roll) to do to finish my dress. However, there is a slight issue with size as I had to give Maud a little bit of a diet to get the dress to fit her hips nicely...which means that I might need to follow her lead and lose a centimetre or two on the hips if I want it to look this good on me.

The other good news is that lovely music book bag I made a few weeks ago is paying itself off as this arrived home with Miss Seven from her piano lesson this week:

When did she get so big as to be doing grown up things like piano exams? And why didn't I start using Instagram much earlier since it's so fun experimenting with all the photo styles?

Meanwhile, what am I thinking???

See the shiny bemsilk lining at the top of the photo - that's for a jacket that I started 10 years ago and I should be cutting it out so I can finish and wear the long awaited jacket.

Instead I have hidden it beneath the pile of old clothes and jeans that I have pulled out of my recycling stash. I'm hoping to put together some skirts for the girls. The only problem being that skirts for the girls, while fun to make and probably even in a slight deficit in their current wardrobe, are not on my sewing list. I have also thrown an old woollen jumper in with the towels to felt...I don't recall seeing that on the list either.

I seem to be creating on a bit of a whim this week. How about you?

Instagram...

I'm a bit behind the eight ball, but I've just started having a little Instagram fun. You can find me there as "homebyfriday", of course.

My Ongoing Dress

As you can see I have made a little progress on my dressy-dress. The bodice is now finished and I just need to make up the skirt and attach the two. Maud is enjoying her modelling career and I enjoyed pinning the inner and outer bodice pieces together while she was wearing them - gone are the days of working over the table. Love it.

As my excuse for not having done much on the dress I offer you the following. In the past week I have also...

Completely sorted out all of my recipes - you know, all those recipes scribbled on bits of paper or cut out from magazines or printed from the internet shoved into a folder together in the hope of being used. Well, not any longer - I now have three neat binders with ten full sections each - meal planning here I come!

I have also made six wheat bags to fill the osteopath's latest order - and modified three others.

And I've knitted my way up to 40cm on the back of the cardigan I am knitting for myself (time to start decreasing).

Oh - and then there's tidying the house, taking the kids here there and everywhere, cooking and baking, running errands, shopping (clothes and shoes as well as groceries), doing Kinder duty (fun!), doing reading at school, getting back to the gym after almost two weeks off, watching the aeroplanes land at the airport, and I have been reading The Alphabet Sisters by Monica McInerney (one of my favourite comfort writers - I have Family Baggage and Lola's Secret on my bedside table waiting).

It all fits into the category of My Creative Space, I'm sure. Must be time for a cup of tea now.