No time for blogging today, but I couldn’t let the opportunity go past without telling you how much I love you all and appreciate your comments and emails. Big slurpy smooches to you all.
Make sure you tell someone you love them today. Even if it’s only your mother.
I’m leaving you with a picture of the sugar cookies I made and iced a few years ago. Nothing so ambitious is happening today.
Unlike fancy pants litter boxes, here is a cat accessory we can all get behind.
Cate is a long time commenter on this blog and runs a Blanket ID which provides super smart ID tags for dogs and cats.
Her idea is as nifty as it is simple. Each tag comes with a unique code number which you use to register your pets details online. If anyone finds your pet, they simply go to www.blanketid.com, put in the code number and lo and behold, they can find all your pet’s contact details and any other useful information such as special diet or allergies and vet contact details.
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It’s better than microchipping (though our cats came chipped from the shelter) as the tags can easily be read by members of the public, and the online data storage allows you to store a lot more information than would fit on a normal collar tag. It’s also easier to keep information such as phone numbers and email addresses up to date rather than having to have collar tags re-engraved.
As final bonus, if your pet does go missing, the online service means you can quickly print off ‘Lost’ posters, and BlanketID automatically contacts vets and shelters in your area. Your first year’s registration on the site is included in the price of your tag. Thereafter BlanketID charges a small annual subscription that includes a donation to their own pet charity.
Aside from all this goodness, the tags are also beautifully designed, and come in a bunch of colours and styles.
The Minx of course chose the girliest ones she could find for Flora and Harriet, which proved to be a bit of a mistake as we have recently found out that Flora is in fact Prince Florian, though we will still be calling him Flora for short (yep, you’re probably as confused as I am, and he is, by this).
Here’s Harriet modelling her tag.
I think Flora, on the other hand, may be rather embarrassed by his, as this was the only unblurry picture I was able to get.
Full Disclosure : Cate sent me a couple of tags to try for free. Don’t tell her but she didn’t need to do that as I think it’s a fabulous idea and would have bought some anyway. Thanks Cate!
Welll, that was trickier than I thought it would be.
Last Friday the walls of the Minx’s room were painted in Benjamin Moore’s White Vanilla and from the picture rail upwards in BM’s Morning Sky Blue. However, when it was done, the ceiling read much lighter than the tops of the walls and looked more like a greyish white than a true blue.
So then we painted just the ceiling and not walls in the next darkest colour- Benjamin Moore’s Tear Drop Blue. And this time the ceiling was very obviously a darker blue than the tops of the walls.
So finally we mixed Morning Sky Blue and Tear Drop Blue in about equal percentages and again painted just the ceiling. And this time it was just right.
It’s interesting how the angle of the light changes everything.
Here’s a reminder of what the room looked like before. That purple (chosen by the previous owners) could look very dark and forbidding on a gloomy Seattle day, such as we have very occasionally in the winter months (hahahahahahahahaha).
There’ll be more updates from the Minx’s room as we piece it all back together and assemble her super duper big girl loft bed.
It’s funny the way the mind works.
Finally, only four years after I wrote this blog post discussing possible paint colours we’ve got a painter in to do the Minx’s room. The comments from you all on that post were REALLY helpful and led me to think of sky blue as a colour for the walls.
Recently though I changed my mind and have asked the painter to paint the ceiling and top part of the wall sky blue with the rest of the walls in a creamy vanilla white. The painter will be finishing that off today and I can’t wait to see how it looks. Lots of before and after shots next week.
Today I wanted to share with you a beautiful restoration of an 1890s Greek house that I first came across last October and which seemed perfect to brighten up a dull February day. I looked at the pictures I’d saved, and lo and behold the house is full of sky blue ceilings! I swear I wasn’t thinking of this when I talked to the painter – I was thinking more of the blue ceilings you see in some porches – but I suspect my brain had just filed it away for future reference. Even more excited to see what the room will turn out like now.
In the meantime enjoy all the summery pretty on the Greek island of Nisyros courtesy of architect and designer George Koukourakis.
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{Photos by Vangelis Paterakis, via Yatzer.com}
A lot of knitters can get very snobbish about acrylic yarns, and having been knitting since the days when most yarn had a high acrylic content, I’m not exactly a fan of the squeakiness and dayglo colours.
Valerie Anne Molnar, however, makes fabulous use of acrylic yarn and acrylic paints to create stunning knitted art installations. Certainly one way of using up your yarn stash.
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I love the clever colour transitions and the randomness of the knitting – what fun to just go where the spirit takes you instead of following a pattern.
I also love the the work on the right is entitled ‘Smoked Ham Risotto, Pea and Mint Salad with Shaved Black Truffles’. Of course.
{via Design for Mankind}
So I’m a bit embarrassed about this one.
I haven’t had pets since Bubbles the goldfish committed spectacular suicide by throwing himself out of his bowl when I was a kid, so I’ve launched myself into the world of pet accoutrements with some trepidation.
When you acquire cats, the very next thing you need to buy is a litter box, and if you’ve been in the market for litterboxes recently, you’ll know that, although they come in all shapes and sizes, they have one thing in common. They’re all remarkably, hideously ugly.
With one exception that I’ve been able to find.
The Modkat litter box is the iPhone of litterboxes – a cool piece of thoughtful modern design, and available in an array of contemporary colours to match your decor or your cat.
The cat climbs inside the box to do its business and then has to walk on the litter catching tray on top to get out, so excess litter is caught and it reduces tracking and mess to a minimum. It comes with a sturdy reusable tarpaulin liner and an integral scoop that clips to the side.
I’m a firm believer in making sure that things that will be on display in the house are as nice to look at as possible (especially for something like this which we will hopefully have for the next fifteen-twenty years), so of course I bought one. Even though it costs $180. Yep, $180 just to buy a litterbox that is well-designed and doesn’t look like sh*t as well as smell like it.
Fortunately we love it. It’s big and sturdy, looks great, is super easy to clean and does a great job of reducing litter mess to an absolute minimum. Which is a good job as I think we’re going to have to get two – Harriet refuses to do her business anywhere near where Flora has been.
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But why does good design have to be so freaking expensive? Am I crazy or would you buy this litter box too?
If you’re tempted, you can buy the litterboxes at Modkat.com or with free shipping at Nest Living.
Since living here I’ve learned how fanatical Americans are about their pies.
In Britain a pie is a homely thing, most often made with apples, with a soft filling and a thin, light, crumbly crust.
As in so many other things, an American pie is an altogether less delicate and more robust affair. The piecrust is generally thicker, crunchier, and baked to a deeper golden hue with a chunkier filling. Aside from apples, a whole cornucopia of different fruits is used, particularly here in the Pacific Northwest, with its fabulous stone fruits and soft fruits. I remember watching Twin Peaks (which, incidentally, was set in the mountains close to Seattle) back in the day and being bemused that such a thing as cherry pie even existed. It seemed so much more exotic and truly American than apple pie, which to me was just my British father’s favourite dessert and had no American connotations at all.
After finding out that I had a hitherto undiscovered talent for pie-making, I was determined to broaden my horizons further and take a pie-making class so as to learn how to make a classic American pie. Fortunately Seattle is home to one of America’s top pie gurus, Kate McDermott of Art of the Pie, so I added her class to my 101 Things List and two Saturdays ago, off I went.
The classes are held in the kitchen of her West Seattle home, where Kate first demonstrates her techniques and then you get to make your own pie to take home.
Kate first made her pastry. Her recipe is here and in all honesty, it’s not that different from the recipe I used for my Bramley Apple Pie.
Kate too is a fan of using pure leaf lard and European butter. She gets her lard sent mail order from Pennsylvania – when I told her that you could get 100% pure lard in the chiller cabinet in any British supermarket, she nearly wept. She specifies using King Arthur Flour, which she keeps in the freezer. Apparently this has a higher protein content than most flours, similar to Italian doppio-zero flour in Europe.
Kate’s not a great believer in strict measuring. She doesn’t use scales, but instead pretty thrifted teacups and roughly-measured tablespoons. For her it’s all about the texture.
The big revelation for me was her method of rubbing in. I’ve been making pastry on and off since I was tiny and used to help my mother and have always assiduously rubbed all the fat in until the mixture resembled tiny breadcrumbs. Instead Kate prefers to rub the fat in a little less so that you have mixture of crumb sizes – some like sand or cornmeal, others like chopped nuts, some the size of peas.
It seemed strange to see the finished pastry streaked with fat, but it’s the fat which gives her crust its mouthwatering flakiness and crispness.
While Kate’s pastry was resting in the fridge, we set to making our pie fillings. In January Kate uses high quality frozen fruits instead of fresh. I decided to unleash my inner Kyle Maclachlan and make a traditional American cherry pie.
To make Kate’s cherry filling you just add plenty of sugar and the merest hint of nutmeg and lemon juice to frozen pie cherries and then stir in a third of a cup of flour and a little quick cooking tapioca to absorb the juices. I am thinking of experimenting with adding ground almonds instead, but that will be for my next pie.
I also generally have a lot of trouble rolling out my pastry. Kate showed us how to give it a couple of hard thwacks with her sturdy ‘French pin’ to show it who was boss
and then roll it out using a pendulum-type motion. I loved using her old-fashioned rolling pin, which is hand crafted from solid maple by Vic Firth Gourmet in Maine. Apparently he used to be timpanist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra before moving first into drumstick manufacture and then into rolling pins. Stories like this please me greatly and I have since bought one of my own. They’re available on Amazon.
Kate then filled her pie – a blackberry one – dotted the top butter and then showed us how to craft a lattice top
And here is my cherry pie. I’m assuming you can imagine how proud I was of this. Also I really want the little thrifted pot Kate uses for her eggwhite and water wash.
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Then all our pies went into the oven and we spent the rest of the afternoon drinking champagne and eating Kate’s utterly delicious rhubarb pie, talking about pie, and reading about pie.
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I think this almost qualifies me to be an honorary American.
More photos here.
Late last autumn the UK part of my Twitter feed started buzzing with chatter about Downton Abbey, a new ITV period drama, set in the halcyon years of the Edwardian era just before the outbreak of the First World War.
We managed to er, acquire it just after Christmas and loved it, though it hit every single ‘missing England like crazy’ button I possess.
It’s a typically English class-ridden frothy costume drama, about the fictional aristocratic Crawley family and their servants, with a fine, witty script by Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park); Maggie Smith, being Maggie Smith at her most imperious; a stellar cast of well-known British actors and ridiculously exquisite costumes. It’s currently being shown in the US, and the US part of my Twitter feed is now similarly alive with love for it.
The star of the show though, is Downton Abbey itself, or more properly the splendidly overwrought Highclere Castle in Berkshire, the seat of the Earls of Carnarvon, which was rebuilt in 1842 in High Elizabethan style, by Sir Charles Barry after he’d finished building the Houses of Parliament. The gorgeous park is by Capability Brown.
Here are some of the spectacular locations – the costume designers and camera folk must have thought they’d died and gone to heaven. Literally every frame is a visual feast. The last episode airs on Sunday in the US, but I think it’s available to download from iTunes and from PBS.org. A new series is coming this autumn.
More stunning photos of the locations are here.
The Minx’s first word, when she was around ten months old, was ‘ca’ and ever since she’s been asking us for either a cat or a dog or (though not as frequently) a sibling.
Since we decided that a sibling was definitely NOT going to be provided, she was fobbed off with vague promises of a pet ‘when you’re old enough’, which turned into promises of a ‘cat when you’re six’.
The Minx turned six in the middle of this month, and we soon realised that she would not let us postpone the fateful day a moment any longer and we signed up to get emails from cat adoption agencies.
Last Thursday we unexpectedly heard of a kitten adoption event at a local shelter and after meeting them on Friday night brought home two small grey kittens on Saturday. So my weekend was spent somewhat differently than I had anticipated and our house has already turned into Grey Gardens.
Here they are – Flora has three white socks and a white bib and Harriet is completely grey. I am realising that cat photography makes kid photography seem like a walk in the park.
And as you can see someone is absolutely besotted.
So after the tiny needles and fiddly techniques of Carmen Banana, I was ready to knit something quick, easy and luxurious, low-stress and for ME.
I needed a cowl and found a pattern, which was apparently inspired by a wool and silk Burberry cowl which cost $750.
Because I didn’t have any suitable chunky weight yarn I decided to use two skeins of Sundara Yarn’s Aran Silky Merino held double, which is why this knit ended up being rather decadent (though since it cost nothing like $750 I consider it to be a bargain).
I highly recommend this pattern, even if you’re pretty close to being a beginner. It introduces a few intermediate techniques such as a provisional cast on, grafting (Kitchener stitch) and simple cables, but there are plenty of videos online you can watch to help with these and otherwise it’s very quick and easy with spectacular results.
The yarn I used makes a soft, dense and snuggly fabric with a slight sheen from the heavy silk content, which also helps it drape beautifully.
All in all it was a wonderful, stress-free, indulgent knit, except for the grafting bit at the end. This is how much yarn I had left when I finished, and any knitters out there will appreciate just how close to a heart attack I came.
Here’s a self portrait of me wearing it. The composition is somewhat odd as I’m holding the camera in my outstretched arm while looking at myself in the mirror. However it’s still better than most pictures of me the Husband takes.
As usual there are more details on Ravelry. Come and be my friend!
