mirrormirror - Part 70

Adventures in Knitting – Knitting the Ocean

September 9, 2009 By Paola 6 Comments

The only thing I have really been able to achieve this summer is a ton of knitting. I was inspired by all the fabulous patterns on Ravelry to embark on a cardigan for myself, the first time I’ve knitted an adult-sized cardigan or sweater since I was at college (more years ago than I care to remember).

This Featherweight Cardigan was a really quick, simple and pleasurable knit, particularly as it was the first thing I’ve made out of yarn dyed by a Seattle-based woman who goes by the name of Sundara. The woman is a colour genius and I’ve recently been bankrupting the family buying up her limited edition yarns, but the colours, oh the colours are a-maz-ing. I will blog about her separately as she really is an artist who deserves to be seen by knitters and non-knitters alike.

But I digress. This cardigan was made in Sundara’s soft and sumptuous Fingering Silky Merino in a limited edition colourway ‘Macedonia’ and, with its variegation from dark to light blue with little flecks of pale ‘foam’ on top, it was just knitting up the sea. The photos really don’t do justice to the depth of the blue and how it glows in the sunlight. Full project details on Ravelry as usual.

These pics were taken by my friend Kassandra at Seattle’s Golden Gardens beach on the last beach day before school started. Our kids are rioting gently somewhere a few yards out of shot.

While we’re on the subject of rebooting and reclaiming one’s life after the baby years, looking at these pictures I think I also really need to start reclaiming my body – it seems a bit much to be carrying ‘baby weight’ when the baby is nearly five.

I’ve been hampered in my efforts to exercise recently by lack of time and crippling plantar fasciitis -an excruciating pain at the bottom of my foot, which I think has been indirectly caused by twisting my ankle very badly a couple of years ago. At the moment the best exercise for me appears to be yoga, so I’m committing to doing a bit of yoga (either a class or a video) every day for the rest of September. I used to do quite a bit of yoga before the Minx was born, and it’s horrible to realise how inflexible I’ve become.

Separated at Birth?

September 5, 2009 By Paola 3 Comments

Or, calling a Spade a Spade

Incredibly fashionable Kate Spade Fall 2009 bag

Fantastically terrifying decoy owl

{via Making It Lovely and Whorange}

So, let’s start as we mean to go on shall we?

This bag has been doing the rounds of the blogs in the last day or so. Much as we like an owl motif or two round these parts, and much as I hate to contradict two of my favourite design bloggers, I frankly find this bag both extremely ugly and utterly, bone-chillingly, terrifying.

It reminds me of the ferocious looking plastic decoy owl which you, dear readers, encouraged us to buy, and which was perched on our roof deck for the best part of the summer in an attempt to scare the birds from our cherry tree. I think it worked with the birds – there definitely seemed to be fewer around this year, and it certainly gave me the screaming heebie-jeebies every time I glanced it out of the corner of my eye.

Oh, and if you must buy this bag (and we would encourage you not to) the bag is available here.

We’re off to visit our friends’ cabin in the mountains this Labor Day weekend (oh how painful it is to write ‘Labour’ without a ‘u’ ) so I’ll be back on Tuesday. Next week we’ll be talking about my new knitted cardigan and the new sofa. How can you stand the excitement?

Reboot

September 4, 2009 By Paola 3 Comments

Here’s the Minx enjoying her idyllic Pacific Northwest summer

I’ve been waiting for this moment for nearly five years.

Yesterday the Minx went off to kindergarten (for UK readers that’s the equivalent of ‘infant school’) clutching her new Tinkerbell lunchbag in her sticky little mitt and I got my life back.

I fell pregnant with the Minx two months after deciding to start mirrormirror and was seven months pregnant when the website actually launched. The Minx was three months old when my then business partner decided it wasn’t for her and eighteen months old when we moved lock, stock and barrel to Seattle while continuing the business in the UK. So really I’ve never been able to work on the business without fitting it round the needs of a tiny child.

And although I’ve had varying amounts of childcare, since the Minx was born I have never before had the unbelievable luxury of five (albeit short) days a week at my disposal, instead of cramming in odds and ends and bits and pieces of work round the childcare.

So there are going to be some big changes round here.

– First up I really want to start developing this blog. Thanks to my diehard readers for sticking with it even when I’ve hardly been updating. I do love writing it though and now I’ll be able to update it at least daily. So stay tuned.

– Next, there are some changes happening with my poor neglected little shop back in the UK. I’m not quite sure yet how they’re going to pan out, so no news yet, but stuff IS happening behind the scenes.

– Lastly and, most excitingly, I hope to launch the US version of mirrormirror early next year, depending on when our green card comes through and I can legitimately work out here. Please keep you fingers crossed that it’s soon.

I’ve got tons of other ideas bubbling up, but we’ll start with this stuff for the moment and see how things pan out. I’ve also got nearly five years of neglected filing and a disastrous email inbox to take care of.

The Desserts of Summer – Lemon Frosted Pistachio Cake

August 17, 2009 By Paola 5 Comments

I already wrote about this cake from Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries when I was also writing the blog A Year of Living Gorgeously, so there’s more cake-y description, links and photos here.

However the inlaws are in town, so the Minx and I whipped up another cake and I made a few modifications to the original recipe to make a bigger cake, so I’m writing out the full recipe here.

Here’s the cake in its latest incarnation. Perhaps one day the Minx and I will manage a tasteful version.

I have a 23cm cake tin instead of the 22cm one specified in the recipe and used to end up with a slightly flat cake, so I have modified this by ‘adding a little bit more’ to the butter and dry ingredients which seemed to work although they weren’t precisely calculated. The amounts I used are given below. In order to keep the ratio of dried ingredients to wet similar, I also added one tablespoon of olive oil, which I’ve used before in dense, moist middle-eastern type cakes such as this and which was a super successful addition.

If you want the original recipe for a 22cm tin then there is a link here.

Lemon Frosted Pistachio Cake (from the Kitchen Diaries, with slight modifications)

275g butter

275g Caster (baker’s) sugar

3 eggs

Shelled pistachio nuts 100g

Ground almonds 130g

A large orange

1 tsp rosewater

1tbsp olive oil

75g plain flour

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees C/Gas 3. Line the bottom of a non-stick 23cm cake tin with baking parchment.

Cream the butter and sugar in a food mixer until very light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating between each addition. Blitz the pistachios to fine crumbs in a food processor, then add them, with the ground almonds to teh butter an dsugar. Finely grate and squeeze the orange, then stir it in with a the rosewater. lastly fold in the flour with a large metal spoon.

Scoop the mixture into the lined baking tin and bake for fifty minutes (I usually need to add 10-20 mins but start checking at 50) covering the top lightly with foil for the last ten minutes (I never bother). Chek the cake by inserting a metal skewer (I use uncooked spaghetti) into the centre. It should come out fialry clean, without any wet mixture stuck to it. Leave to cool in the tin before running a palette knife around the edge and turning it out.

Decorate with icing made from 200g sieved icing sugar and the juice of 1 lemon.

You all know how much I love my American readers (and er, those in Liberia and Myanmar), but today I really can’t be arsed to translate all the quantities into pounds and ounces. If must insist on being pretty much the only nation not using metric measures then Google is your friend.

Little Bo Peep

August 13, 2009 By Paola 5 Comments

Funnily enough one of the things I miss most about England is sheep. There is something so very quintessentially English and homey and comforting about a windswept hillside dotted with fluffy white blobs – a sight I don’t think I’ve ever seen in America, the land of the cow.

Lamb here is an exotic meat – tucked into a corner of the supermarket at the end of the huge counters displaying every possible cut of beef, chicken and pork, and viewed with some suspicion. It’s rarely on the menu in restaurants, I’ve never had it served by American friends in their homes, and a waiter once told me that I may not like a lamb dish because the lamb taste might be ‘too strong’.

Anyway, I like this story, because it is so very English, so very charming and so very sheepy. Vegetarians may be aghast to note that not only did sheepbreeder Louise Fairburn make her wedding dress from the fleece of her Lincoln Longwool sheep, but she served lamb from her flock to her guests.

Full article here, {via Rose-Kim Knits}

And speaking of owls…

August 11, 2009 By Paola 1 Comment

…I’m very much loving the new bamboo owl mobiles from one of our favourite suppliers Petit Collage.

For UK peeps we also have her beautiful wooden owl collage for sale on mirrormirror.

Lorena at Petit Collage has also brought out a couple of fun owl-y packing tapes

Must think about getting all these in the shop.

While we’re on the subject of real estate…

August 11, 2009 By Paola 5 Comments

… this has just gone on sale for $25million in Brooklyn, NYC. This is apparently twice the previous record price for Brooklyn, but, truly you can see why. I think I could live here quite easily, if anyone fancies gifting me $25million. The clocks all work too…

See the full slideshow here

Wise Guys

August 7, 2009 By Paola 2 Comments

We all loved the Mibo Beetle stickers I blogged about earlier this year (and no, I haven’t yet done anything to personalise the car) and today I found out about another cool idea from the Mibo website – downloadable, print-at-homeable OWLS.

The Minx and I will be making these on Monday after we return from camping. That is if our fingers can move for the chilblains and frostbite – after last week’s record high temperatures, temps have plummeted this week and the weather forecast for the weekend is awful. I will be attempting to blog my camping experiences from my new iPhone (the silver lining to my car being broken into on Tuesday).

Speaking of iPhones, has anyone get any favourite apps they want to share? Either for me or the Minx? If you have a pre-schooler about the house you could do much worse that to download Smacktalk.

Thanks for the Mention

August 7, 2009 By Paola Leave a Comment

A few nice mentions since I’ve been back blogging properly.

The Roasted Corn Soup was mentioned on Shelterrific

Amy Ruppel’s State Animals were much admired and mentioned on Shelterrific and the fabulous Whorange

My new sofa was also mentioned on Shelterrific.

And I was mentioned on local Wallingford Seattle blog Wallyhood – though that was on the occasion of my second car break-in this year (yep, I’ve had a ton of luck with cars this year), so we’re not too happy about that one.

If you’ve blogged about either the blog or the shop recently and I haven’t mentioned you, then do let me know.

Alexander McQueen’s (Ex) East London Home

August 7, 2009 By Paola 4 Comments

As you know around here we’re rather partial to a peek at fashion designers’ houses (we’re looking at you Matthew Williamson, Betsey Johnson and Vanessa Bruno), so here for your delectation and delight are pictures of Alexander McQueen’s East London townhouse. {From the Real Estalker via the HolyMoly mailout – yes I do read it}

I don’t think it’s fair to make this a ‘Go Fug Your Room’ candidate as these photos are only estate agent’s photos and don’t fully reflect McQueen’s personal style, but it’s still interesting to snoop.

Personally I’m finding this rather boring. As you may have guessed I’m not hugely into minimalism at the best of times, but this strikes me as rather boring minimalism. My main gripe is with all the square and boxy built-ins – I prefer a few elegant curves in my rooms. And that house looks as if it dates from the 1850s? so it probably had quite a few nice original features – ceiling mouldings, fireplaces etc - which have all been summarily destroyed.

I also have to say that this house could benefit hugely from a bit of American-style home staging – some pictures, maybe a rug and a funky chair here and there would make all the difference.

I am loving the roof deck (though for me the glass skylight directly above the bed is not exactly a selling point), the pond thingy (pool?) and what we can see of the outside spaces though. Here the minimalist lines are softened by the plants, though a few flowers wouldn’t go amiss.

Anyway, if this house is for you it will only set you back 1.7 million pounds (I’ve just got a new computer and now have no idea how to find a pound sign) or around $2.8 million. Please bear in mind though, that this house is in Hackney, one of the, shall we say, edgiest areas of inner London.