Creating | 1000 Fields of Roses

Exquisite Corpse

Well… that’s a title to catch the attention! 😉

“Exquisite Corpse” is the name of a game played by the Surrealists in the 1920s (although it has similarities to earlier parlour games). Each person in turn adds to something that has been written or drawn, but that they are not able to see – the previous person only provides enough clues on the visible paper for the next to continue.
Much hilarity ensues…
We’ve had a few goes at drawing the exquisite corpse, and it’s been fun. Today we tried writing. Still fun. It can be difficult to read it out loud after (giggling can get in the way). We played fairly fast, which is probably reflected in the story. Here’s our effort…
Try to figure out who wrote what! 🙂

Nobody knows what happened, on that dark, cold day in September. The wind was howling, the leaves were dropping, and Gerald trudged on, neither noticing nor caring what was happening in the street. Gerald did not know how things could get worse…
He had a sister who was so likeable that his friends deserted him to go and play with her. She played in the sun with a friend whose face was that of a rose and she was a laser shooting dog-bot with a tail made of marshmallows and happiness who blasted him to the end of time and space. While there he saved the world from space alien lizard people who wanted to scuff the leaves with his shoes. He thought it might rain. It was always raining!
How could this happen? Why? One minute the plan was proceeding smoothly, the next it had fallen in a heap. Perhaps he wasn’t cut out to be a lion-tamer. Why care about the collapse of a childhood dream? Because it is so unbelievably dreadful and you should care very much if your childhood dream collapses around you, yes you must care about these things if they suddenly happen.
What do you think? “I think you have a very large bottom.”
He then proceeded to use his large bottom to expel gas and fly back to Earth. After crash landing in the middle of a park (with some curious stares) he decided to learn to deep sea dive instead. After all, it was the sense of adventure he was after. His mother had suggested teaching beading and jewellery making classes at the local college, as he was quite proficient in the art, but that didn’t quite seem to fill the void in his heart. He sighed, as something suddenly fell from the sky and landed on her head. She cried out in pain and sank to her knees and saw an apple and a pear.
She pondered for a while then she went for the chicken and ate it whole.
And the world was saved from aliens and chickens alike.

Published in:

on May 22, 2015 at 2:08 pm Leave a Comment
Tags: exquisite corpse

Back To Baking

Wednesday again! Pizza day today…

We made up a very quick and easy dough.

We were a bit worried about the dough being able to rise, but it wasn’t overly cold today.

Each of the boys had their own dough to prepare. The recipe said to roll it out, so one of the pizzas was rolled and shaped into a circle. It turned out thin and crispy.
I used to make this recipe fairly often, but I didn’t have a rolling pin – I would just stretch and shape it with my hands. The other pizza was shaped like this – it was a bit thicker and more springy.

Ready to go in the oven 🙂
The sauce on the base is roasted tomato and bacon (pasta sauce, I think). They were topped with steak fried with garlic, bacon, onion and ricotta.

Yum! 🙂

Published in:

on May 20, 2015 at 3:45 pm Leave a Comment
Tags: pizza

Clanger Pie

Baking day again!

We decided to make a pie today, but couldn’t decide which one to do. A few days ago, we watched an episode of River Cottage, where they made a Bedfordshire dish called a “Clanger”. It’s a bit like a pasty (or “elongated suet crust dumpling”…) but with a different filling at each end. The original pasty had savoury at one end and sweet at the other – a meal in one package… We were making a savoury meal, but why not use the same concept for a pie?
So was born the Clanger Pie! 😉

Waiting to be covered – one side cheese and onion pie, one side “shepherd’s” pie (although nothing to do with a shepherd, since it’s beef and bacon…)

Covered with pastry one side, potato the other, with an egg wash.

Cooked!

…and ready to eat! 🙂

Published in:

on May 13, 2015 at 7:20 pm Leave a Comment
Tags: baking, bedfordshire clanger, river cottage

Rising To The Occasion

Bread again today!
We made focaccia – quicker than the bread we made a couple of weeks ago, so we were able to have it with lunch…
We’ve been having trouble with it rising, since the temperature has been a bit cooler lately. Today was warmer anyway, and we put the dough out in the sun, under a teatowel. We used cheese, onion and rosemary for the topping. Here’s the result 🙂

Published in:

on May 6, 2015 at 4:54 pm Leave a Comment
Tags: baking, bread, focaccia

Lazy Loaf

Baking again today! 🙂
We decided to do some more bread, but chose Nigella Lawson’s Lazy Loaf recipe. It’s a sort of non-sweet fruit loaf, and meant to be mixed and then just left in the oven at varying temperatures…

Yum!!

Here’s the basic recipe –

Lazy Loaf

200g muesli (we didn’t have any, so just combined rolled oats with sultanas)
325g wholewheat bread flour
1 sachet (6g) instant yeast
1 tsp salt (we use Himalayan)
250ml milk
250ml water

Mix dry ingredients, then mix in wet ingredients. It will look like a thick porridge.
Pour into greased loaf tin.
Place into a cold oven, then turn on to 110*C. Leave for 45 minutes. Then turn up to 180*C, leave for one hour. Tip out and tap base of loaf – if it sounds hollow, it’s cooked. If not, put in the oven for about 10 minutes more. Cool on a rack.
Eat warm with lots of butter 🙂

We had some issues with our oven, and didn’t have a loaf tin (we used a steep-sided casserole dish), so our loaf took longer than it should have. Still worth cooking!

Published in:

on April 29, 2015 at 8:46 pm Leave a Comment
Tags: lazy loaf, nigella lawson

Baking Day

Tomorrow is Biggest Boy’s birthday – he’ll be 16! We would normally have a full school day, but we’re going out for lunch, and will probably take our time…
Thought I’d try to fit a bit of Wednesday’s normal “classes” into today…
The boys usually do some cooking on a Wednesday afternoon. They’ve been doing dishes for the evening meal, but today we did some baking. Biggest Boy made cheese biscuits (basically – scones) and Littlest Bean made shortbread.

Both were very nice, and livened up our morning tea. Some of our available ingredients were not quite what the recipe needed, and our set of scales is a bit wobbly… consequently, we didn’t end up with perfect results (the shortbread wasn’t quite shortbread – I think it probably had too much butter. Still tasted very good!) Today was fun! Tomorrow should be too. 🙂

Published in:

on March 17, 2015 at 11:54 pm Leave a Comment
Tags: baking, cheese scones, shortbread

Knot Your Average Saturday

Most weekends, our Saturdays are a either a time to catch up on reading and resting, or a time to catch up on various things undone during the week. Sometimes they are a varied mixture of both.
Today was the first day of the school holidays (yay!). There’s a Knot Fibre Festival going on in our town at the moment, so we went down to try our hand at the workshops (free!) today – there are more on next week, the details of which you can find here.
Today we made paper, weaved, knotted, and even tried a bit of knitting. That’s something I could never figure out in school, but I managed to get some basics today 🙂

Littlest bean and I did some papermaking while hubby tried his hand at macrame.

Littlest bean made white paper, with a starfish/sealife watermark. The paper was all made from cotton rag, blended with water. The watermark is made by attaching a wire design to the mesh of the mould and deckle, so the paper is thinner and shows the light.
I used a yellow pulp, with a flower design.

The green blob is a shell mould – the same paper is used, but compressed into the mould. I didn’t place the first pieces of paper in as well as I should, so my shell has a crease across the top.

I was most pleased with my “scarf” – a piece of finger knitting which is long enough to be a scarf, but not very wide. We weren’t sure of the best way to do this – I was trying to explain a page I’d found here, and not doing very well with my explanation. We ended up googling the page and following the instructions – easy, and rather addictive… it only took me around half an hour (possibly less) to make the above length. Looking forward to getting rainbow colours for the rainbow scarf 🙂

If you’re looking for something to do this week, check out the Knot Fibre Festival Textile Tasters. I’m hoping to try a few more…

Published in:

Creating

on June 28, 2014 at 10:36 pm Leave a Comment
Tags: knot fibre festival

Not The Lesson We Were Looking For

Yesterday, the plan was to spend a large portion of the day experimenting with home-made batteries.. there’s a book called “Geek Mom” that details the actual experiment we tried. The website is here but I couldn’t find the experiment on there (have a look at the other stuff, though) Let’s just say that it involved making batteries out of drinking straws, copper wire/galvanised zinc wire, tissues and vinegar, then wiring each battery together as “legs” stuck to a plastic bowl, and connecting it all to a pair of LED “eyes” – ta da! Spider!

Ever felt calm, confident, and excited about a project you were just about to jump into? That was me, yesterday morning. The instructions I’d copied out were precise, and warned that they had to be followed precisely to achieve success. If you find the book (it’s in our local library), I would urge you to follow the instructions precisely…

We had the straws, we had the LED lights (2V, as specified) The plastic bowl was a substitution for a styrofoam bowl… I figured the weight was the significant feature. That, and the fact that I couldn’t find any styrofoam bowls. The pipette was to draw the vinegar and inject it into the straws. The first major problem came with the wire. We didn’t have fresh wire – we did have scraps of copper and (supposedly) zinc wire hanging about. Why not snip those into the appropriate lengths? Then, we had no hot glue gun (to seal the straws), but we did have modelling clay. That should be adequate to seal the tiny openings of the straws.

Armed, still, with optimism, but fairly clueless with everything else, we started to assemble…

The batteries are fairly simple – the end of the straw is sealed off, the copper wire (positive terminal) is wrapped in a thin layer of tissue to keep it separate from the zinc wire (negative terminal), then both wires are inserted into the straw. The straw is filled with white vinegar (acid conducts electricity) and the other end is sealed. The first problem was with the modelling clay – it seals, but it’s not strong enough to keep the straw sealed unless it’s treated very gently. Bending wires and twisting them together doesn’t treat modelling clay gently. The other problem was that the copper wire was thicker that the zinc – something I’d vaguely registered as not too important, but caused problems when trying to twist them together, while simultaneously trying to keep the straws upright and sealed…

The zinc twisted easily around the copper, but tended to slip off with handling if we couldn’t hook the copper somehow around the zinc. Nevertheless, we eventually got something resembling the needed circuit – positive terminals to negative terminals, connected to look like spider “legs” (complete with bendable knees)

The legs were stuck to the underside of the bowl with electrical tape, and the remaining wires were attached to the eyes. Which steadfastly refused to shine.
There could be many reasons why it didn’t work – substandard components, not enough voltage. It was a frustrating end result.

Dead and blinded spider (I saved the LEDs – the rest went in the bin.)

There was a lot of stress and emotion flying about. In the end, we still learned – just not what I had hoped. We still covered the basic theory, and we recovered enough to attempt a second spider (each boy had their own project going) Hubby put the second one together, just in case I’d skipped something obvious without realising it… and also to apply more force to the wire-twisting problem..
I found it interesting to watch the learning styles of each of my sweet beans. One of them dives in head first and starts putting things together, without stopping to listen to instructions. The other, when things don’t go perfectly (as they generally don’t), throws his hands up in despair and declares it all useless. Each reaction causes its own problems, and makes imparting knowledge to them a sometimes tricky prospect.
We didn’t get cool, light-up spiders. We did learn a little more about perseverance, and working together despite our different personalities and styles.

We also tried a basic lemon battery, although that didn’t generate enough power to light the LED. I gather that an average lemon produces 7/10 of a volt, so I hoped that connecting two lemons and a lime might get it working.

It didn’t.
We tried the “tongue test”, though (touching the tongue to the terminal wires) The boys just felt a “funny taste”, but I think that was a weak current…
So – not the original plan. Still valuable…

Published in:

on June 14, 2014 at 4:47 pm Comments (2)
Tags: lemon battery

Morning Creations

Most mornings, my littlest bean creates different bionicles (a sort of lego) and their various accessories. Here’s today’s..“What do you think this is?” he said. My first thought was “microphone”. Turns out Rediak’s brushing his teeth…
My gorgeous bean makes me smile 😀

Posted using Tinydesk blogging app

Published in:

on March 3, 2014 at 7:59 am Leave a Comment
Tags: bionicles

Gifts

So, the Christmas season is over, although we’re still lounging around, reading (and eating). Contemplating going out somewhere this arvo, which should be fun..
It was lovely to spend Christmas Day with all my boys.. a quiet, happy day. I love to watch them open their presents, especially when we’ve managed to sneak in something that they really wanted, but didn’t think they’d ever get!

So, here’s the thing –
I know that Christmas is not about presents.. I wrote about that last post..
The value of gifts, to me, is that I can see the love people have put into choosing something, and the understanding, to varying degrees, of who I am. Plus, I like gifts, too 😉

I got thoughtful things – foody stuff, miniature things, money for going out on my own for a day (or possibly staying overnight in Brisbane – anyone know anywhere cheap? 😀 ) We gave gifts, as well – I try to choose things that reflect the other person, with varying success, I suppose…

Here’s what we made for the family here –