In the faraway land of Once Upon A Time, they all lived happily ever after.

Moon Munkie has been living up to her pseudonym. Sleepless nights when she just wants to be close to Mama Munkie. And stories. She wants me to tell stories. At 3.30am, I don’t want to put on the light and find a book to read.  Lying in the dark, with my eyes closed and my Moon Munkie cuddling close I begin, “Once upon a time in a faraway land there was a princess;  there was a castle; there was a wicked queen;  there were three bears, three little pigs and a big bad wolf; there were two small children; there was a little Munkie who didn’t want to go to sleep.”

It’s awoken my inner Anderson. I want to help Moon Munkie make her own stories. So I’ve been creating the cast of “Once Upon a Time”. And here they are in the  shade of the carrot bed. So far we have the King and Queen of Once Upon a Time, 2 princes and 4 princesses. Given Moon Munkie’s fascination with the Frog Prince story, I also made a frog and a lily pond. We found a little yellow pom-pom (or “ponpon” as Munkie calls them) to be the golden ball. She told the story to Daddy Munkie after tea, using the new dolls. Then we set to making a tower for the princess from building blocks, but got distracted because Munkie thought they each needed a throne. The frog had to have one too. A green one.

If you want to make peg dolls of your own, I can recommend Lil Blue Boo and her wonderful tutorial. I didn’t follow it very closely because I wanted more than princesses, but I was grateful for help with the hairstyles. And the King of Once Upon a Time looks suspiciously like Burt Reynolds, does he not

I’m just going to go and make 20 eiderdowns and 20 mattresses so we can play the Princess and the Pea tomorrow. I’ll probably scale it down to just 5 of each. And after that I’m thinking maybe Snow White and then Cinderella. Dwarves and Fairy Godmothers could be quite good fun to make. I hope that after some time Moon Munkie will start to inter-mix the characters from different stories to make her own. I hope they all live Happily Ever After!

Strumpet Barbie

A friend bought Moon Munkie a Barbie-esque dolly back from her holidays. I feel ambiguous about these toys. On the one hand pretty dollies are a mainstay of childhood. They encourage imaginative play; life skills like hair brushing, face washing and getting dressed; they assist with development of fine motor skills as tiny fingers learn to dress and undress, do up and undo; and generally they make little ones happy. One the other hand, they seem to promote a type of beauty that is unachievable for most women; reinforce an unhealthy focus on appearance, hair, clothes and weight; and I feel that they encourage a materialistic and consumer-orientated approach to life too.

So here’s my dilemma. As a kid I wanted a Sindy so badly. I asked for one for months. My Mum eventually capitulated. I was so excited as I opened my Christmas present, knowing there would be a dolly in it for me.
And there was. A freckled Sindy with long chestnut hair. And a trench coat… A long, toad-green, trench coat.

Here’s a cracking photo of me, having just opened it, before I got my “polite face” on, holding the dolly with an expression that clearly says, “What the Dickens is that? ” Of course, in my 4 year old naivety, I hadn’t specified that I wanted a dolly with a pretty dress, it just seemed obvious.

[Edit: Having re read this, I'm concerned that I sound like I'm whingeing. Really, I'm not. With hindsight my Mum probably had similar ambivalence towards the pointy-plastic-breasted ones as I have now. My life was not ruined. I am not emotionally scarred! I learned to sew in order to make new clothes for her. It's just a funny story.]

That’s part one of the dilemma. I wanted one, so badly that I don’t want to say no out of hand. Part two is that Moon Munkie fell instantly in love with what I’ve come to call Strumpet Barbie. Of course she did. She’s a dolly with blonde hair to her knees and a “pretty” [read: slutty] gold and red dress. With gold metallic decoration. What’s not to love when you’re 2 and a half?
Anyway, I’ve decided not to make too much of a fuss for now.  Trollop Barbie can stay, although I’ve made her a new princess dress which is altogether more demure and  pleasing. I got a lovely and very easy tutorial from Miss B Couture. Given that I think she’s writing in her second language, this tutorial was easy to follow and easy to adjust to a slightly different doll. Also, I wanted it to be a long dress right to the floor.

It was a quick make, just a couple of hours. The top fabric was sheer and hard to work with. I was toying with making Moon Munkie the same costume. But I don’t  know if I physically could. I’m not good with slippy fabrics.

And that should be the end of the story. But after I’d taken the photos for this post, I presented Princess Barbie to Moon Munkie, full of motherly pride and creative joy at having made something so lovely for her. She gave me a look reminiscent of trench coats and said, “I want red one.”

*sigh*

Streetwalker Barbie is back.

Like Mother, like Munkie…

 If you had given me £3 to spend when I was 2 and a half, this is probably what I would’ve done with it. Who am I kidding? If you gave me £3 today (and I wasn’t allowed to spend it on chocolate!) I’d head directly to the stationery aisle.  (Initially I wrote stationery isle… now there’s a place I want to visit, just imagine…)

Moon Munkie spent the rest of the day happily in her “office”, drawing, writing important letters and getting to grips with the intricacies of scissors. Those chubby little fingers – I could just bite them.

Look how hard she is focussing on that writing. What does it say, little Munkie? “Mmmmm … It say… Mummy is great.”  Way to go kiddo, you’re pretty great yourself. Try to ignore the late-afternoon Vegemite tide lines around her mouth. She was working too hard to be interrupted by the banalities of personal hygiene.

Planning what to go into her new pencil case.How many hours of my life have I spent doing that? I hope she doesn’t also inherit my Stationery Fear. Pretty things that I never use, for fear of spoiling them. The lovely notebooks that I don’t write in because I have nothing to say that is important enough to mar their creamy pages. Pretty rubbers and pencils that remain in their boxes because using them would make them  uneven sizes.  (Yes, I know. But as OCD goes, it could be much worse!)

For the moment, I’m deriving a pure and simple happiness in watching my Moon Munkie discovering the pleasures of the Stationery Isle.  Perhaps I’ll hand over my beautiful notepads and pencils and enjoy her using them on my behalf.

Pigeons

I’m a patient person on the whole. I’m happy to let the lady with the one bottle of ketchup take my place in the supermarket queue. I don’t beep my horn at the driver in front the minute the light turns to green. My temper wears a little thinner with cold-callers who telephone me just after I spent an hour getting my over-tired Munkie off to sleep. Even when pushed to my limit I tend to stamp my feet or have a little cry. I don’t resort to homicide.

But pigeons bring out the worst in me. I could quite happily wring their fat fluffy necks, one by one, until my garden is at last quiet. And scattered with little feathery corpses. It’s the noise they make. 4.11am this morning. huu HUUUU hu. huu HUUUU hu. It’s fine to begin with, but then it starts to fill up my head until I can’t hear or see or think of anything else. huu HUUUU hu. They sit on my chimney using it as an amplifier and the hooting echoes down and fills up the room. I’m sure they know about Physics. I go outside and glare at them, sitting far out of reach on the TV aerial. hu HUUUU hu. I throw a piece of gravel in their general direction, hoping to scare them off. It narrowly misses the bedroom window and the pigeons giggle contemptuously at me from their perch. huu HUUUU hu. huu HUUUU hu. I stomp back into the house and plot ways to kill them. Kill them all.

1. Get a gun and shoot them. I live in UK. We don’t have a written constitution, therefore no Second Ammendment. I’m going to get myself arrested and the pigeons would just love that.

2. Poison them. But the other prettier, QUIETER birds also come to eat from our garden. The occasional squirrel. A woodpecker here or there. And then of course, there’s Moon Munkie who has never been known to refuse food of any sort. I wouldn’t like to accidentally poison her (even if she did tell me, “Daddy is my favourite!” quite recently.).

3.Electrify the chimney and roof. I don’t think I need to spell out why this isn’t a good idea.

4.Get a cat. It might work in the long run. Mr Munkie doesn’t like cats. I don’t want to be pigeon AND husband free.

5.Buy a water pistol with a very long range. But my aim is bad and  I’m just going to make them laugh at me more.

Nothing I can think of seems to combine the efficient but deadly solution that I’m looking for. They are more persistent than I am, and cleverer than I am – especially at 4am. Probably, I’m going to have to learn to live with them.  Or make pigeon pie.

Breakfast Muffins

Breakfast is intrinsically difficult. I find it hard to eat early in the day and yet I know that a good healthy breakfast is essential to a good healthy day. The breakfast products available seem to fall into 3 categories. Type 1: So full of sugar, fat, salt and refined stuff that I’d hesitate to eat them as a meal. Only for high days and holidays. Type 2: Pretending to be healthy. May have whole grains but still containing a lot of sugar and salt. Tends to be the sort I buy. Type 3: The genuinely healthy, but almost inedible at that time of the day. Shredded Wheat is what I’m talking about here.  My other problem with cereal products is that to feel full I need to eat at least twice the recommended portion size.

Sugar free muesli is fine. Porridge is healthy and tasty but I do like to pour on the syrup. Also I’m not good at preparing it right and I really hate cleaning up the pan and bowls after. Between muesli and porridge, breakfast at home is manageable. But I’ve really been trying to come up with something a bit different that would fill me up and also feel like a treat. I love muffins for breakfast, but with the butter and sugar (and *gasp* chocolate chips!), they’re not good for me.  Plus I’m hungry and cranky an hour later after the sugar buzz wears off.

So I’ve been messing around with a muffin recipe to see if I could turn it into a breakfast muffin with a difference. I cooked up the first batch last night in readiness for this morning. And for a first go, they were good. Almost-fat free (I had to grease the pan), almost sugar-free (I forgot to  check the apple sauce til after), and wheat-free too. Tasty and filling. A good breakfast treat. Much denser than a sweet muffin, but not chewy like bread. And still moist the morning after I made them. I’m going to stick what’s left in the freezer and see how they hold up.

To come up with it, I looked at recipes I already used and some I had when I was on a diet a few years ago. I used American cups to measure because I wanted it to be a quick to make recipe.

Ingredients

1 cup of wholemeal spelt flour (you could try something else if you need it to be gluten free)

1 cup rice flour

2 tsp baking poweder

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1/2 cup of sultanas (but it could be anything you like here)

1/4 cup ground almonds (could be any ground or chopped nuts)

1/4 cup dessicated coconut (but could be any ground or chopped nuts)

1/2 cup apple sauce ( I forgot to check if it was sugar free – it wasn’t! Next time I can make it myself or buy sugar free)

1 cup of milk (but I’m thinking this could be apple juice if it needs to be dairy free)

1 egg

honey to taste (I used 3 dessert spoons)

1 tsp vanilla

1 tsp mixed ground spice (next time I’m going to try lemon zest)

To make:

Heat oven to 180 degrees

Oil a deep muffin tray (the American type, not the fairy cake type)

Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl and the wet ingredients in the other bowl.

Add the try ingredients to the wet ingredients and combine.

Fill the muffin tin so each is pretty full up.

Bake for about 18 minutes.

Tip on to a rack and let them cool.

Guilty.

I seem to have lost my Makery Mojo somewhat recently. Just lacking in inspiration, and creativity. I think I’ve probably contracted some rare tropical disease because I’ve been focusing on cleanery and laundery(!) rather than makery. For people that know me, this is serious… I’ve never met a duster I liked.

So my house is sparkly but my sewing machine is gathering dust. Along with the dust, once nebulous feelings of craft guilt are starting to coagulate in a thick patina on the inside of my skull. And this post is a shameless attempt to break through. So here is the list of things I’m feeling guilty about right now.

- Not posting about the Mystery Makery that is going on world wide. It’s taken off well. I just haven’t been keeping up with it.

-Not completing my own Mystery Makes from the Seek Speak (who is doing a very cool giveaway at the moment!) and Modern Vintage Cupcakes (go and see how cute she is with her baby bump, it will make your day.)

-The incomplete cardigan I started at Christmas for Moon Munkie. Just one sleeve left. Why can’t I pick it up?

-The large bag of dress making fabric bought at a whim and stroked lovingly many times. But as of yet uncut.

-Map bunting for my classroom

-Final hemming of the hallway curtains.

-Blackout curtains for Moon Munkie’s new bedroom

-I haven’t written in Moon Munkie’s journal for a couple of months either. Which isn’t officially makery, but it comes from the same bit of me that isn’t working at the moment. Wish I could locate that spot and give it a prod.

I could go on, but it’s not really helping. I’m just feeling worse. So I’m going to post a picture of the only makery I’ve been up to in a fortnight. Some small eco-systems for my classroom. The little growing plants make me happy.  I hope that Year 8 are happy too when they make theirs. I’m especially fond of the tall one which has a pond eco sytem at the bottom linked to a soil eco system at the top. I found the idea here.  I love it but I couldn’t bring myself to introduce live animals and insects to such a small environment. No point in starting my own version of the Hunger Games.  

Moon Munkie has planted a whole trough of her own plants too. She came running inan hour later to see if they’d grown and her little sad face broke my heart. A hard life lesson to learn there.

Antipodean Mystery Make

So cunning is Kat of Modern Vintage Cupcakes! She has taken a length of yarn I sent in the Mystery Make package and designed it into her blanket for her soon-to-be baby. Take a peek here at the rest of the squares for the blanket. What a privelege it feels to be a teeny-tiny contributor to that blanket. Keep an eye on Kat’s blog as her little one grows and also at the AMAZING outfits she makes and wears. That baby is going to be the best dressed child in the Southern Hemipshere!

Moon Munkie Mystery Make Update.

Oh, look! The MoonMunkie Mystery Make!

JMdayis super talented all round. Is there anything she can’t turn a hand to? I doubt it. And inspite of not loving the colour combinations I’d sent, she still managed to produce a fabulous book cover. It’s gorgeous. Look at the way she cut the fabric and restitched it to turn straight lines to zigzags! I want to make one just the same for my Bible, with a little pocket to put my notice sheets in. 

 And Seek Speak is working on several smaller projects using Moon Munkie Mystery Make materials. She’s designing pretty things for a baby shower in May. I love both of her projects so far. These little sweetpea blossoms are amazing. What an imagination that lady has. I’m also loving the twisted vine lettering. Lucky mummy-to-be!

And now a confession. I haven’t started my own mystery make project which I reveived from SeekSpeak. And even worse – I received surprise packet from Modern Vintage Cupcakes. I really wasn’t expecting it at all. It was full of awesome stuff. And I haven’t even had time to photograph it all yet, let alone begin making anything. I’m so sorry. Maybe this week…. maybe next week.

And I should also confess now, while I’m on a roll, that the pretty booties I made for the babies last week ARE TOO SMALL!! For both babies! I have no idea what happened. Perhaps the babies of Cardiff have anomolously large feet, although they both looked perfectly proportioned all over to me. More likely my tension was bad and chopped necessary milimetres off the length of the booties. Better try harder next time.

Teeny tiny baby boots.

 

 

 

 This is what I learned to do at Stitch and Craft 2012! It turns out that I have preciselythe prerequisite number of thumbs for knitting in the round. Inspite of everything  I was worried about. These tiny Greemy Baby boots were so easy to whip up and the pattern was free from Ravelry. I crocheted 2 little flowers, also a new skill this week. I think I may cut them off again though as a dear friend has had a little boy and I’d like to give them to him. 

 These were my first attempt at Mariam Bootees also from Ravelry. These were made with aran weight wool, perfect for keeping tootsies warm. I hope Nia will like them. I can’t wait to meet her.

 

 

 

 These are also Mariam Bootees but knitted with fingering weight wool on smaller needles to make them small enough to fit a newborn. I can’t wait to meet Tamsin either!

 

 

 

 

Complete Surprise

I received an complete surprise in the mail yesterday.  I had 100% forgotten that I was one of 5 winners of Seek Speak’s  Moon Munkie Mystery Make. And yesteday a wonderful packet arrived. It was HUGE! And crammed full of goodies, all wrapped in a gorgeous brown scarf. I don’t think I’m going to be able to cut that. It might just have to be worn as it is.

Here’s what was inside.

• A beautiful blue vest top with a beaded top.
• A length of the softest pink gingham with a floral motif
• A length of white lace curtain
• A piece of batik in browns
• A suns and stars fabric in blue and bright yellow
• 5 gorgeous origami papers and a heart cut out of a similar design
• A metre or more of 1 inch elastic in pwder blue
• A metre or more of a dainty lace trim n yellow and white
• And my favourite item: a dress pattern. It’s a lovely long dress and even better, it has the words EASY across the top. So I might even be able to make something I can wear.
• A white plastic grid thingy (bottom left of the photo). I have no idea what this is. It’s divided into small squares and they are sectioned off in larger squares. It’s very flexible. Maybe for a tapestry? If you know what it is, do let me know!

Oh, how exciting. I have 420 ideas just now, but I don’t know where I’ll eventually go. Do please give me your ideas in the comments