Treeeesa

Rosa-May is an incredible friend, talented artist, and one of the funniest people I have ever met.  I really wanted to make her feel special for her birthday this year.  She really does love trees so I thought what could be more appropriate than a tree softie?

I got the inspiration for her from this lovely book.

Patchwork knitted blanket

This blanket started life because I wanted to try to use up all the half balls of wool that I had.  I used some recycled wool from a previous project.  I soon realised that I didn’t have much wool after all.  After numerous trips to the yarn store to buy yet more wool, and much procrastination, my blanket is finally finished.

The thing that held me up the most was the sewing together of pieces, but one last push a couple of months ago made it happen.

It’s a giant measuring 82″ by 66 ” (that’s 208cm by 167cm)!  That’s 4100 stitches per square, 82,000 stitches in total.  It weighs 2kg!  That’s so much wool!

My friend Rosa crocheted around the edge for me, and that really makes the whole piece look lovely.  I’ll have to wait for a good sunny day before I can get any pics up of the lovely edge.

It’s so heavy, it just traps you under it, making getting off the couch to head to bed quite hard.  It’s definitely going to keep both Joh and I warm all winter.  We love it.

Eveleigh Farmers’ Market

This Saturday saw the Eveleigh Farmers’ Market start trading for the new year.  Joh and I rose early and rode our bicycles to Redfern. We arrived around 8.15 and were pleased to see that there was a bike stand right outside the entrance to the covered marketplace.

The first stall we headed to was Yuri’s Sustainable Produce.  They had a wonderful deal where you fill your bag with anything from their tables for $8.  I decided to take a selection of their delicious fruit and vegetables.  They had some incredible looking black russian tomatoes that filled most of our bag, I couldn’t resist them!

The eggs we got from Egganic looked so good that I bought two dozen from them.

The mini capsicum from Kemps Creek Farm were so beautiful I had to take a photo of them.  We didn’t buy any capsicums, but did buy some fresh chillies, prickly pears and three bunches of ong choy (water spinach).  The ladies selling the produce propped up the capsicum box so that I could take a photo of them!  Then they all proceeded to tell me about the dangers of using prickly pears without gloves.  I must admit they are still in the refridgerator, I did get a spine in my finger as soon as I got them home.

We also brought home a piece of Berkshire free range pasture fed pork neck.  Unfortunately I didn’t get down the name of the grower, but the pork was certainly teriffic.

Joh and I headed home laden down with all kinds of goodies!

For dinner on Saturday night Joh cooked our Barramundi from Infinity Fish on the barbeque with kaffir lime leaves stuffed into its belly.  I used some of our organic yellow squash and garlic from Lettuce Deliver Organics and stir fried them with the water spinach.  A very nice meal indeed.

The Eveleigh Farmers’ Markets are held every Saturday and are well worth a visit.  I am so pleased about a weekly produce market, it’s a wonderful thing for Sydney.

A mini dress made less mini

My friend Janne gave me this sweet little lemon mini dress that she didn’t want anymore.  Being that I’m taller than the average bear, this dress is super short on me.  Cute, but not really that wearable. 

I rummaged through my box of trims and lace until I came across this sweet little floral ribbon.  Perfect!  I had just enough to go around the dress, like exactly the right amount and no more.I pinned the trim to the dress and then used a little piece of green ribbon to cover the join in the trim.

I sewed the trim to the bottom of the dress.  I think it looks very 60’s modish

I might embroider some little flowers around the neckline, though I’m not sure the dress really needs it.

Shorter is better – for hemlines anyway

I picked this dress up from a local thrift store a couple of months ago because I loved the colour.  It was two sizes too big for me but I saw immediate potential, and for $4 you can’t really complain can you.

I’ve been wearing it around the house recently as is, because its so big and roomy in this hot weather.  But I caught a glance of myself yesterday when I was shopping with it on and I realised that I really needed to do something about it.  Trust me, it wasn’t good.

Last night I took the bottom 3 inch panel of blue off with my quick unpick.   Today I took the sides in and took the bottom hem up another 7 inches.

It really does need a belt to break it up, but these two of mine will do until I get around to making something specific for it.

I love how it came out.  It’s quite cute I think!

Better late than never

I finally got my tea towel calendar hung this week.  Isn’t it lovely?  I bought it from Cicada Daydream’s Etsy store last year.  Love it.

Sunday lovely Sunday

Joh and I had the most lovely day at home today, pottering around the house.  We had three separate offers to go out to see our dear friends for afternoon drinks, but we decided to stay here and spend some quality time with our house (and each other, of course!!)

For breakfast we had the last two slices of our sprouted rye bread with organic avocado, tomato and fresh coriander from our garden.  Half way through mine I decided to try out some of our new alfalfa sprouts, and they were delicious!

I can’t wait for our deliveries from Lettuce Deliver to start again.  We’ve been shopping at Fratelli Fresh while the Lettuce family are on a much needed break.  The quality at Fratelli Fresh is some of the best in the city, but it still doesn’t even come close to our beautiful organic deliveries.  We did pick up some Tasmanian walnuts, which I cracked with my monster of a mortar and pestle.  I’ve popped them in the freezer until I decide what to do with them.

I did a bit of knitting, finishing off a monolith of a blanket that I’ve been using for months in it’s incomplete state.  Photos and gory details to come in another post.

Joh and I had some cheese in the fridge that needed using, a Polish style cottage cheese.  Joh made a wonderful organic wholemeal bread dough and left it to develop for a few hours.  I made some organic caramelised onions while the dough did it’s thing.  Joh kneaded and rolled the dough to a wonderful carpet of carbohydrates on the kitchen bench.  Then we scattered olive oil, caramelised onions, polish cottage cheese, parmagiana reggiano, olives and basil leaves.  Joh rolled the whole thing into a log, and then we decided it would be best to slice and cook the pieces individually, kind of like the broiche dough we used to make when I was a cook in Auckland.  They worked beautifully!  We cooked half of them on our pizza stone, and half in muffin tins.  The verdict?  Joh prefers the look of the muffin tin variety, while i like the more rustic feel of the pizza stone cooked rolls.  Either way, they are delicious, and will make a great lunch for us tomorrow.

Project 365

I’ve just joined project 365 on flickr.

I thought it would be a good way to keep myself taking photos, and hopefully it will encourage me to blog each day too!I wont post the photo here everyday unless I have something specific to say about it.  The flickr demo on the right hand side of the blog will show the most recently uploaded pictures each day, so you’ll be able to head over there and have a look anyway.

A well balanced breakfast

Today’s breakfast:

Organic sprouted rye bread

Organic avocado

Organic mung bean sprouts

Home cured salmon gravlax

This must be one of the healthiest life giving breakfasts that I can think of.  I’m really loving sprouted grain bread at the moment, i’m going to sprout some wheat of my own this week and see how we go making the bread from it.  We have been sprouting all kinds of beans and seeds this week, picture heavy post of our efforts to come soon.

I was given a tub of gravlax salts that my bosses partner had made.  It contains salt, pepper, sichuan pepper and sugar.  We purchased a small fillet of salmon to cure the first time to see how it went.  We washed and dried the fillet and packed it with salt and dill, then wrapped it all tightly in plastic wrap and stored it in the refrigerator for three days.  I turned the salmon twice a day to get the flavours to go through the whole piece of fish.  This morning when we unwrapped it I was amazed to find that there wa no fishy smell at all, and that the fish had firmed up and gone a darker red colour.  Delicious!

Tote bag for Christmas

This is the bag that I made for my sister Karen for Christmas.

This is the best photo that I took of the inside of the bag.  I didn’t have much time to get good photos, but just imagine a white lining with gold stylised birds on it.

I cut the legs off a pair of Joh’s old work pants to make him some shorts recently.  I made the straps for Karen’s bag from the leftover fabric.

I made the straps extra long because my sister is extra tall.  I thought that she could use it for grocery shopping like I do with my own