But what about the reindeer?

Father Christmas got his mince pie, clementine and Calvados.
But what about the reindeer?



Not even a carrot?  I love carrots.

And what are all these big socks doing here?
And why is there a tree in the house?

I'm very confused.

And now there's half a roast chicken in the kitchen that nobody seems to have noticed.

I'll have to cry for two hours until somebody deals with it.

Christmas creations

In 24 hours I have gone from this:

 and this

to this

and these

My old Christmas cards, from several years back, chopped up and zigzagged onto cards.  Was quicker than I thought.  You know the feeling, starting a project and going beyond the point of no return, then thinking oh, hang on, this is going to take me until next week to do.  Well it didn't. 

This post, on the other hand, has taken two days.  Partly courtesy of Blogger's shenanigans, but also underestimating the time it took to break off for the careful and altogether sticky process of filtering and bottling and labelling my Christmas booze presents - Sussex Sloe and Wealden Wodka. 

May have something to do with the necessary quality control checks.

Richard's pies

 When I saw Gina's mincepies with this recipe I just knew I had to give them a go, not least because of Richard Bertinet...

About a year ago, I found this video of Richard Bertinet making dough* and fell head over heels...I even bought one of his dough scrapers (or "scrappeur" to pronounce it correctly).  I did try making dough his way, but there isn't enough free airspace between my worktop and my kitchen wall cupboards to sling it about like that, and it all got a bit messy...

ANYway, the Girl must have caught hold of the name, because soon after a character arrived at the Royal Perquencwoo (a Lego town built on her bedroom floor which I have to try and hoover around) called.....Richard Bertinet.  And he appears quite regularly in her stories and newspaper articles about the Perquencwoo as well.

So here is Richard Bertinet, and his mincepies.

*the eagle-eyed will spot that this video is from 2012, and this post is from 2010...regretably I'm not a time traveller, but the previous link had broken so I found a replacement. 

Little quilts

 

I finally finished something for my Wednesday Workshop group...an A4 quilt.

I dithered for ages (approximately 10 months) with what to do for my quilt, and finally got fed up of dithering last week.  So I grabbed some fabrics and a collagey piece made as an experiment, and stitched them all together.

And the Girl, thus inspired, set about making her own. 

I lowered the machine speed right down to 100 (stitches per minute?) but after a short while she was confident enough to get it up to 200 (I usually have it set on max, 880).  She also got the hang of lowering the needle into the fabric by using a half-hitch on the foot pedal and swivelling around her corners, learning faster than some adults I have known. 

Start 'em young.  She'll be wanting her own machine next...