Jared's Woodcarvings

I think I've mentioned before that my husband is a very talented artist. Right now he's a postgraduate student at the City and Guilds of London Art School studying historic and ornamental woodcarving. I just wanted to show off a few of his recent projects.

This is a work-in-progress. It's a copy of a hand clutching a scroll carved by Donatello (he's working from a cast of the original). It's carved in yew, and the hand is slightly larger than life size. I'm excited to see this one when it's finished.

I really love this acanthus. Jared carved it in lime, and it's a really lovely decorative piece. I'm really lucky to have this decorating my kitchen right now! (He does take commissions and has carved a lot of gifts for people as well, so we don't get to keep many of his pieces. It's exciting to watch the process and then get to keep it.)

This is a piece of lettering practice (his initials) carved in beech.


These two pictures are both of a strapwork carving in English brown oak. This is a copy of a fragment of an early 16th century Flemish carving.

The Secret Post Club

This month I joined a kind of cool group called The Post Secret Club. Basically it's a group of bloggers. Each month you send a present to somebody in the club, and you receive a present from somebody in the club. It's a fun idea and a good way to get to know more bloggers (and get a pressie every month).

This month I sent my present to Audrey at Audrey's Country Crafts. I'd never visited her blog before, so it was nice to get to know her a little through her blog. It's packed full of crafty things, and has some great giveaways that you can enter.

I was also excited to receive my package. A huge thank you goes out to Jo at Arctic-Mummy for my new goodies. She sent me some Willie's Dark Chocolate (this is good stuff if, like me, you love dark, rich chocolate...it's great for baking with, especially if you want desserts that are very chocolatey, but not too sweet.) and The Help Yourself (and others) Cook Book. All of the proceeds go to the Ghana Education Project, so it's a cookbook for a great cause.

Now I'm looking forward to next month's Post Secret Club....

Furzey Gardens

Over the weekend we enjoyed a fantastic family day out at Furzey Gardens in the New Forest. It's a beautiful garden with breathtaking azaleas, wildlife, thatching projects, an art gallery, and a lake with lily pads. Goregous and very peaceful. What we really loved about Furzey, though, was that Furzey is a fairy land. That's right: fairies. All over the garden there's evidence of fairies: tiny doors in the sides of trees, miniature boats and bridges, fairy sized notic boards, etc.

The girls LOVED finding where all of the fairies live (and even got to see one up in the trees! They stayed very still and quiet so they wouldn't scare her off.). It was really exciting to go around Furzey Gardens finding all the secret little fairy spots. (Jared was by far the best at spotting them.) Miriam and Anya tried knocking at the doors, but most of the fairies were a bit shy. It was a lot of fun and Furzey really made a great family day out.

To see more pictures from Furzey Gardens, click here.

Fine Doodles!

A lot of people think that they have cool families. In my case, it's actually true. On my dad's side of the family, the family "business" is the CIA. I'm not even joking. On my mom's side of the family, pretty much everybody is an artist of some type: musicians, sculptors, etc. Pretty much everybody has the type of career that really is interesting, rather than the type of career where you politely mutter "oh, how interesting", and then try to get away as they start talking about how fascinating accounting is. (No offense to any accountants out there. I'm sure you're really interesting people.)

My cousin, Summer, is an artist and young mother who has started a very cool new company called Fine Doodles. Basically she recreates your child's drawing(s) into an amazing new painting. It's your kid's drawing, but turned into a piece of artwork that is beautiful, unique, and will last until your kid has kids of their own to admire their work. In short, the things are dang adorable. (The collage above is of kids' drawings and their re-imaginings as Fine Doodles.)

The really cool part is that I'm going to get one! The hard part is picking which drawing to choose. My house is overflowing with my childrens' artwork, and Miriam's pictures especially are really good. So I have to pick which picture to have transformed into a Fine Doodle. Maybe I'll put some options on here and see what everybody thinks...

To find out more about Fine Doodles, click here.

Another Chance to Win Photography

Here's another chance to win some artwork by up-and-coming photographer Christine Armbruster. Visit her site for a chance to win.

Fingers crossed that I'll win this time. It's my birthday this week & the beautiful girl in the green photo is, in fact, my little sister! So maybe this time I'll win. Here's hoping. Good luck to anybody else who enters too....but not too much good luck, because I want one of these pictures.

Redecorating the Kitchen & Inventing Cake

We used our Easter break to redecorate the kitchen. It's a project that we've been wanting to do for the nearly three years that we've lived in this house, and we finally got to it. It was all horribly dated with browns and nicotine yellows. Now everything is bright and cheerful and clean and inviting. I love it.

We used a dulux custom mixed gloss paint on the cabinets and brackets, white tile paint on the tiles and white on the shelves, and pink (Dulux Rock Candy 5, to be precise) on the walls (in special kitchen paint so that it can be wiped clean without harming the paint). We also did general tidying up, reorganizing, etc., and replaced the lights.

Miriam is convinced that we redecorated just for her because "pink is MY Favourite colour!" We let both of the girls help us paint...even if most of Anya's paint ended up everywhere but the wall. It looks great now and just really changes the whole feeling of the room.

To break in the new kitchen, we did some baking. In fact, I invented a whole new recipe to go with my new kitchen. We're trying to detox, and so we're currently not eating sugar or artificial sweeteners, no caffeine, and we're trying to cut down on white flour, and have eliminated as many processed and junk foods as we can. So this is my fairly healthy cake.

New Kitchen Cake
Otherwise known as Sugar-free Spiced Apple & Date Cake

Ingredients:

heaped 1/4 cup butter (room temperature)

4 eggs (room temperature)

1 tbsp vanilla extract

4 tbsp Agave (This looks similar to honey, but comes from cacti. I bought it at Asda.)

2 tbsp honey

1 cup wholemeal flour

1/2 cup rye flour

1/2 cup plain flour

2 tbsp baking powder

2 tbsp flaxseed (I use one of the powder mixes of flaxseed and goji berries)

1/2 cup dates (Roughly chopped. You can add more to taste.)

1/4 cup walnuts (roughly chopped)

1/2 cup apples (I used apples, with the liquid, that we had jarred from our garden. You could use apple sauce instead.)

1 tbsp cinammin

1 tsp ginger

1 tsp nutmeg

1 tbsp Caro powder

Instructions:

Butter & flour your cake tin.

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F.

Beat together the butter, eggs, vanilla, agave, and honey. Mix well until it is completely blended and smooth, and the mixture is light.

Sift together the flours and baking powder. Mix into the wet mixture. Then add in the rest of the ingredients and mix well.

Bake for approximately 30 minutes.

The cake is not super sweet, but is a fantastic tea cake with lots of spice and depth of flavour. I love biting into a bit of date or walnut and getting that extra taste. I served with a cup of Caro, which complimented the cake really well. So here's a cake that you can enjoy without feeling guilty. And if you don't tell people, they'll never know. Miriam has been nibbling away at it all day, convinced that she's sneaking in some junk food :)

Easter Cakes (Lavender Cupcakes)

I hope that all of my lovely readers had a fantastic Easter. We really enjoyed our Easter. It was really nice for all of us to just have some time off and be at home together. We've enjoyed things like pancake brunches and crafts with the girls. We also redecorated our kitchen over Easter! (I'll try to post pictures of it later because it is so cute.)

We had some people coming over on Easter Monday for dinner, and Miriam really wanted to make "Easter Cakes". So we made some lavender cupcakes. The lavender just seemed appropriate for Easter--so light and delicate, the flowery taste just seems like spring and new life. Anya helped me to make the cake (she loves mixing), and Miriam helped to decorate them (she loves sprinkles). They are a great desert because they are so light that they are almost refreshing...except for the buttercream icing I put on top, obviously. I just did a simple buttercream with a splash of vanilla extract and food colouring to make it lavender coloured.

For my super easy recipe for lavender cake (or cupcakes), click here.