As much in the mind as in the execution

If the number of blog entries posted recently is anything to go by, I'm not being very creative at all. On the one hand, this could make me a bit sad. Fortunately, the other hand is full of excuses which get the thumbs up for not making me sad. These are a combination of me either being out and about making the most of the good weather  - going on walks, gardening, visiting gardens, and spending time with friends; and new responsibilities at work which involves the occasional trip abroad. Oh, and I've also been trying to perfect the art of Martini-making which could, at a pinch, be classed as me being creative. Or am I stretching the definition somewhat?

Anyway, it was Craft Club yesterday so I did actually get a teeny bit creative. After all, that is the whole point of Craft Club - to put aside one afternoon a month to creativity (and catching up with friends).

The first task was to line a summer skirt which was a little too transparent for comfort. This was a fairly simple task so didn't take long so I was soon getting my head around a new project.

Last month I finally decided to try to make a few things from old woollen garments that had accidentally been through too hot a wash in the washing machine. Continuing with this theme, I had selected an orange mohair wrap cardigan and matched it with some brightly striped cotton I'd bought some years ago. The plan was to make a handbag.

The key thing about making something out of old clothing is to treat the garment almost like normal fabric but, if possible, also incorporate any original features. In this case, the only 'feature' of note was the v-shaped edge to the front of the cardigan. Of course, this could be ignored but when you have taken into account the shaping around the arm holes and the widths of the sleeves, you haven't really got many large pieces of fabric to make a bag of any decent size.

Anyway the first task was to cut open all the seams. You may think that cutting is drastic and that you will lose fabric but unpicking a knitted garment is very hard, particularly one that has been felted in the washing machine. Cutting is also a whole lot quicker!

In the end, I selected the back to form the back and base of the bag; one of the sleeves was shortened and cut in half vertically to form each of the sides; and the left front forms the front of the bag. I am hoping to make a feature of the sloping top edge, which you can just about make out in the photo below.

As with another bag I have made out of machine-felted knitting, the woollen outside is really just the cosmetic bit. It's the lining that does all the hard work. This new orange bag is really no exception. Not least because the wool is quite thin and so rather flimsy. I'm therefore going to use iron-on interfacing on the main bits of the lining.  This will sit between the lining and wool so will not be visible.

But first, a good bag should be designed in a way that means you can lay your hands on exactly what you want when you delve into it. If it's pouring with rain and you have to stand outside rummaging through your bag trying to find your door keys, which will invariably have slipped to the bottom, the bag is not really adding much value to your life. You may as well just sling everything into a plastic carrier bag. Well, that may be a bit harsh as I would hope your bag was a little more stylish than a plastic carrier bag and style certainly should be valued. However, I'm a practical woman so I need a bag that is stylish and practical. I'm also security conscious so I want a bag that unwelcome hands can't slip into and grab my valuables.

For organisation, pockets are key and need to be thought about before you begin construction of your lining. I've decided to go for a zipped pocket in the lining one one side and a series of pouches on the other side for phone and purse. These are all now cut from the lining fabric but I have hit a problem in that I don't have a suitable zip for the pocket. This has been added to the shopping list but won't get bought this month thanks to another work trip and another weekend away walking.

In the meantime, I'll get thinking about how I'm going to secure the top of the bag. A fully enclosed, zipped top ticks all my security boxes but I'm also considering some sort of fastened flap. The outcome of this decision may come down to how I end up fixing the lining to the bag. It is all very well making a feature out of the original cardigan's v-neck - where I'm hoping to show off the lining - but it has left me with another challenge.

However, if I didn't like a challenge the cardigan would have gone in the rags bag years ago and I would have gone out and bought a bag. Besides, the creative process is as much in the mind as it is in the execution. I'll let you know how I get on.

Coconut and Sweet Potato Muffins with Ginger, Cinnamon and Maple Syrup

I've been suffering with a bad back all year.  It was slightly relieved during an expensive three-month course of treatment at the local chiropractic clinic but kept flaring up whenever I walked more than two miles or tried to go for a run. I decided that I could achieve stretching and strengthening in a more proactive way through yoga, so I downloaded a really great yoga app and am squeezing in 5 sessions a week of between 20 and 45 minutes.

It was during a 35 minute session this morning that a few messages from my friend in Italy popped onto my phone screen. The messages included a photo and recipe for flour-free coconut and sweet potato muffins with ginger, cinnamon and maple syrup, which I have to say I found quite distracting as I was yet to have breakfast. Anyway, once the yoga session was over I had a study of the recipe, followed by a check of the weather forecast.  The latter confirmed that I would be unlikely to be spending any time gardening this afternoon so I checked the muffin ingredients, popped to the shops, and got cooking.

I found a few glitches in the recipe so here's my speedy version:

Take a clean, medium sized sweet potato, stab it a few times with a sharp knife and microwave it for 4-6 minutes or until soft.  (If you don't have a microwave you'll need to bake it in a hot oven for about 45-60 minutes or until soft.) Whilst the sweet potato is cooking, preheat the oven to 200C, 185C if using a fan oven, or gas mark 6 (obviously you'll be doing this anyway if you are cooking your sweet potato in the oven!); and lightly oil a 12-hole muffin tin.

Once the sweet potato is cooked and cool enough to handle, cut it open and scoop out the flesh into a mixing bowl or large jug. Discard the flesh (or eat it as a snack). Add 1 cup of coconut milk, half a cup of maple syrup, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, and 3 lightly beaten eggs. Mix together well - I used a stick blender to ensure there weren't any lumps of sweet potato.

In another large mixing bowl place 1 cup of rice flour or a gluten-free plain flour blend, a quarter of a cup of coconut flour, 2 tablespoons of gluten-free baking powder, 1 tablespoon of ground cinnamon, 1 teaspoon of ground ginger, half a teaspoon of salt, a pinch of grated nutmeg and a pinch of ground cloves.

Mix together the dry ingredients and form a well in the centre. Pour in the blended wet ingredients and mix thoroughly with a balloon whisk. Spoon the mixture evenly into the muffin tin.

Going into the oven

Pop into the oven and bake.  The recipe on-line says to cook them for 30-35 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean but mine took just 25 minutes and were looking rather well done.

I just couldn't wait for them to cool down

They get a big thumbs up from me. The cat was also very keen - I caught her running down the hall with one in her jaws. I'd only turned my back to get the cake tin to store them in!

Laundry accidents and electronic gadgets

I seem quite good at accidentally bundling woollen garments up with the ordinary laundry, putting them through a far-too-hot spin cycle and pulling them out as shrunken bits of felt. I then feel too guilty to throw them away and so they sit in a box in the craft room waiting for me to find the time and the inspiration to turn them into something.

Yesterday, I finally had some time on my hands, thanks to this month's Craft Club, and so I dipped my hands into the pools of inspiration.

An old wool walking sock seemed to lend itself to a pouch of some description and, since I am sick of rooting through the desk draw trying to match the cable to my laptop's external hard drive, I decided the match up the two (putting an all new meaning to pairing socks?)

I chopped off the foot, sewed up the newly cut seam, sewed a loop from scrap of ribbon to the top opening and added a button from the button tin.

One computer hard drive and cable safely stored.

Next, I turned my attention to the Sat Nav - also something that needs a protective case for when it gets shoved in my handbag or rucksack when out and about. For this I selected an old beanie hat.

I cut up the side seam and removed the oval shape that made up the top of the hat.  This gave me a rectangle of flat fabric. To protect the short edges, which would take a bit of a battering each time the Sat Nav was pulled in and out of the pouch, I bound them with some bias binding that I had left over from a previous project.

This done, I folded one end up to form a pouch large enough to fit the Sat Nav and the other end was folded down and inside the pouch to form a short closure flap, about half the height of the pouch. After sewing the two side seams, I inverted the pouch so that the seams were on the inside, and the folded the closure flap securely over the opening.

The finished pouch

Sat Nav safely stowed...

...and closed

It was all so simple that I'm feeling inspired to do something with the remaining pile of jumpers. Although, that may just have to wait for another weekend. For now, the sun is out and the front garden needs weeding!

Avoidance Tactics

I am supposed to be updating my CV. It needs to be done by 9 May and I thought the long May Day weekend would be a suitable time to tackle the task. And it is certainly a task that needs tackling. I've not updated it since about 2001, the reason being that all the jobs I've had since then have involved an application form and so my CV has become redundant. Except that now I need one, it feels like a Herculean task to update it.

So, when faced with a big challenge, what do I do? I find other things to do of course! Having found Mad Men on Netflix I decided that I would play catch-up with the final two series. I read the other week that the main rival to Netflix is sleep and I almost agree. What is it with binge-watching television series? It really is the crack cocaine of entertainment!

However, I have been fairly strict with myself (who am I kidding?), setting myself the task of achieving something from my to-do list between episodes. So far I have been to the Post Office and visited every charity shop on my local high street. For the record, there are seven. I know it is only April but this year craft club have agreed to do a Secret Santa where the gift has to come from a charity shop. The budget is £5. I have drawn a name from the hat and, in unhelpful but typical ElleAyJay style have something quite specific in mind. I'm therefore trying to visit charity shops at every opportunity. This weekend was my first proper attempt at the 2017 search and I came home empty handed but was inspired with a plan B if my plan A fails to materialise.

I have also done three loads of laundry, including the door mats and cat blanket (was that third load really necessary?); vacuumed the house (that really was necessary!); trawled reviews to find a yoga app so that I can attempt to be a relaxed, stress-free individual and free from back pain at the touch of a button (well, I can dream can't I?); completed a personal impact opportunities and challenges analysis (don't ask!); and (my proudest moment) changed the side light in my car's headlamps (thanks YouTube!).

After all that the to-do list was getting pretty thin so I went off-list, which is always dangerous, and I made a cake. I made it once before at the end of February when I had a day off and a fruit bowl full of very ripe bananas. I was due to visit friends at the weekend so I knew the bananas wouldn't get eaten but would be horribly over-ripe by the time I got home. The solution was to make Banana Bread and take it with me to my friends'.  It went down very well so I kept the recipe on my phone. The only trouble is, every time I open my internet browser the recipe is there, staring at me, and that is what happened today.

Now the problem is how to ensure I don't eat the whole loaf myself. It would seem by best option is to have a day out with the family tomorrow and take it along, although that means I won't be able to send time developing my CV. Darn it, things were going so well too! I shall have to console myself with a couple of episodes of Mad Men tonight.

Blueberry Cake (gluten-free!)

Inspired on a recent trip to Finland, I was itching to try to recreate a blueberry cream sponge cake and yesterday's craft club gathering was just the excuse I needed.

I have to admit that I had never before attempted to make a traditional Victoria sponge cake in gluten-free form. Gluten-free baking tends to be pretty heavy. This is because gluten in wheat flour is the the protein which gives any sort of dough its stretchy texture - ideal for stretching around bubbles of air for lovely light sponges or bread. This tends to mean that you have to add other stuff to try to recreate this elasticity, often without much success. Gluten-free flour is also very water absorbent and so the results can be dry and crumbly. However, the chef in Finland had made a fabulous gluten-free sponge cake so I just had to give it a go!

My cake tins are fairly large (20cm diameter and 4cm deep) so I ended up making a '3-egg-sponge'. I began by weighing my chosen three eggs (223g) and used this weight as the basis of the rest of the ingredients.

I used an electric hand whisk to beat 223g Stork margarine 'for cakes' (lighter than butter so helps to produce a lighter sponge, and recommended when using gluten-free flour) with 223g caster sugar until I had a light, creamy texture. I then beat in the three eggs and a teaspoon of vanilla bean paste. I then added 223g gluten-free self-raising flour, 1 and a half teaspoons of gluten-free baking powder, half a teaspoon of xanthan gum (helps with the elasticity) and five tablespoons of milk (helps with the dryness) to the mixture and gently but thoroughly folded it in. The mixture looked quite sloppy and almost curdled at this stage but I ploughed on by dividing the mixture between the two lined cake tins, carefully levelled out the mixture and popped them into the oven, preheated to 170C fan / 190C ordinary oven / gas mark 5. I tested them after 20 minutes to see if a skewer inserted into the centre came out clean but ended up leaving them for a further 5 minutes.

Once out of the oven I cooled them on a wire rack and well away from any four-legged furry friends (lesson learnt from a previous disastrous experience - well, disastrous for me, but the cat was very happy indeed!)

When it came to the assembly, I whipped 300ml double cream until the 'soft peaks' stage. Put about a third of it into a piping bag before mixing a very generous amount of blueberries (at a guess about 250-300g) into what remained in the bowl. I decided to use frozen (defrosted) blueberries for this bit as I was keen for some of the juice to seep out into the cream to make it a bit pink and also slightly more juicy. I heaped this over the top of one of the cakes before putting the other cake on top.

I then took about 2 tablespoons of salted caramel sauce (from a jar), slackened it off by adding a dash of boiling water until it was a spreadable consistency, and covered the top of the cake with a thin layer, leaving a 3cm caramel-free ring around the outside of the cake. Onto this I piped the remaining cream and topped each 'blob' with a fresh blueberry.

The result proved very popular and I'm not sure you could tell it was gluten-free - but not having eaten a similar cake that contained gluten for at least 17 years who am I to judge! However, I think this sponge recipe could become a new favourite.

Jewellery Pouches

At Christmas I discovered that my Mum keeps her jewellery in a re-purposed ice-cream tub where it all gets tangled up. I was therefore on a mission to make her something more suitable as a Mother's Day gift. March craft club gave me the perfect opportunity as she was out of the country and so I could finally make something without her knowledge.

Inspired by a small felt pouch I keep two special necklaces in, I dug out my felt supplies and the button box and started playing around with colour combinations. In the end I settled for some large wooden buttons printed with blue flowers, some navy blue and sky blue felt, and some petrol blue embroidery thread.

I took a square of the sky blue felt and folded it in half. I then used this to cut some navy felt the same width but slightly longer so that the finished pouch could be closed with a flap and secured with one of the buttons. Lining up the two folded bits of felt I then sewed around the edges. All that was left to do was to decide on the position of the button, sew it on and cut a button hole.

This arrangement of folded felt gave the finished case three separate pouches - between the fold of the sky blue felt, between the fold of the navy blue felt, and also in the middle between the navy and sky blue felt. Hopefully, this will help separate items and prevent tangling. I then repeated the process in miniature to make a matching pouch for earrings and rings.

I'm pleased to say that my Mum is now back in the country and was delighted to receive the jewellery pouches as a belated Mother's Day gift. Not only will it be a vast improvement on the ice-cream tub but will hopefully also allow her to travel with a selection of necklaces and earrings.

Come to think of it, perhaps I should make myself a set too!

Hapa Zome Leaf Prints

A few weekends ago my friend's 9-year-old daughter wanted to share a new craft with me. She called it Japanese Leaf Printing but that was all I was told except that we first needed to go for a walk to find our leaves.

Intrigued, I joined the family in putting on coats, hats and gloves (it was a wet and windy day) and went out in search of suitable leaves. I was instructed to look for nicely shaped leaves that were fairly fleshy but not at all waxed. So, grass, nettles, dock leaves, bracken were good; ivy, holly, gorse were bad although I did sneak in some gorse petals as I was keen to try some colour.

Back at home we gathered together our leaves along with a chopping board, a couple of sheets of card (this need be nothing special so bits of an empty cereal box would work fine), two squares of white fabric (ours were cut from an old sheet) and, most importantly, a hammer. Using the chopping board as our base we then layered our other items beginning with a sheet of card, a sheet of fabric, our leaves arranged in an attractive fashion, the second sheet of fabric and, finally, the second sheet of card.

The fun then began. Using the hammer you just pound the pile of card, fabric and leaves. Do so in such a way as to ensure you apply equal pressure evenly across all areas where there are leaves but be careful not to disturb the layers of card, fabric and leaves as you pound.

I have to say that, at this point, I was fairly sceptical but once all the hammering was over I was pretty amazed to see the results revealed. Carefully remove the top layer of card and fabric and then, even more carefully, remove the now pulverised leaves.

Not only do you get leaf shapes imprinted as the chlorophyl leaches into the fibres of the fabric, but some leaves also revealed the most intricate details. Passing a hot steam iron over the finished results is supposed to help fix the image but, this being all natural, the colours will fade over time. Also, the bottom layer of fabric seems to pick up the leaf definition better than the top.

My friend's daughter gave me the top layer to bring home as a souvenir. The first image is of a bracken leaf with some hints of the gorse petals I snuck in at the top. The second image is of a nettle.

I was so impressed that I showed a friend.  We were in my kitchen and it was dark outside so I demonstrated using the herbs from the windowsill. The thyme and parsley left my friend speechless (and also smelled great when being hammered!)

A sprig of thyme

Coriander (left) and Parsley (right)

I've since found out that the Japanese name for this type of printing is Hapa Zome but that many cultures around the world have been using this method for extracting dye or colour for centuries. Other examples I've seen on the internet are much more vivid so I guess you could be a lot more forceful with the hammer than I was. Just make sure you have a very solid foundation such as an unbreakable floor.

Do give it a go!