37 weeks expectant acrophobe stands on a chair

A few weeks ago I joked that I was making a baby blanket big enough to swaddle my coffee table. As the accompanying photo proves, this is now a reality. 

Definitely no longer a baby blanket. You'd lose a baby in that thing.

Anyway, these are the final three balls of yarn, so the epic 99,000-garter stitch project is at last nearing an end. It'll look all kinds of chi chi on the end of the (double!) bed in our spare room, recently painted in fancy schmancy shades of grey.

I'm at that point where I'm pretty sure I'll go in to labour as soon as the final end is woven in (hope I haven't jinxed that now). Mind you, to get this photo I had to stand on a chair (and I consider standing on a chair cause for having my mobile set to 999 even when I'm not at full-term). I shan't be doing that again. Promise. Anyway, hope that explains the slightly out-of-focus squinty photo. Give me a moment while I wipe the beads from my brow...

So, time for a new project for after the baby arrives. It'll have to be something for The Boss. She's pretty nonplussed about all her handknit garments (to a five year old a jumper is a jumper is a jumper after all, blissfully ignorant as they are to those evenings of cursing and frogging) but I need to make something for her just so that I know. Do you get what I mean? If there's a metaphorical kiss in every stitch and all that, then the dragon baby's been hogging a lot of the stitches, and it's not even born yet. So I need to remedy the imbalance for my own state of mind.

Yarn Along saves the day again with Greer's photos of this edible little sweater (and edible little girl) which have completely whelmed me over. In another browser window, I'm searching Loop for just the right shade of worsted yarn as we speak. Quince Lark stock is running low but there is enough of some colours left. Cascade 220 would work out cheaper. Or should I stick with the Brooklyn Tweed stated by the pattern? Tweed isn't always a favourite look for little girls.

I've never used any of them before - any advice?

And for reading, there's another something you can maybe help me with. There's a been a book doing the rounds and mentioned on several Yarn Along posts over the past few months that I am longing to get a hold of. I've commented to that effect on lots of your posts... and then promptly forgotten to write down the details (blame baby brain). It's non-fiction about organising/simplifying family life (I don't mean 7 by Jen Hatmaker, but Tracey's post about that today made me think of it...)

If you have any idea what I'm babbling on about, please let me know.

Oh, and it was Tracey who won my giveaway last week of the lace-weight shawl kit - hurrah! Couldn't go to a nicer lady, and I do so like making brown paper parcels :-)

the one with the makeover

Don't panic, I haven't spawned yet, but in preparation for the big day it feels like time to get rid of my old strapline "jack of all trades, mother of one". Sadly I'm such a filing div that I can't find the original photoshop file of my old banner, so simply changing it wasn't an option. In the meantime, there's a new banner that rather sums everything up at the moment.

it rains all the time in Scotland... honest

me and Dan Lepard :: two degrees of separation

Only one week in and I'm officially the neglectful mother of the playground pariah.

Quite some achievement in such a short time and all because I telepathically failed to pick up on an unwritten primary school memo stating that: five-year-old children must be encouraged to snack ALL THE TIME, and you must provide said snacks in her homework bag daily, obviously, you cretinous woman.

[Edit: I'd better clarify for some of my readers who have been kind enough to be aghast in their comments, that here I am being belligerent, melodramatic and bad-tempered because an institution has made me feel ignorant. The actual truth is that the kids apparently have snacks for playtime, and I hadn't supplied any. Go on now, make me feel bad for never even having considered giving her a morning snack before in her life. Dare you!]

Internally I veered from the irate (why the hell didn't they tell me this last week?) to the practical (gah, it'll need to be prepackaged and shopbought, because the homework bag is completely flat and full of paper) and back to the irate again (she's at school for barely two and half hours between breakfast and lunch at home, and school gives out free milk and fruit... yet I have to provide MORE food? WTF?).

So, my mission, should I choose to accept it (not that there's any choice about this): Quick, easy for small hands, won't make a mess in the homework bag, and (critically from my point of view) doesn't require any plastic tubbery that I definitely won't get back.

Luckily, Dan Lepard saved the day. Kind of (this is just really an excuse for me to tell you a story - as if you didn't know that already).

There's a lady of elegant maturity who has known me all my life. The kind of person who has sat next to my family in church since long before I was a twinkle in my father's eye. She made tiny cubes of tablet and macaroons to accompany the coffee after my wedding (and not your atas macaroons either, we're talking the Scottish ones made of potatoes). She made huge boxes of pre-sliced gingerbread and custard creams for my puerperial phase five years ago - demonstrating a clear understanding that high-calorie nourishment needs to be accessible with only one hand at that point in a girl's life. She is a baker of serious calibre.

But don't take my word for it. A few years ago, Dan Lepard wrote about her and published one of her recipes in his column for a national newspaper. Yes, she's THAT much of a legend. And, mercifully, the method that was printed, for pancakes, is exactly the same as my Granny's. Which means it is definitely right. Again, we're talking about the Scottish ones -  not crepes, not fluffy American alternatives, not pan scones or drop scones or any of the other names that people give them - these are pancakes, plain and simple. Dan would agree I'm sure.

A large batch of pancakes, frozen individually in sandwich bags and chucked into the homework bag the night before - phew, I think I've found one solution that we're all happy with for the moment.

So if you're making raspberry jam this month (our wet Summer has been great for one crop at least), then I suggest you whip up a quick batch of these pancakes and smother them in butter and jam while they're still warm.

And if you have any other ideas that would fit my tightly-defined remit (small, flat, non-squishy/non-crumbly snack) I'd really love to hear your suggestions. Because I don't know if a plain pancake, no matter how good, will cut it as a playground snack every day for the next seven years...

Black Isle wild raspberries

yarn along giveaway :: when the going gets tough...

... the cat hits the crack pipe and my thoughts become increasingly haphazard. Don't say you weren't warned.

It seems that if you completely gut much of your house, you also obliterate all of an old cat's pheromone spots (the things she rubs her chin on so happily). If you move her food and litter trays, wash her bed, and put away those deliciously wiffy brogues that have been getting in everyone's way for six months, you're probably just adding insult to injury. The result? Unhappiness. She no longer rubs her chin on anything and cries a lot. At 3am, 4am, 5am, 6am... you get the picture. I know we're awaiting the arrival of a newborn, but this level of preparation is ridiculous. So my stinky old shoes are back under the coffee table, and a pheromone plug-in (aka: the cat crack) has been installed. I hope to God it works.

I tell you all this as a way of (emotionally) fiddling while (my personal) Rome burns.

I now have only 100 minutes left to kill before I'm allowed to go and pick up The Boss from her first day at primary school. Her hand has never been held so tightly as it has been this past week, as I desperately try to cling on to the last few hours of me'n'her.

The 'A' team.

Five-and-a-half years spending most of every day together, just us.

Now there's school and an imminent sibling - surely it can never be quite the same again? Naturally she has responded to all this frantic maternal warmth by being simply adorable, only making the lump in my throat larger with every gulp. Only 95 minutes to go now.

Thank goodness it's Wednesday and there's Yarn Along. The 0-3m cream and ecru puerperium (that I started months ago) is finished, all but the buttons. But the only thing I'm more hopeless at than choosing buttons right now is choosing names, especially the male variety. So my reading material is limited to the boy section of the baby names book for the twentieth time.

On the subject of yarn (and because I want to keep that clock ticking on) I'd really like to give some wool away to a more suitable home. I found a Laughing Hens crochet shawl kit during our recent migration.x.renovation marathon - it was a gift a few years ago from a generous relative who doesn't know the difference between knitting and crochet (and doesn't realise that I cannot crochet to save my life). The kit contains two huge lumps of merino lace yarn (one cream, one teal), a hook and a shawl pattern. I'd much rather spend a few pounds posting it to someone who will value it than stash it away for another few years. There have been so many beautiful lace-weight pieces on the blog circuit this Summer that I figured, even if you don't want to make this particular pattern, perhaps you'll find a use for the wool?

So, if you would like it, do the usual sorta things:

• You can follow on Google 'friend connect' if you like (though it's not necessary to take part, in real life I don't ask for stuff in return for company so I'm not about to start now).
• Please do make sure I can contact you directly by email though; either leave your email address in your comment, or make sure I can find it on a 'contact me' blog page or via your blogger profile (in other words: please switch off your noreplyblogger thingummy, even just for the duration of this giveaway. If I can't email you to get your address then I'll choose the next person.)
• Leave a note in the comments section here saying you'd like to take part before 2200 BST (British Summer Time) on Friday 24th August. I'll pick someone using a random number robot.

Only 90 minutes to go. Instagram will take care of another five...

the ones on the bottom left?

Frill-edged shawl kit giveaway

the reluctant addict

how did this happen?

random recipes :: money from old rope

There's a talent I admire. It may not be big and it may not be clever, but people who are able to, almost literally, make money from old rope? They deserve the props.

Those designers who charge twice the price for past season jeans with newly incorporated rips? If punters are daft enough to go for it, then why not. The genius who had the idea of putting tiny handfuls of raisins into little matchboxes and flogging them (at a billion times the price of a big bag of raisins + an Ikea tub) to harassed parents labouring under the misapprehension that it's a healthy snack because the box is mostly green? Thoroughly deserving of his or her convertible. It's not that I like the product necessarily* but I admire the gumption. And I really like the word gumption (apparently a Scottish word incidentally).

The recipe book world is full of such examples - cooks and food writers making money out of either a) tweaking recipes so generic that no-one can claim the intellectual property and publishing them between glossy covers for £17.99, or, b) giving you recipes on how to pour boiling water over [a teabag/egg/pasta/rice/insert blithering obvious] and publishing them between glossy covers for £17.99. I'm not criticising it - I just wish I'd thought of it first.

My Random Recipe selection this month is kind of one of those. But in a good way. Having (rather obsessively) numbered all my recipe books last month for Dom's Random Recipe challenge, it was nice and easy to use a random number generator to pick a book for this month. It chose number 6: Jamie's 30 Minute Meals (so we're already getting a meal rather than a recipe for this one) and page 55: spaghetti in tomato sauce, garlic bread, salad and melted chocolate puds (obviously he used fancier words like puttanesca and ganache, but you get the idea).

I had an old friend coming for the weekend, so this would be perfect. We would cook it together on Friday evening. We are both more than capable of making red gloop, garlic bread, salad and melted chocolate without Jamie's assistance, but we followed his instructions anyway (more or less) which naturally meant that it made twice the mess it needed to, took at least three times his estimated 30 minutes, and some vital kitchen equipment perished in the chaos. (My darling friend is a ham-fisted klutz,** but I'm trying to forgive her.)

Like everything I've made from this book, it was very tasty. You simply can't fault him on that. But a plate of quick spaghetti, garlic bread, and homemade version of a Gu pot was never going to exactly set the gastronomic heather on fire. Mind you, the fennel and radish crunchy salad really was a tasty new idea that I wouldn't have had myself.

No wonder JO's a squillionaire though. I own a book in which he tells me how to make garlic bread and melt chocolate. I spent my (husband's) hard-earned on it. I use it. And I tell people how tasty it is. Talk about money for old rope, the man's a genius. Now I'm off to work on my big idea.

To read more random recipes (usually by people who remembered to photograph their plates BEFORE they ate) hop over to Belleau Kitchen at the end of the month.


* Yeh, yeh, naturally I have, in my time, bought both.
** I suppose there is technically no such thing, the ham and the Yiddish and all...