Four letters for four years

Yesterday was my wife and I's four year anniversary, which obviously required celebrating, but we decided to spend nothing. I therefore trawled the apartment for supplies, thought of an idea and came up with this:

This evolved from an idea of using some french knitting to make a word wall decoration. I just had no idea when I started of quite how it would go or how I would achieve it. 

First of all, I had to make a french knitting doll so that I could do that part. Again, this was done using things I found around the apartment. Those things happened to be plastic spoons and a toilet roll tube. So here is my knitting doll:

Let the french knitting commence ...

(And I was so busy doing it, I forgot to take a photo)

I then took a hanger

And straightened it out:

This told me how long my french knitting needed to be, so I did a bit more and then, after wrapping masking tape around the hanger, inserted it down the centre of the tube before fastening off the knitting:

Here's a close up of what it looked like:

Then came the tricky part, making this length of wired french knitting into a word. At this point I underestimated the strength of a wire hanger that until this point had seemed pretty flimsy and insubstantial!

After a fair bit of elbow grease and the help of some pliers, I had the finished product:

I reckon it's pretty appropriate for an anniversary and not bad for supplies found around the flat! :D

A box for wool

While the majority of our belongings have been locked away in a storage facility back in England, we obviously have some stuff in our teeny apartment. This is an apartment where pretty much all of the storage is shelving, and where I seem to have managed to collect a surprising amount of wool for such a (relatively) short stay. I decided now was the time to do something about it, also bearing in mind that I know we'll have to be moving everything pretty soon now!

As we also have a very limited budget, and a huge stack of newspapers, picked up on the train every morning on my wife's commute to work, I decided to fashion something out of them. 

I started out by making lots of strips that I could weave together by folding individual pages into eight.

Then made a start on the weaving:

At this point I wasn't entirely sure how big I would make this wool box, so just kept going until I thought it looked the right size. This happened to be eight strips by ten:

Then time to make the sides:

After adding some more strips just by slotting them into each other, the box grew:

And grew:

Until I figured it was probably big enough. Big enough was eleven strips high, and then it was time to finish off the top edge. I did this by folding the ends of the strips into the middle of the uppermost horizontal strip and taping them down:

Main construction finished:

Then I decided to make a lining for the box so that the newspaper ink didn't get on the wool that'd go in the box 'cos that'd be no good. To do this, I just cut up a clear plastic bag to line the sides, and a square of a white plastic bag for the bottom, then taped them into place. The overlap of plastic at the top was then also folded into the middle of the top horizontal strip and taped down. To finish the box I taped the top edge up, and ta-da, done:

With wool in:

Those are 400g balls of wool, to give an indication of size, and the box ended up using ninety-three strips.

Full Steam Ahead

There are five and a half weeks, or thirty-nine(!) days, until we leave France. That's not very many. It's also really not very many considering I said I'd make the Birthday Blanket while we were here. That gives me thirty-nine days to finish it! 

So, how am I getting on you ask? 

Well, there are 121 squares to be made in the blanket, this picture shows the ones that are finished, blocked and everything:

There are 60.

Then there are 15 more squares being blocked:

Making 75 squares.

Which means I still have 46 squares to knit ... did I mention there were 39 days?!

Best get cracking I guess ...

A letter by a different name ...

... is still a letter; it just looks like a zine in this case. 

Recently, I've seen a couple of pictures/how-to's of zines and decided I wanted to make one. Only problem was I didn't know what to put in it. 

Then I had an idea. 

While we've been in France, we've been keeping in contact with my wife's best friend, also on her year abroad, also in France. On the complete other side! Since getting post is so fun (as mentioned in Yay, post) we've been keeping in contact that way rather than via the internet (which may be easier, and speedier).

There was my idea: write our next letter in the form of a zine. I figured it would make for a more exciting (if that's possible) letter.

Here's how it went:

As we always write a fair amount, I decided an A4 sheet of paper wouldn't be enough and hence used A3. I followed this to make the zine and then opened it out again so I could work on the design.

At this point I had very little idea of what I was actually going to put on the paper, so it kind-of evolved of its own accord.

Starting with letter basics

Then came the decorating, until it looked like this:

At this point I gave the zine to my wife to actually write the letter; that's her job :P

And there you go, one finished zine-letter. Obviously it didn't quite look like that but I've blurred the writing out seeing as it's a private letter :)

And a couple of views of it in its folded up finished state:

Ta-da! Now wouldn't you like to get that in the post?

Up the garden path ...

While it might seem like all I/we did while house-sitting was cook, it's just not true! We spent lots of time watching english tv, which was awesome, and also took on a puzzle ...

When the owners of the house left over three weeks ago they said that if we felt like it we could start laying their garden path for them. We decided to take them up on their offer!

This is what the path looked like three weeks ago:

So, using the stones laying around in various places, we made a start:

Kept going:

And this is what we managed in our first afternoon:

Not bad, huh?

The next day we did some, we managed somewhat more:

And, oh look, there I am too!

We even spotted a bird (well, my wife did):

Third day of path-making:

And we managed to finish it on Sunday, just in time really!

Cue two pretty proud people!

What you think?

Profiteroles

So we're nearly at the end of our house-sitting, but there's still time for one more French dessert :)
The recipe I used is here.

First steps; making the choux pastry:

Melting the butter and sugar with water:

Add the flour:

Mix vigorously and put into a bowl:

Add in the beaten eggs, a little at a time:

Until it looks like this:

Onto a baking tray and into the oven:

Done:

Next, cream:

Makeshift piping bag

Piled up:

And after we added the chocolate:

Mmmm, yummy :)