Epiphany

Today, the sixth of January, is Epiphany. When we were in France last year, my wife and I were introduced to their traditions for the day and we decided to bring those to our friends back here in England today. It also provided a good excuse to catch up with the girls from work before we start back tomorrow.

The traditions we followed were thus:

- send the youngest member of the party under the table

- ask them to allocate each slice to each person

- see who finds the fèvre (or baking bean in our case) in the galette des rois (Epiphany cake)

- the one who finds the fèvre is king or queen for the day (or rest of the evening)

It was a lot of fun this evening, and it was fun to introduce some differing culture to our friends. 

The galette we served up was mostly homemade (other than the ready-roll puff pastry), and our recipe was based on a Raymond Blanc one that I found on BBC food, but was unfortunately taken down before yesterday when I went to find it again. Therefore, I did my best to remember the ingredients and process followed.

Ingredients:

75g soft butter

75g icing sugar

100g ground almonds

1 tbsp amaretto

1 egg

2 egg yolks

500g puff pastry

1. roll out the puff pastry and cut out two circles; one 20cm and one 22cm in diameter

2. chill the pastry in the fridge for half an hour or so

3. mix the butter, icing sugar, ground almonds, amaretto, egg and 1 egg yolk to make the frangipane

4. spoon the frangipane onto the smaller circle of pastry, add the fèvre and put the other  pastry circle on top. Press down around the edge to seal.

5. chill in the fridge for at least an hour

6. glaze the galette with the other egg yolk and score a spiral in the top

7. bake in the oven at 180˚C until golden and risen

The main detail that I completely failed to remember was how long to cook the galette for, so we kept a pretty close eye on it. In the end it took about 40 minutes to be ready.

And here's the finished result:

Happy Epiphany everyone!

Back in England

Our time in France has come to an end, and now we're back in England. After a slightly crazy week, involving crossing the channel three times, us and our stuff are back at home.

Fitting all our belongings from the last year into our little Fiat 500 was slightly interesting but we managed it. It looked like this:

Forgive the bad lighting, we were in an underground car park.

Dalbe

On Sunday, during our leaving Grenoble barbecue, I was given a gift voucher for Dalbe by my wife's boss. Dalbe (as I found out) is an art shop here in France and so yesterday evening me and my wife wandered down to our local one to have a look-see. 

This is the bag we came out with:

Most of the contents are for a particular project which I'll get to later (hopefully this week), but I also picked up a magnet kit which I put together this morning.

Following the nice French instructions, I managed to make us a magnet to remember our time here in Grenoble.

I began by cutting out the guide for the design, and taping it to the table so it didn't move. Then the first sticky sheet was laid sticky-side-up on top of that. 

 Then it was time to begin laying out the mosaic tiles

Until all the tiles had been laid and I put the second sticky sheet sticky-side-down on top

The next step was the trickiest as it required me to flip the mosaic upside down and remove the first sticky sheet. Unfortunately the tiles liked that sheet more and were reluctant to come off this first sheet so it took a little while and some repositioning to get the sheet off.

But, it did happen! And then I could stick the mosaic to the magnet, yay

After flipping the magnet back over and pressing down the tiles to make sure they were stuck securely to the magnet, the second sticky sheet came off and our magnet went onto the fridge.

There you go, one Grenobloise-esque magnet :D

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?

Une première visite à Ikea

(A first visit to Ikea)

Yesterday was a glorious Saturday and my wife and I had already planned a trip to Ikea. Now, while we're in France, we don't have a car (ours is being lovingly looked after by my grandparents back in England), so we had to make our way on public transport, which, thankfully, is pretty awesome here.

We decided to walk some of the journey since we do like a good walk-and-talk and meandered our way through the city, stopping to look in shop windows and enjoying the 20 degree heat. After a while, we could no longer walk as the French do not always go in for useful pavement, so we hopped onto one tram, then a second one until we reached as far as we could in the right direction. The next stage was slightly trickier, getting the bus ... We spent ten minutes or so looking for the bus stop which we knew should be somewhere very close to the tram stop. We even asked a nearby bus driver. Finally we realised that the bus simply went from the tram stop opposite, doh!

Ten minutes later and we were at Ikea :)

Not really knowing what to expect, the building looked huge, we entered the shop. We pretty much already knew what we wanted to buy having looked things up online before going - we like to be organised - but I wanted the whole experience as it was my first time. 

We strolled round the shop, looking at various items of furniture and making mental notes of the kind of stuff we liked/would like for when we eventually have our own place that we need to buy for ... like this sink.

After an hour or so of wandering, we were both beginning to get hungry so we made our way downstairs to find the items to buy: this proved more tricky than I imagined, but we did eventually manage to find the three products we wanted to buy ... and buy them we did.

Our haul

A well-deserved stop at KFC on the way back for dinner, before we foolishly decided to walk back to the city centre, as we thought we didn't actually look that far out(!)

An hour later, with the sun setting we returned to our apartment, definitely tired out after the 3 mile walk. 

Virserum frame for my mountains

Grundtal pots for stock cubes and other kitcheny items

And the Ribba frame will be for the cross-stitch that I've nearly finished.

Watering the plants

Although we live in a teeny tiny studio apartment, we do have the luxury of having a small balcony. I mean, it is pretty small, only really big enough for a couple of chairs, but we also have a row of window boxes out there. 

Unfortunately (gardening-wise) we moved to France mid-August, which isn't really the best time to be planting. We tried, but unsurprisingly, almost everything died!

Now that spring's popping up, the chives and, surprisingly, the lettuces(!) are starting to revive. The rosemary coped fine, but obviously stopped growing. We've also planted some acorns that we collected in the autumn and stored in the fridge over winter, in the hope that they will grow. 

However, our rosemary plant was getting very dry in it's spot, so we decided to move it to its own box in the hope that having more space would also encourage it to grow. So move it I did. 

The rosemary in its new spot

Our balcony is also south-facing which won't really help with the whole being dry thing. So, while I was on Pinterest this morning up popped a link to a tutorial for keeping your plants watered (find it here). I loved the idea, so wondered if I could do the same for our plants. What with our plant boxes being on the ledge of our balcony I didn't particularly want to use glass bottles (although we have several waiting to be recycled) so decided to make use of our plastic milk bottles.

What a beautiful milk bottle ;)

You can just about see the hole in the lid

I removed the label and cut off the bottom to allow me to be able to fill it while it's in the soil. Then I punched a hole in the lid to make the opening smaller.


With fingers crossed (not literally) I placed my bottle in the soil and filled it up with water. Much of it went straight through the bottle and came out the bottom of the plant box. Not what I wanted to happen. I took the bottle out, looked at the soil and decided I'd try again, maybe the soil was just too dry to start with. In went the bottle for a second time; I repositioned it slightly. This time, the water didn't drain straight through so I've left it out there. Hopefully this'll help the rosemary be happier, and if it works I'll think about putting some more in the other boxes. Watch this space. 

The bottle in situ

Rediscovering my iPad

For my birthday in 2009, I asked for -and received- a wacom Bamboo Fun. These are some of the pictures I created with it:

Since that summer, when I drew a fair amount, I haven't really used my tablet, and I didn't bring it with me to France. I found myself with the urge to draw so decided to try my hand at using my iPad to create. These are the first couple of quick pictures I've produced, using the Sketchbook Express app:

I'm hoping that now I've started with this again that my drawing can get better in this digital form.

Yay, post

I love post, quite simply love it. 

So, having received a little yellow slip in the letterbox yesterday afternoon, I bundled myself up against the softly falling snow and the cold air and made my way to La Poste. I knew what my package would be, I'd ordered it a week and a half ago - my new Family Tree Maker software :)

Since arriving in France, my wife and I have worked a fair amount on our combined family tree - no small task when you consider that we both don't really know our fathers, and have step-fathers along with many siblings, and close cousins. It makes for very many branches of a tree! But all ones that we're interested in finding out about, none of this following the male name back and ignoring all the wives - in fact we've found they often have the most interesting stories. 

Anyway, so back to today, I picked up my package, hurried home to make a cup of tea and get installing.

Gotta love a good parcel :)

Now, it's time to play :D ... before returning to the knitting of the Very Pink Jumper!

Beginnings ...

So we're six months into a year abroad in France with my wife of seven months and I've had a lot of time to myself what with my very limited French and therefore lack of ability to find a real job here. I volunteer, but only for two hours a week so very quickly the year turned into my opportunity to focus on a variety of craft projects. 

During this time I've joined Ravelry, and have very much enjoyed charting the progress of my knitting, but have thought about all the other crafty things that I enjoy and how I'd like to be able to do something similar with those too. This is where blogging came in. I figured that might be the best way to document everything.

So, I'm midway through my very first knitted jumper (among other projects) and the weather here has been very very cold, resulting in my fingers not wanting to work - not very useful of them! This leads me to procrastinate (something I'm ever so good at doing) and figured now was as good a time as any to start this going :)

The Very Pink Jumper so far