I know that it’s a mother’s job to see her own children as the most gorgeous children in the world. But seriously, I could just look at this face all day.

Look at those cheeks! And those eyes! Isn’t she just gorgeous? Can you guys believe it’s been nine and a half months since she arrived? It feels like yesterday.

Anyway, I’m not cruel enough to put an orange hat on a ginger child – she’s simply modelling for me! I made this hat for my wonderful friend Jenn who had a lovely little girl in January. Jenn’s elder daughter is Nairn’s Canadian birth twin – they were born on the same day 3000 miles apart – and both celebrate their 4th birthday tomorrow. Isn’t that sweet?

This hat is made from the candy cane pattern in Itty-Bitty Hats by Susan B. Anderson and knitted in a lovely Debbie Bliss DK cotton in a beautiful bright orange. Isn’t it cute? Greer certainly seems to think so.

Does this photo remind you of anyone..?

I defy anyone to say my girls don’t look alike

Posted under knitting

Poor Greer. Since she started nursery one day a week prior to Christmas, her little body has been bombarded with germs – moreso than it already was with two brothers and a sister at school & nursery – and this weekend she’s succumbed to a horrible cough and cold which meant she had to miss her weekly Waterbabies class today.

Luckily, she has Mummy & Daddy, a snuggly quilt made by Auntie Kat and a lovely warm sweater made by Auntie Pad to keep her going.

I wish I had her energy! When I was sick, I could barely get out of bed but Greer’s ploughed on quite happily – as do the other children when they’re sick. Maybe it’s a case of different priorities?

Anyhoo. I shall be back later in the week to blog my utter failure with macaroon bars and hopefully a success story too!

Posted under family

… she’s definitely ginger.

Posted under family

It occurs to me that I have loads of blog fodder but I hold back on posting it for reasons known only to myself. What daunts me slightly is the aspect of permission – I have Bob’s permission to blog about him, I’m capable of making decisions for myself about what I’m comfortable blogging but a large proportion of my life revolves around the children who are not capable of providing informed consent. Part of me thinks that worrying about this is being hugely self-indulgent because nobody is going to remember what I’ve posted in five, ten or twenty years time. But. And it is a big but – is it fair to them that I make their moments so public? The kind of moments which are filed away by parents and brought out at 18th birthday parties or meeting-the-boy/girlfriend-for-the-first-time are the kind of moments that I could (and have) shared with the world without their permission.

So it’s something I’m working through because honestly they’ve provided me with some real fodder over the last few days. Plus I can’t blog about anything I’m crafting right now because it’s all for Christmas!

Posted under family

It’s Greer’s six month birthday today, and I swear with each child these milestones come faster and faster. I can’t believe that she has been in our lives for such a short period of time and yet we’d be so lost without her. She’s suddenly gone from the newborn stage to being a little person with a big personality, big smiles, big love and a big voice! Not sure who she could possibly have taken that from!

So to celebrate we got a lovely picture of the children all together.

and of course five seconds later got this beauty which I think I might actually prefer

Posted under family

You may or may not have noticed (and Kat can certainly attest to this fact) that I am quite the perfectionist. I’ll try most things but don’t sell my crafts really because I have no confidence that they’re good enough. If there’s even the slightest flaw – if my stitches aren’t quite right, if I am a little heavy handed with paint or dye – I will set what I’ve made aside.

So can you imagine my rage this evening? I’ve been working on a pair of longies* for Greer this week, it’s the first knitting I’ve picked up in a while and I spent most of last night and today working on the leg. I was SO HAPPY with how the wool (which I dyed myself) was knitting up and finally cast off the first leg earlier.

Then I looked at them.

Then I noticed a MAJOR COCK UP.

I’ll post what the cock up is tomorrow, in the meantime I’m going to leave it as is to see how quickly my knitting friends can spot it. Luckily for us, my lovely and fabulously talented friend Evelyn is currently making Greer a pair of her scrappies longies so at least we’ll have one pair to tide us over!

Apologies for the terrible photos but a) they were taken on my phone and b) the light in here is terrible.

I’m away to frog** the leg and start again. Out of curiosity though, can I ask your opinions on the leg design?

Firstly – I’ve got a moss-stitch band roughly where Greer’s knees will be. Primarily this is because the rise is so big on these that I don’t think my variegated wool will stretch to two full legs so I’ve broken it up with the trim colour. The other reason is that Greer will be crawling soon and I think the moss stitch patches will help reduce the wear and tear if she’s crawling in them. Do you think a) the band of colour looks okay and b) the moss stitch band is a good idea or a terrible one? Bob said he thought it might look better simply knitted but after the work that’s gone into them I’d be fuming if they ended up with a hole in the knee.

Secondly – I usually do a ruffle edging on the legs but I’ve gone with a ribbed cuff which can be folded over to give Greer some growing room. I can’t quite decide if I like the way it looks though – what say you?

* Longies are knitted, lanolised trousers worn over cloth nappies. They’re a more breathable solution than plastic pants and the wool can hold a significant amount of wee before it leaches, PLUS with being lanolised the longies are self-cleaning since lanolin+urine=soap. Clever, eh?

** Frogging (for the non-knitters) is when you rip back what you’ve knitted. Rip-it, Rip-it. Geddit?

Posted under dyeing wool, knitting

So, dear reader, I have a dilemma. I have been baking and cooking away lately but haven’t managed to blog it because SOMEONE had misplaced the memory card for the camera…

Findlay says, “It wasn’t me…”

Nairn denies all knowledge

Erica looks at the camera and shouts, “CHEEEEESE”

Whilst Greer looks cute

So in the meantime I’m afraid you’ll need to make do with photos from my phone. Luckily we have now located said memory card so when I’ve blogged up the camera photos we should be back to normal service. Well, I say normal because knowing my terrible children and messy house I don’t doubt that something else will go missing soon!

Anyway. Today I’m going to show you another wee taste of my childhood. My Nana and Grampa are children of the war era and so had a fantastic ability to eke dinner out on a budget. As classic Scottish weans* we’d get mince an’ tatties and if we ate all that, we might get bread an’ butter pudding after. What a treat that was! As I was the eldest grandchild it was my job to help my Nana and I can remember standing on a stool at her kitchen sink when I was probably about Findlay’s age, peeling potatoes and turnips and being allowed to help bake in return.

Thus, I decided last week that my kids should have some bread an’ butter pudding. Admittedly this was influenced in part because we were skint and had very little food in the house, and in part because I had about 20 million eggs needing used up! Nana always told me to use bread that was a little past it’s best, but bread doesn’t get a chance to go stale in my house so I used an outsider on the bottom layer.

You will need:
6 slices of bread
Butter
Raisins
Cinnamon and/or nutmeg to taste
2 egg yolks
2 tbsps sugar
3/4 pint milk (or more if it’s not enough to cover your bread)

Preheat your oven to gas mark 5 (375F). Butter the dish you’re using to make your pudding in, then butter the slices of bread and cut them diagonally in half. Cover the bottom of the dish with bread slices then sprinkle over a small handful of raisins. I really like cinnamon so at this point I sprinkle a teaspoonful of cinnamon over the top but I know my Nana prefers nutmeg – do whichever suits best or leave it out altogether. Repeat this layering again before topping off the dish with bread. Do NOT put raisins on the top of your dish because they’ll burn in the oven, and nobody likes a burnt raisin.
In a saucepan, mix your milk and sugar together and heat until the milk mixture is bubbling. Make sure you stir regularly to help the sugar dissolve and ensure it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan but be careful not to let the milk boil. Beat the egg yolk quickly in a jug then add the milk, whisking gently to combine. Pour the mixture back into the pan through a sieve and simmer for five minutes, stirring regularly. Pour over the bread slices and leave for at least half an hour, gently pushing the bread into the custard occasionally before sprinkling the top with the brown sugar and cinnamon. Pop in the oven for half an hour until the top is a golden brown colour. Serve with custard or vanilla ice cream.

*Wean means child, literally “wee ‘ane” or “wee yin” meaning “little one”. You’re a wean until yir Granny tells ye itherwise!

Posted under baking, family, recipes

Following on from my ramblings about our family’s environmental impact and our attempts at self sufficiency I thought you might like to see these photographs. First off, this is the first broccoli that we’ve harvested from our garden. We ate it in a vegetable lasange and it was amazing!

And these are my girls in their cloth nappies. We ran out of disposables last week and I realised that I had 20 bajillion* nappies that could be pressed into service, so I popped them back into cloth and remembered just how easy it is to deal with them when you’re in the house. My only criticism of cloth nappies has been how awkward they are to carry when I’m out and have more than one child because I have to lug the dirty ones around with me but when I’m at home there’s really no excuse.

Posted under self-sufficiency

I did finish this before I had Greer but until this week I didn’t have a good photograph of it. Alas, Greer has grown so quickly that it looks like a tank top rather than a dress! Still – after all our worries with Erica, Greer’s growth is a very welcome surprise. She was weighed this week at 11lb 2oz so is absolutely thriving. It’s making me feel very proud of my boobies and EXTREMELY relieved!

So – this dress is knit using the Kaia babydoll pattern and I just squeezed it out of 100g Sirdar snuggly baby bamboo DK. Seriously – I had just enough left to do the drawstring and that was it! It’s a really lovely little pattern although I think if I were to make it again I’d pick up stitches around the armhole and knit little sleeves.

You even got a wee smile from my big girl!

Posted under for the kids, knitting

Summer holidays here in Scotland started at the end of June, so I’ve had to come up with entertainment not only for Haud it and Daud it* but for Findlay too. LUCKILY Cbeebies has been repeating ‘Dick & Dom in da Bungalow’ over the last few weeks, a major feature of which is their sublime highbrow feature, “Bogies“.

This is the result after one day of watching the aforementioned programme.

Most excellent. This is day two – excuse the sofa missing a cover, that’s a story for later**

To be fair, they actually seem dramatically better behaved whilst playing, ‘Bogies’ than they were the other day when we were stuck inside due to the rubbish weather. People ask me, “How do you do it with four kids?” Simple, my friends. I leave the house otherwise my living room ends up like this:

*Haud it and Daud it – a very Scottish way of saying, “Those two eejits”

**Erica decided she wanted pants on the other day and kept sitting on her potty. Unfortunately she decided to pee standing on my sofa so the cover was in the washing machine. Why didn’t I buy a wipe-clean sofa?

Posted under family