Christmas pudding recipe - Cross Stitcher 311

Well, well, well. Same week, second post, another cover piece... :O #likebuses

We`re back from Iona and on the way home I picked up the latest issue of Cross Stitcher - my mum`s here visiting and I stitched this Christmas pudding recipe the last time she was here, which puts everything in a neat frame for my OCD, lol. The design is by Emma Congdon and I loved working on this (erm, apart from the whisks in metallic silver, hehe) because 1) it`s Christmassy, 2) it`s food-related, 3) it`s colourful, 4) it`s useful and 5) it grew so quickly (the whole picture took 32 hours, including metallic whisks). ;)

Here it is on the cover and inside the mag:

I have a few closeups of parts of this design, plus a bright photo of the whole. Hope you`re all having a good time, I`m off to cook with my mom and then stitch, happy days! :)

little chefs finished!

Good evening from Ward 7 where the only thing warmer than the soup and tea is the nurse`s smile :)

I`ll be the first to admit: I have no idea how it happened in all the commotion (both snotty males are home, no doubt to give the school and work a little respite for a change) but I managed to finish not one... not two... but THREE projects!

OK, first up is the least successful one. I sewed up the Scrappy Doo pieces I`d knitted the other day - well, I don`t know if you remember the cover of the Wendy booklet I showed you earlier, but my Scrappy looks nothing like the model. I don`t know why, I mean I followed the pattern to the letter, and still: my version looks more like the love child of Ratatouille and Wile E. Coyote. Are you ready for a giggle? Here we go:

I think I stuffed the muzzle too much so it`s a wee bit on the large side - not to mention that I mixed up the arms and legs (by that point I just wanted to finish ASAP and get this thing out of my sight) but Gregory seems to like it... well, he very caringly buried it under a pile of toys...

Next one up is a couple of hats I made for the charity appeal: I have to say, I`m much happier with the end result of this knitting escapade!

And, finally, the big reveal, the moment I`ve been waiting for for a couple of months now (due to other engagements) but it`s finally finished - yay!!!

weekend summary

It`s Sunday night, time to sum up the weekend - so here it is in a nutshell: 

The Snotty Young One (SYO) had finished the third box of mansize tissues by 10 o`clock this morning, so I was forced to go to Tesco again, after spending the bulk of my Saturday morning there (spent a fortune and got a trolleyful again, despite the fact I`d only gone in for another 4 boxes of tissues). The Battery-Operated Husband (BOH) had disappeared somewhere around the garage area on Friday afternoon, and only resurfaced a couple of hours ago - my fault entirely: if I hadn`t kept the coffees coming, he would`ve returned to the house much sooner. (Oh, he`s BOH because he had this 24-hour blood pressure monitoring device attached to him Fri-Sat). And me, you ask? I`m fine, thank you - as long as I don`t have a runny nose, I`m OK, I mean I can still stitch (I just try not to cough all over it).

I`ll show you the stitchy pic in a second - after a quick update on the Scooby story... I`ll be short, I promise, as there`s not much to tell. I spent almost two whole days knitting up the bits and pieces, just to run out of the Scooby brown yarn before making the tail and the two ears. I don`t want to cheat and use a different brown for these, and anyway, I wouldn`t gain anything as I still have to sew up all the pieces. I was so disappointed last night that I started to knit Scrappy instead but then I got bored with it, so today I picked up the little chefs again - and here`s the result:

I`ve finished the cross stitches, done a bit more backstitch and started the "floor" with the tent stitches

Little Chefs update

Just a quick note because I think I might have a cold - that`s the bad news but the good news is that I`m not shivering (yet) vehemently enough to be unable to handle a needle, so here`s how much I`ve done since the last update on my Gran`s little chefs:

I started the backstitch too so as not to be lumbered with the whole lot at the end

Mothers` Day prezzies

I`m writing this on 30 March, the day before we`re going on holiday, but just in case my husband wipes our computer (again) while we`re away, I thought I`d better save these pictures that I promised ages ago. So here are the presents I made for my Mum and my Gran for Mothers` Day, which in Hungary is the first Sunday in May. For my Mum I made a new glasses case to replace her old, tatty one; it`s my own design, based on the eye chart you have to read at the optician`s (the letters make the word GLASSES CASE in Hungarian).

And for my Granny I made a bell pull, not that she`s got any bells to pull in her house, but because I had this mini-doweling and some patterns for alpine flowers that I thought she`d like. In other words, it is something she can hang on her wall but it`s not the traditional framed picture either. I can`t wait to find out what she thinks of it!

recipe books

I love spring cleaning. Or, before you get the wrong idea, I love that time of the year when the fields get bloomier, the birds chirpier and the days sunnier - so that those dust particles that were floating just the same way in winter are now more visible, and the windows suddenly look much dirtier. This is the time when other women (alas, not so much me...) feel the urge to start cleaning the house from top to bottom.
Same thing happened to my neighbour this March who, unexpectedly, turned up one day on my doorstep with a Tesco bagful of lovely cross stitch magazines she`d found under her bed, APOLOGISING (bless her!) that some of them didn`t have the freebies in them any more (!). As you can imagine, I didn`t leave my armchair for the next three days until I meticulously went through all the magazines and the other prezzies, from embroidery hoops to magnetic boards to wee "good-for-keeping-anything-in-it" type of very handy boxes. When I finally came up for air, I decided I`d make something for my neighbour to show my appreciation for her kindness, using a cupcake motif I found in one of her magazines. Just the day before I came by a lovely little (blank) recipe book in a charity shop and recalling how my mum and I used to fold the paper for my books in primary school, I managed to make this book cover.

I can happily report that my wee gift was very well received, which spurred me on to make another recipe book cover - that, and the fact that I knew there was another identical blank book in the charity shop which I left there the other day and I simply HATE unfinished business. So anyway, I went back, bought it, and started to flick through my stichy books and magazines (with my recently acquired stash I have over about 200 magazines so "flicking through" them is a roughly 18-hour process).  I only had about a week before going to Hungary for a fortnight to visit my family, spend Gregory`s spring break there and celebrate my granny`s 78th birthday.
Now my gran LOVES cooking. My mum`s a pretty mean cook too and I`m told I`m not bad either (blush, blush...) but with my granny it`s an obsession on a par with my obsession with cross stitch. I think if it wasn`t for her soaps, she would be glued to the Food Channel 24/7, and she must have filled an enormous number of jotters with her favourite recipes so far. So I thought a book like this would be ideal for her and after a long, long search I found this adorable kitty design in the very last magazine I looked at (where else?), and managed to finish stitching it the night before our flight.

I even managed to sqeeze in "My Favourite Recipes" in Hungarian under the picture and covered the whole thing with see-through plastic so as to protect it from the greasy fumes of a kitchen... So where is it now? Probably in my granny`s treasure box under her bed, since the last time I asked she said "it was way too beautiful to spoil it with her scrawly handwriting". Oh, bless!