Another mural...

So, Little Boy has been hassling me for a while now.  He's been lying in bed asking me to take Charlie and Lola off the wall, and paint Peppa Pig on there.  It went on for quite a number of consecutive nights.  'Want Peppa Pig'.  'Paint Peppa'.  'Don't like Charlie and Lola'.  And on it went.  So I eventually got around to actually doing something about it.  (Don't worry, we addressed the not liking Charlie and Lola by watching it every night for a while.   He soon changed his tune)
I used tester pots of paint, so it cost somewhere in the region of a fiver.  If you happened to have leftovers in the right colours, you could probably use them.  I used proper wall paint, not kiddy paint.  Here's the morning's work:

The virgin wall.

Same method as before - trusty OHP :)

Which allows you to do this!

Add some more outlines and the mud and flowers

More facial features...

Limbs and the beginning of colouring in.

And this is how it ended up.

We even splashed out and bought a George Pig duvet set.

So, all in a morning's work.  I did it on a morning where both boys were out, otherwise it would have taken considerably longer!
If you don't have an OHP to hand, you could try asking to borrow one from a local school or church.  If you do a good job and show them the results, they might even be happy for you to do a mural or two for them!

Cool stool.

This is old news, having happened back at the tail-end of August, but I've not blogged on it, so here goes.  Bought a piano stool (ex-display) for an absolute crazy-bargain price (like £140 off or something) but the shop was worried about the state of the cover. 

















"You may need to re-cover it" they advised.  What a fab idea.
So I bought some music notes fabric from Amazon (about £6.50 for twice what I needed).
Then I cut the fabric in half.
I unscrewed the padded seat from the main body of the stool

















I stapled the fabric onto the seat.

















I screwed it back on to the stool

















And here are the boys, performing a stool test (I had to get that gag in somewhere...)

Place setting name cards.

So, here's a quick little post about some name labels.
It was Anna's parents' Ruby Wedding anniversary recently.  We were tasked with the production of name labels for the place settings at the sit-down meal.
So I pottered off to some shop (the Range, perhaps?) and bought some cards, some little ruby red sticky 'stone' things (I'm sure there's a technical term) and some sticky cork hearts.

 Sadly, there weren't enough sticky cork hearts in the shop, and they were a bit big, so I had to chop every single one into four little hearts (thus the blade in the picture - a fiddly job if ever there was one...)
But here's what they looked like in the end.  (Except they didn't all have the name Anna on).

Village Show 2013.

You remember the elderflower cordial?
And the Plum Jam?
And there'll be a post about a bread plait some time.
Well, they all ended up in the village show. 
I've just blogged about this year's village show entries.  Read all about it here.

A spice-saving solution...

So, we've got kitchen cupboards.  But they're on the full side.  One of them was, until today, rather crowded with spice jars, as we could only fit a few (14ish?) on our spice rack.
So I made a new one.
Simple enough, some stripwood, some dowel, and some little lathe-type things.
A bit of measuring, sawing, drilling and hammering later...

Ta-da.  Space for 30 (ish) spice jars.  And yes, we do use most of them!
The sides and shelves are the same wood, nailed together.  There are thin strips nailed to the back (two to each row) to stop stuff falling off the back, and the dowels you can just about make out in the rubbish photo are just pushed into holes in the side bits that were drilled using a drill-bit the same size as the dowel.
Pretty easy task.

Rhubarb!

You may recall the elderflower cordial.
Well, here's a quick recipe that includes the use of slightly too sweet cordial...

Rhubarb crumble.
Basically, you get a whole bunch of rhubarb.  You slice it up into chunks.  Then you cook it up in some of the elderflower cordial.  This makes the rhubarb taste (even if I say so myself) absolutely amazing.  It was genuinely completely delicious.  I suppose you could use shop-bought elderflower cordial if you haven't made your own!  Perfectly acceptable :)
I made up a crumble topping, which was basically along the following sort of quantities:
155g flour
80g butter
110g sugar (I use a mix of white and demerara or light brown sugar)
A generous amount of ground ginger. 
Buzz the butter and flour in a mixer thingy (or do it by hand) then add the ginger and sugar. 
Rhubarb goes in a dish, crumble mix on top.
Pop it in the oven 'til the crumble's a gorgeous golden colour and the rhubarb is bubbling up around the side. 
Eat.
Let me know how it goes!
(Sorry, not got pictures at the mo'.  May add some later)

A cordial attempt.

It seemed that for our entire Cornwall holiday last week, we were never more than about 20 paces from a display of elderflower - in the fields, hedgerows, gardens...  You name it, elderflower was there.  I determined to do something about it - make some elderflower cordial.  Not while on holiday (picking elderflower from the roadside can appartently result in fume-tainted cordial, quite apart from anything else!)

So when we returned, I decided to find some elderflower, harvest it and make it into cordial.  A bottle of elderflower cordial costs £3.15 at Tesco...

Finding the elderflower was harder than I thought - yes, it grows along every road in the land, but I wanted non-exhausted elderflower (so to speak).  Little Boy and I went on a long and largely fruitless (flowerless?!) search,but had a fun outing whilst on our hunt.

 We eventually found some by our cricket pitches.  With my completely inexpert eye, it looked about right.

 We took it home, dissolved a kilo of sugar in a bowl of about 1.5 litres of boiling water, cooled it down in a sink of cold water and rinsed the flowers in the sink, adding them to the cooled, sugary water (I trimmed them to minimise stalks).  We also added the zest of two lemons and sliced the lemons into the water.  (I did a second batch which was one lemon and one orange...)

 This was then clingwrapped and put in the fridge overnight.  We then strained it, first through some muslin. 

 Then, because I wasn't convinced the muslin was fine enough, through a tea towel. 

 This can then be diluted (either with fizzy water or with normal) and made into a lovely drink. 

 Hey presto, elderflower cordial.
We'll probably add some preservative if we want to keep it, or bottle it into the freezer... 
It's actually probably a bit too sweet, so I might ease up on the sugar next time :)