21 Feb
2007

Pancakes

Today’s recipe is the obligatory follow-up to Shrove Tuesday yesterday. I had actually forgotten it was pancake day until I got in from the gym starving!

Pancake Batter

  • 4oz plain flour
  • 1 egg
  • half a pint of milk

weight the flour (sift it if you like, I never bother), add the egg and a bit of the milk. Mix very hard with a wooden spoon until you have a smooth, sticky dough-like arrangement. Then add the milk a little at a time, stirring it back to smoothness after each addition.

The batter is supposed to be better if you leave it to stand in the fridge for an hour before serving but if time isn’t available then don’t worry.

Melt some butter in a pan over a medium heat. Once its sizzling a bit, add enough batter to cover the base of the pan and wait. When it sets on top, keep waiting until its a bit brown underneath. This is especially important if you are going to toss your pancake as if you try to flip a soft pancake it will tangle. Get it turned over one way or another and let the other side brown too, tip out onto a plate and get some more butter in the pan ready for the next one.

Fillings

The usual fillings are sugar and lemon juice (freshly squeezed ideally but from a bottle is almost as good) and maple syrup. Last night, in a nod to our late friend Amy who introduced me to this, we had cherry pie filling in our pancakes and they were yummy!

Not sure what else you can eat on a pancake – any suggestions?

20 Feb
2007

Mortgage Muddles

I’d be the first to admit that our path along the house-buying road (see all house posts if you missed earlier episodes) hasn’t been straightforward. So far we’ve had:

  • Three offers accepted on different houses
  • Two different solicitors
  • Two different estate agents
  • One mortgage arranged, then the amount reduced, then put back to the original amount again
  • Another mortgage arranged to cover the shortfall between the original mortgage and the house we’re now buying.

Its complicated and I admit that. However the bank have surpassed themselves over the last week or so by sending us out paperwork for one mortgage with the wrong amount on it, one with the wrong property address, a duplicate of one of the above, and finally copying the wrong solicitor on the corrected version of the paperwork! I’m confident that they now have it under control and I’m more amused than worried, but its another twist in the road.

In other news, the estate agents tell me the survey was done last Friday (I discovered you can just ring them and ask and they will tell you these things) so we’re giving them a chance to type it up before I start stalking them for a copy of it … I’ll keep you posted.

20 Feb
2007

String Basket

There’s a lot of craft entries going on here at the moment I know but actually I’ve just had a binge at finishing things off rather than actually creating things at speed.

Here’s my string basket:

Its going to hold all those little samples that you get from Boots in the free gift from the No7 range that I keep ending up with! Its made from “jute twine”, that’s common-or-garden brown parcel string to you or me, I used a 5mm hook and its just double crochet through (single crochet if you are not British – see an earlier post about crochet dialetcs). Just make a little loop, dc into the middle six times, then 2dc into each stitch for the next round. After that I increased in every other stitch and then less frequently as the round base of the basket grew. The exact pattern depends on the string and your hook so I just tried to stop it from curving up or getting wrinkly and its not too bad. The double crochet makes it quite quick and very simple:

The stripe is just some crochet cotton that I used for a few rows, partly for interest and partly to give my fingers a rest from being shredded by the rough string. I might make a few more to go with it … can’t decide though whether to do the next ones more stripy or in another colour of cotton or what. Watch this space!

19 Feb
2007

Big Wool Bag

The good news is that I’m nearly at the end of my pink big wool stash, so there might be some less-matching items appearing here soon. However today I’d like to show off the bag that I’ve made to go with the mittens and the hat.

The pattern for this bag was taken from Emma King’s 25 Bags To Knit Book , here it is:

A closeup of one of the cables with a bead in the middle (I’d never cabled before so I am very proud of myself!)

As a finishing touch and to keep the bag in shape, I decided to add a lining. Thanks to Jess for “lending me her sewing machine” … actually she just sewed the lining for me :) Here’s a peep at the lining:

Now I have a dilemma. Can I reasonably wander around with bag, mittens and earflap hat which all match … ?

18 Feb
2007

Coldspring Mill

I haven’t lived in Leeds very long and I’m hearing about new places to go all the time. One of the girls from the “Leeds Knitterati” knitting group that meets in Starbucks in Leeds had told me about Coldspring Mill – its the other side of Bradford and has a camping and wool shop.

Well we went today and it was a lovely day out – it feels like spring today and the scenery is amazing, its hard to believe we’re so close to Leeds/Bradford when we’re there. The place itself was really nice – some good outdoor gear and camping basics. Its not huge but its fine. The wool shop is downstairs and it has lots of mysterious seconds of “designer wools”, they can’t advertise what it was supposed to be but you can guess some of the time.

There is also a tea room at which we had a very nice lunch – they do real meals as well as toasties, sandwiches and so on.

I got 350g of (I suspect Debbie Bliss) DK cashmere in a kind of mauve so I’m open to suggestions for what I might do with that!

18 Feb
2007

New Camera

We bought a new camera yesterday. Kevin has a good digital camera but its quite big and now quite old. He saw that Jessop’s was having a sale so we went and looked … we’ve now got a fujifilm finepix F650 [1]. Its quite small and quite powerful with simple enough interface for me to easily use it but enough override to keep Kevin happy too!

It has an internal lithium battery and takes XD cards as its memory. On the whole its got everything we wanted and has the biggest, nicest screen I’ve seen in a while. Its easy to set the flash settings and it has both macro and super-macro modes (useful for taking closeups of stitch patterns). There are also some presets for using it in different modes – like fireworks, sunset, flower, landscape and so on, including a museum mode where it turns off the keytones! There are also some presets for whitebalance which seem to really help with colour temperature when I photograph knitting without the flash.

The photographs that appear over the next few days were taken with the new toy, let me know what you reckon!

1 I know that link is to amazon but I can’t find either Jessop’s or the manufacturer’s page

16 Feb
2007

Crochet Slowpoke

I saw these slowpoke patterns linked from somewhere else a while back and I just had to buy them. Well the first one is finished – he’s a bit plain (think that was the rather primary colour choices) but he’s done and I think he’s cute:

I pre-recorded this entry a few days ago as he’s a present for a friend and I had to photograph him and then post him … but he should be there by now if you’re reading this.

I might have to make some for myself, or maybe one of these what do you reckon?

15 Feb
2007

Email Outage

Like the technical wizard that I am I’ve just spent 48 hours (almost) with all email to my lornajane.net domain getting lost in the ether somewhere. The story is one of those silly bureaucratic ones which I won’t repeat here because my hosting company, flump , have been all-round great for the six years I’ve been with them and their support people have got me sorted out politely and relatively quickly.

So, if you’ve been emailing me and I’ve been ignoring you, can you send it again please?

11 Feb
2007

CMS Promiscuity

This site is run by textpattern, I’ve used it a few times and I love it. In addition you may have read about my recent encounters with Joomla! .

This week I’m trying out Serendipity for another site and its quite a change. For a start I haven’t read a lot about it although there are a few places that I’ve notice it used (on Sara’s blog for example) and wondered about it. It turns out its templates use Smarty which is good for us as quite a few of our recent projects have (both woollyblanket, for its user management bit, and our recent experience creating playTAG.

First Impressions

Well the installation was a dream, which I kind of expected, but its great to see all the same and a nod to the team for that. Getting started with the admin side of things wasn’t too hard either – you install a plugin called “Spartacus” and then you are able to download and install any plugins and themes from their central respository. Its very convenient and perfect if you only have FTP access or just don’t want to mess about moving files from one place to another.

Getting a site running

The admin interface is quite simple – you add content items into categories in a way that will be familiar from other comparable CMS products. Getting some navigation to happen needed a selection of plugins but installing each one is pretty painless. The configuration screen shows the “sidebar” plugins in the location that they will appear followed by the “event” plugins which are the ones that modify the functionality.

What Next?

Well, I’m not posting the URL of the project I’m using Serendipity for just yet, because it’s not ready. I hope the suspense of wiating to find out what the site was and what I did to Serendipity in the process won’t be too much!