Jammin'

Tonight I had the choice of spending my evening either:

1. Doing an ever so slightly demanding and fiddly bit of editing on a voiceover script for a video demo of a technology about which My Lips Must Remain Sealed; or
2. Making jam before the mountain of apricots I bought in a fit of optimism on Monday afternoon started to ooze:
   

At first I thought I could combine them -- had glamorous visions of flitting to the kitchen to check my pots in between bouts of staring at the screen punctuated by rapid typing -- but abandoned that idea on re-reading my jam recipe and remembering what a punctilious process it is. So, weighing up the urgencies of income vs jam... I made jam, of course.


Now this is what I'd forgotten about making jam: It's a pain in the ass. It really is. But at the same time, and for pretty much the same reasons, it makes me feel triumphantly domestic and competent, the queen of my kitchen laboratory. Once I get started, I actually enjoy the rigour of it all, cutting the fruit just so and lining my jars up and scrabbling in the cupboards for a bottle of meths so I can check pectin levels, and sticking saucers in the fridge for wrinkle tests and soaking circles of wax paper in brandy (with a glass for the chef on the side, of course):



I'm even getting moderately good at the bit where I need to scrape the scum off the boiling syrup, although I think I may need one of those famous Slotted Spoons all writers of cook books seem to own. Also I need a proper jam funnel. But even without those, I am now the proud owner of four pots of delicious apricot jam:


Four pots is a kilogram of apricots and nearly that much again of sugar, incidentally. There is a truly frightening amount of sugar in jam, it just keeps going in way beyond the point where it seems sensible. The jam does taste good, though. There more apricots but I ran out of sugar, so the rest are cut and waiting in the fridge.

I need to get up at 5am again to finish the voiceover script, but I'm good in the mornings. Really.

School holiday survival tactics

Keeping small people out of the office when they're at home most of the day can be... challenging. So my chosen survival tactic of the moment is to offer a little block of concentrated do-stuff-with-mom time for every x (usually 2 or 3) hours they leave me alone. The source of all goodness during said blocks of time is an Usborne activity card pack called 50 Things to Make and Do. They're mostly easy enough for JJ do do with minimal interference from me, and they use stuff we actually have around the house -- I've passed over enough activities in other books that demand things like wallpaper paste or wood shavings or soap flakes to know what a good thing that is. Anyway, this is what we've produced so far. You will note a large degree of creative adaptation, but that's a good thing:

 

Not so succesfully supporting local crafters

The Cape Craft and Design Institute held a little Christmas market yesterday which I attended with high hopes of picking out fabulous crafty gifts. The whole event was a little disappointing, though. With hindsight I guess crafters who're good enough and savvy enough to market themselves independently don't need this kind of engineered opportunity, so possibly I was only seeing crafters who are just getting started or still need support of various kinds. But if that's the case, the support they're getting isn't good enough. Take these handprinted T-shirts, into which somebody had clearly put an awful lot of time and effort:

I really, really liked the prints, but when I tried them on the shirts themselves were all wrong. Badly cut and constructed, too low in the neck, cheap fabric -- and when I checked the labels I discovered "Made in Myanmar". So that would be a no, then. If the shirts had been better I'd happily have paid twice the ridiculously low -- and probably unsustainable -- price being asked.

My favourite thing on the market was these aprons made by Vukani Bafazi Silkscreen Printing in Crossroads:


The colours are fabulous, but the construction not always ideal and the drawings maybe just on the wrong side of the line between naive and crude. I did bring this beauty home though:

And yes, I am going to keep it for myself.

Who writes this *@#*#$#$%!?

I have a new most-hated word: "lifestyle". As in this from the all-new singing, dancing, credit-card munching Cavendish Square:

"We tried to create a place for lifestyle living..."

Go on, see if you can get that out of your mouth without sniggering or cringing: "lifestyle living". What on earth do you suppose they mean?

And then there's this, from a radio ad for some building design-type showroomy thing in the Strand:

"Empowering and promoting your latest lifestyle."

I've heard that twice now and both times I nearly crashed the car. Words pretty much fail me, but somehow I don't think "empower", "latest" and "lifestyle" were ever meant to go together. I do try to be un-curmudgeonly and non-prescriptivist about the English language in all its lovely rich messiness, but really. There are limits. And don't even get me started on the deification of consumption.

Lookybook! More picture books online

My fondness for picture books puts me in tune with the zeitgeist, I think -- here is Lookybook, which puts entire picture books online:

Their collection doesn't include any of my favourites yet -- Kay Chorao is the only name I recognised -- but they swear it's growing by the hour.

Link once again courtesy of Stephanie Aulenback at Crooked House.

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More book-swoonery

One of the unexpected pleasures of living with very small people has been discovering the wonders of picture books all over again. I grew up with Richard Scarry, Victor Ambrus, Edward Ardizzone and their contemporaries, but picture books were scarce and colour was rare. In the intervening years there's been an explosion of children's literature, and the books we check out from the library every fortnight quite frequently take my breath away with the beauty and subtlety and general all-around brilliance of their illustrations. These are some of my favourites who are, sadly, missing from the recently-discovered treasure trove of bookplates:

• Barbara Firth is a genius, pure and simple. We've bought all five of the Little Bear books, The Park in the Dark and will buy whatever else we can lay our hands on. It doesn't hurt that she works a lot with Martin Waddell, who's another genius. This one gets me every time:
  

• Helen Oxenbury is just about as famous as you can get being a children's book illustrator, I suppose. I can't wait until my kids are old enough to sit still for her Alice in Wonderland, but in the meantime we have these:

• If anyone can give Helen Oxenbury a run for her money, it's Shirley Hughes. She's astoundingly prolific both as an illustrator and as an author. She's written a beautiful series about Alfie and his sister Annie Rose:

• Jan Ormerod is hardly known at all for some reason I don't understand, but our local library is well stocked with beautiful books including this one, which is entirely wordless. There's a companion volume called Sunshine which I can't find a pic from, but Amazon has a "Search-Inside" feature for both:
  

We've also enjoyed discovering Peter Spier -- Rain is another beautiful wordless book - and Robert McCloskey. Blueberries for Sal was written in the 40s but I'd never heard of it until I got it for my own kids:

The endpapers of this one, in which Sal and her mom are bottling blueberries in the kitchen, are a fascinating bit of social history in themselves.

More recycled yumminess

This came as part of JJ's end-of-school bounty (it's stuffed with sweeties):

We get through a LOT of these little yoghurt tubs and I've been diligently recycling them via the school for months, so it's nice to see them put to such pleasing use. Also another idea for me -- in time I hope I'll get the habit of seeing these possibilities in discarded stuff for myself. It definitely takes a slightly different way of looking at things than I'm used to.

And this came back with Sekkie today. It was handed to me very proudly, with stern admonitions: "Don't touch! "Cos sticky stuff still wet!"

Notice a colour theme here?

Book swoon!

Oh! Oh! Oh! I can't believe I've never found this before ... a gorgeous collection of free bookplates by popular illustrators to download, print and make my own. Paul Geraghty, Penny Dale, Quentin Blake, Anita Jeram, Korky Paul, Jane Ray ... I think they're meant for kids, but really who could resist this:

or this:

or even this?

Treasure trove courtesy of Stephanie Aulenback at Crooked House.

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Recycled vs all new craft items

I finally perfected gave up on further improving the tiaras for the girls:

That will do for now. They look gorgeous on little heads in the sunlight and the wire scrunches up very satisfactorily so it doesn't flop about.

We went to another third birthday party on Saturday and it turns out my friend Noel has had the same idea as me about doing away with overblown party packs. She produced these little butterflies for all the kids to take home:

I think these are just lovely. The bodies are made of broken Christmas tree lights and the wings from old paint colour samples (left) and leaves (right). It's really made me think about what can be produced from "junk" -- the tiaras are pretty but they did involve a lot of expensive wire and beads. So I'll be trying more stuff like this in future.

And while we're on crafty stuff, JJ has found yet more uses for shiny muffin cups:

This was inspired by the incomparable Little Hands Art Book, but she took it a couple of steps beyond their basic suggestion by adding the berries on the tree, and a few companion birds. And, once again, lots and lots of sticky tape.

Not so much the domestic goddess

So today was The Birthday Party and true to second-child form, young Sekkie had to be content with a much more informal celebration than her sister enjoyed. This was mainly for the sake of maternal sanity, which got a little stretched today. I spent last night making tiaras while continuing my mission to catch up on several years' worth of Dr Who (Christopher Eccleston is growing on me although I keep flashing back to Shallow Grave), failed to finish and reassured myself I could do a couple this morning after making the cake. But I forgot that baking a cake in the morning would require the participation of both children, which extended the time required by a factor of, ooh, 500 or so. Then I'd forgotten there was a playgroup meeting in my living room at 8:30, which meant seven toddlers talking over their mothers in increasingly loud voices while JJ, who was late for school by now, attempted to attract attention by being even louder.

By this time I already had that sort of pounding-temples feeling harassed mothers always get in ads for Grandpa Headache Powders (remember those?) So anyway, the pleasant 45mins or so I'd expected to spend crafting in the car while waiting to do a case study interview turned into none, and the case study took an hour and a half instead of an hour*, and then I had to go queue in the bank to raise my cash withdrawal limit so I could pay the painters who'd turned up at 7:15 while I was still shamefully in bed, then I had to rush around the Rosmead Spar finding ice cream cones for the cake, so by the time I got home it was lunchtime and the toddlers were due at 2. I'm very proud to say I not only managed to make the Nigella Lawson marmite sandwiches without which a party is not complete:

I even got the cake done more or less to specification, and had icing left over which never happens. As you can see my style of cake decorating is distinctly handmade. A little wobbly, even. And I'm not so great with the food colouring, this was meant to be a pale purple:

But it had fairies and turrets on it, Sekkie was very proud and it did taste good. That's it for me and domestic goddess-hood for the day, though, which is why we ordered pizza for supper and I'm now closeted with my computer while their daddy puts them to bed.

*For the best of all possible reasons, which is that it's a fabulous case study for a fabulous product. It's VERY nice to write for clients when their own clients love them so much. If my work involved consistently wrestling large bodies of data I would turn my budget upside down and shake it for every last cent to get Qlikview. I'd hold cake sales every Friday if that's what it took. I haven't been so turned on by a piece of software since 1990 or so.

Prehistory for preschoolers

Every Monday afternoon after school JJ has an hour of a very wonderful science programme for preschoolers called Curious Cubs. They do cool stuff like make kaleidoscopes and play with water and, last week, create their very own fossil bed:

This came hard on the heels of a dinosaur theme at school that included making their own dinosaur footprints:

Very cool three-legged T-Rex, no?

Trying to make tiaras

Sekkie turns 3 today and I've been playing with tiaras to give to all the little girls (there is a freaky absence of little boys her age in our neighbourhood) at her party tomorrow. So far the design has evolved from this:

To this, thanks to the nice lady at the bead shop who suggested wire. I made this one last night and it's a little too floppy -- the wire is very thin and the thread I wove in doesn't quite provide the extra support that's needed -- so V3 will be a little narrower, I think. Crocheting with wire is strange but the effects are pleasing.

Beautiful

Language Log has such a way with words:

I'm sorry, I don't want to sound cynical and jaded, but language is not for informing. Language is for accusing, adumbrating, attacking, attracting, blustering, bossing, bullying, burbling, challenging, concealing, confusing, deceiving, defending, defocusing, deluding, denying, detracting, discomfiting, discouraging, dissembling, distracting, embarassing, embellishing, encouraging, enticing, evading, flattering, hinting, humiliating, insulting, interrogating, intimidating, inveigling, muddling, musing, needling, obfuscating, obscuring, persuading, protecting, rebutting, retorting, ridiculing, scaring, seducing, stroking, wondering, ... Oh, you fools who think languages are vehicles for permitting a person who is aware of some fact to convey it clearly and accurately to some other person. You simply have no idea.

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Ambition

"Hey JJ, what do you want to be when you grow up?"

"Mmm... something that doesn't have to work every day. Like a builder!"

Good answer.

Batting around the bedroom slowly beating themselves to death

When I was a kid Christmas beetles were the sound of summer -- not gentle summer, which is the noise doves make, but searing, flattening heat. The hotter it got, the louder the Christmas beetles would screech in the trees until it all blended into one slightly trippy sort of singing noise in the head. That's the way I remember it, anyway; I could be making it up. Crickets were the sound of starlight and peace. I can't remember when last I heard a cricket in the city.

But in Cape Town, Christmas beetles are a different thing entirely. I've never heard one sing, the same way I never saw one of the singers, but I'm convinced they're different animals because their entire being is so otherwise. They're round and brown and innocuous-looking, the teddy bears of the insect world. And they're stupid. Yes, I know all insects are stupid, but these more than most. They get into the house and then they fly around the bedroom all night, going "bzzzz... thud... thud... thud... bzzz.... thud.... silence" and then starting all over again. They're worse than mosquitoes. Sometimes in the morning I find dead or sluggish beetles tangled in the curtains and I toss them outside, but I wish they'd stay outside to start with.

Gingerbread! Icing! Mayhem!

The mayhem part is not so visible in these pictures, but icing with small people makes a most unholy mess. It took most of Sunday morning to get the gingerbread made, and then a goodly chunk of the afternoon to get it iced. Without the help of Auntie Gill it would have been entirely impossible and I would no doubt have resorted to strong drink long before it was over. On the upside, it was the first attempt any of us ever made at using a piping bag and I think we did very creditably indeed:

Machine

JJ says this is a water fountain. She made us test it over dinner and it leaked only moderately:

Again with the sticky tape! And my button box is a lot less exciting than Granny P's, but it did furnish this one button at least.

Snowman

Another JJ special. I don't know why a snowman, she has never seen a real one, but I guess the lovely bulbous shapes of the detergent bubbles imposed their own agenda.

Life would be a lot more boring without sticky tape. And stickers.

'Tis the season...

... of the handmade Christmas decoration. This angel was produced yesterday from a scrap of silver tissue scrounged from my office while I was on the phone, a piece of wool and a whole lot of sticky tape:

I find it oddly pleasing that my children don't know how to use the remote control yet, but produce lots of lovely stuff like this.

Preschool architecture

Sekkie started this on Sunday:

and JJ helped her finish it:

I confess to being impressed with her understanding of structure. She arranged a beam between an upturned table leg and a pillar to start with, and then balanced everything else off it. This was all done entirely on her own initiative, with zero encouragement or advice from anyone over 5.