I feel some new obsessions coming on...

My eyes are watering. A tear is literally running down my cheek. I'm on the verge of an obsession with BUDGETING SOFTWARE. Although my expenses are not very complicated or out of control so I probably can't justify spending money on any. Catch 22.

And I have seen THE MOST PERFECT TEAPOT IN THE WORLD at Plenty in Bondi Jct with JK. It is a one cup pot, matte eggshell blue, made by zero japan, had an infuser and a flip lid, and costs $40. That's twice as much as I would pay for a teapot, but… oh my. And if I could get a matching cup! Waiting for it to restock at Peters.

And I'm thinking about drawing some kind of FLIP BOOK of my clothes, so I have easy access to bookmarked outfits. What I actually need is software like in Clueless, cos I really just want to enter Weather and Mood and Fatness and get something clean to wear. It's probably too complicated for the people who invented google. OR, set up a work uniform for myself in just 2 colours.

And my favourite TEA is Nerada green tea with lemon myrtle. It's Australian and fair trade, sweet and delicious.

Scootering!

I scoot to work about once a week, for variety. Other days I read and walk, or ipod and walk. However my fancy leads me.

This morning I slowed down for a little old lady to give her lots of room and not feel like she was being hooned off the footpath by a grown woman on a scooter. I didn't expect her to give me a bit grin and say "there she goes!"

More bible covers!

Yay! finished 2 more bible covers on Saturday. Was pretty quick the second one I made was made from scratch and took about an hour. The first one had problems because I happened to check it agains't a bible and it didn't go around it, so I had to cut it in half and add some contrasting fabric in the spine, which looks cool.

Putting the button and flap on before sewing the bits together is vital. Also, note the fiddly ironing I've done on the red bits.

Now I have the design set, and ironed out all the problems I used to have with construction of the button flap and magnetic clip, it's pretty easy. The hardest part is all the fiddly ironing of the edges over the facing. The sewing is then very quick.

One closed, one open showing my bodged up spine insert.

Bread baking tips

Smitten Kitchen has some good tips on bread making, as well as some challenging recipes. I see confirmation that bread on baking paper on pizza stone works. I see that I could spray the bowl with oil before I put it in there to rise, and it will tip out easier, which I never thought of yet.

My main obstacle to baking bread often is not that it's hard, its that you need a constant warm temperature and time to hang around near the kitchen so that you can knead it once or twice. So normally I do it on the weekend. I watch DVDs while it rises and bakes, and I also slow-bake something like a cassarole in the oven before I bake bread, to warm up the kitchen so that my bread can rise. Then the oven is pre-heated and ready to bake. And then I can eat my fresh bread with fresh baked veggies or whatever. Yummmmm.

2 attempts at multigrain bread.

Attempt one was ridiculous. I used the no-knead recipe from before but replaced a little bit of flour with a little bit of LSA (Linseed, sunflower, almond). I let it rise on foil before putting it on the pizza stone on the foil, it stuck to the foil. Maybe I needed to flour the foil. Maybe my original idea of baking paper would work better, if I buy some baking paper. Also it didn't rise, it just cooked like a fluffy pancake. So I peeled it off, leaving the bottom crust behind, and it made some nice slices of bread which I made into a burger. Yummy. But a failure. The other half of the batch, not on the foil, worked OK.

Attempt two, I used a white bread recipe from my commonsense cookbook. It needed 4 cups of plain flour, but I only had 3 and a bit, so I did 1/4 of LSA and a little bit of SR. It was a very normal recipe: mix, knead, rise, knead a little, rise, bake. It made a massive loaf (this pic is just the last quarter of it), I baked it on a flat tray so it was wide not high. Very nice! Could use more LSA and have it a bit more fancy/healthy. I added bread improver to the flour. It stayed quite fresh for a few days, and when you toast it up on the sandwich press and butter it, it is *mwuh*.

Full page sketches.

Then I draw full size sketches. I finished them yesterday! We are a little bit ahead of schedule.

Then I scan them in and put them in the layout to make sure the words fit in the space in the picture, and everything looks OK. This is the InDesign layout of the book with the draft sketch placed in.

I often use photoshop to fix a picture. I can cut things out and move them around on screen so that if someone's arm is too long I don't have to go back to drawing and rubbing out.

Christmas songs.

Now it is December, and I am permitting festal cheer. The cathedral morning church which I go to semi-regularly does carols all December, which I think is wonderful. Shops do them for 2 months, why should churches limit their enjoyment to one day only? I always found that I try and do 8 carols on that one day to make the most of them. And cos I never play them at all I'm really clunky and they are untransposed for normal people to sing to and they have so many chords. Tune in the right hand, octave in the left hand will get you through, pianists. So anyway, lots of carol enjoyment at the cathedral, with choir, organ and trumpet. I love the trumpet especially.

I found this song today. What I really like is the time signature change, 4/4 to 6/8, but I'm also a sucker for Coldplay's piano riffs. I can't completely own it because it's still northern-hemisphere-based and talks about snow, but it's melencholy and anthemic, and like I said, time change!! So I'm auditioning it on youtube for the soundtrack of my Christmas holiday. Why does itunes charge 50 cents more for some songs?

Layout magic.

Now we are about to catch up to real time drawing!

When we did the first two books we worked out the production process as we went along, so it was pretty hard. We just didn't know what we were doing, how to actually make a childrens book. Fitting words and pictures together is tricky, let alone that the format changed and pages were added after I had already sketched all the pages for one story. Anyway, now we know what the format is and now we have a system for producing them to minimise having to redraw or rewrite when something has already been worked on.

First the story is written and edited, then we have a meeting—author, illustrator and publishing director—to talk about changes. For example, I found with the first books that a lot of dialogue in a big chunk is hard to illustrate interestingly. Things might need to be written with a more careful mind to the illustrated pages.

Stephanie and I then break the text up into pages. We note down where an illustration could be a full spread, where a page-turn is needed for suspense, etc etc, and spread it out over 21 pages.

Then I draw thumbnails while Stephanie helps say what the illustrations will be. This is a good part, because we think very much the same! When I draw something she usually says "That's what I was imagining it to look like!" so it's very easy. Here are some thumbnails. I try and take into account the space needed for the text. You can see the top right one, that's a spread: two page illo. The bottom right is a full page on the left and a spot illo on the right—some objects isolated.

So these thumbnails become the plan for the bigger sketches. They also bring up problems (eg. too much to fit on a page) before I do any real work.

Update.

I haven't sewn anything in a while, but I plan to make a few more bible covers and a petticoat before Christmas. The petticoat is on hold because I bought not enough fabric. It goes around me, but has no gathering, so too tight to walk I think. I need to buy another half metre of voile. Sigh.

I'm limiting my grocery budget to $60 per month. Not including social eating. So my shopping and cooking habits have changed, streamlined into cheap vegetarian things, lentil based, padded out with the remaining eggs and meat from before the budget. It suits me well. I am going to bake some more bread tomorrow, attempting a sort of multigrain this time.

I've been watching Ashes to Ashes. It is pretty good, but Life on Mars is better. It's just a little annoying how she dresses with off-the-shoulder fluro tops all the time. It's distracting.

My main aim this weekend is to bring order to chaos in my bedroom. Get to the bottom of every horizontal surface.

Family proportions.

I was VERY concerned that I kept drawing the children too old. It's hard to be consistant. Feedback from Stephanie was that I was adding 3 years to Luke and Emily, and I was making the littlest boy too much of a baby. So she took some photos of families from church to show me the relative sizes. Then I drew a version of our book family. I scanned it in and used photoshop to adjust their proportions, mainly leg length.

Mum   Ben   Emily   Luke   Dad

From this, I made some coloured rulers in InDesign, so that when I was putting my drawings into the layout I could also check if the relative heights were correct. And then I also had to constantly remember to make Luke and Emily's legs and arms short, so that they looked little. Fat tummies also make kids look young! A few years older and they get much lankier.

I put the least amount of practise into the Dad. He's supposed to be a skinnyish man getting slouchy and parenty. He doesn't show up at all in one book, so thats OK, but in another book he is all the way through, and unfortunately he varies in quality. His face changes shape, his height varies. I really didn't get the hang of him at all. Even in this sketch I can tell that I don't really understand his body because he's straight like a pole and is falling backwards slightly.

So this drawing is pretty much how they look in the books. The end size of the books meant that the drawings are quite small, so the simpler illustration style of this sketch is basically how I ended up drawing the finished scenes. All my lead-up was too detailed and too big. Drawing it smaller like this forced me to simplify, especially the faces: just dots and spots. I find the hardest part of the face to draw is the bit between the nose and the top lip, so at this size I don't have to draw it at all!

Coloured portrait.

Eventually I had to go to colours, and although I haven't done much watercolour, it seemed the most appropriate style: a lot of colour control and detail. Actually, I had no idea if I would be able to do decent watercolour or not, I just hoped I could! So I painted this, which took half or most of a day I think. It was the big test of my illustration technique, because the books probably wouldn't go ahead unless my illustrations looked professional.

Baking round 2.

This is a very regular sort of white loaf recipe I got out of my bible study leader's cook book. I added a teaspoon of bread improver (with a teaspoon of yeast and 750g of flour, butter and warm water). I kneaded it for 5 or 10 minutes, which I learnt how to do from a youtube video. The internet is so handy.

Then it just sits for 50 minutes or so on top of my warm oven (while baking veggies for dinner) and it doubled.

 
Then I brushed it with milk and baked it for 30 minutes, and it was done! My oven is hotter at the back. I don't know if the back or the front of the oven is the correct temperature.

It is a bit doughy, like a good damper. I ate it with my baked veggies! It's all part of the $2 a day challenge. The lentils weren't that nice, but the bread made it satisfying anyway. I need to buy some mixed seeds so that I can bake multigrain. I think you just need to soak the grain overnight.

Scootering!

Character sketches.

Another installment in my illustration back story! Illustration style finally comes together. Ignore the two little boxes I can't get rid of.

Not very good Emily

Better Emily with practice faces at different angles

Baby brother Todd/Ben

Older brother Luke

Dad and Mum

I did a series of portraits of all the family. Some things I started working out at this stage:

• Eye-shaped eyes don't look as good as just dots and eyebrows. 
• The shorter the arms and legs are, the younger the child looks.
• I like drawing feet.
• I'm trying to make them look messy and casual. It's hard to go against my instinct to make everyone beautiful, but I tried to make the Dad have a bit of a tummy and a receding hairline, the mum look mum-shaped, the kids chubby.
• I've figured out that I should draw hair in big chunky outlines. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't at all.
• I have to draw Emily's body first and then draw her dress over the top and then rub out her body.
• Stripes look really cute. Lots of Bonds-style striped clothing.

Baking round 1.

So I made the 5 minute no knead bread! It's simple in theory, you mix it and store it and bake it on a pizza stone with a bowl of water as well, and you get a sort of heavy turkish bread with a really nice crust. It goes really well with the stew I'm eating at the moment.

Kept in the fridge for a few days.

The dough is really floppy and sticky so my first one was a sort of flat mess on the pizza stone, but it baked fine. The second one I had better handling technique so got a more traditional bread shape, and it didn't make much difference to how it baked. Neither of the rose all that much, but they were still yummy. I'm exercising much restraint and making a loaf last more than one day.

Before baking.

This was the second loaf. It uses 1.5 cups of flour. The idea is, you make a batch with 6 cups of flour and bake it by the chunk as you need it. I didn't know if it would be any good, so I made a half batch (3 cups) so this is 1.5 cups.

After baking.

I will try another recipe this week, maybe one that involves kneading. I will try and buy something called Bread Improver, which bakers use. I'm starting the $2 challenge, so baking bread will save money. If I can get some multigrain happening, that would be good!

Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

Hymn: How firm a foundation.

(I discovered this hymn on the Together for the Gospel CD. That CD is a great singalong hymn-learning resource.)

After the first verse, all the verses are sung from God, if that makes sense. We sing to Got what he said to us. ie,

Fear not—I am with you, oh be not dismayed,
for I am your God, and will still give you aid.

That's a very unusual voice to write a Christian song in. It can be kind of confusing.

It's a good song to sing when you are walking in the rain, because there is a verse that goes: When though the deep water I call you to go the rivers of sorrow shall not overflow...

I especially like the last verse: the repetition for emphasis, singing about hell and foes. Leaves me pumped full of singing endorphins.

The soul that on Jesus shall lean for repose
I will not, I WILL NOT, desert to its foes.
That soul, tho all hell should endeavour to break,
I'll never, no never, no NEVER forsake.

Also in Goulburn.

Goulburn had amazing roses everywhere.

I didn't take my camera with me on Saturday morning, but I will mention the bikeshop/cafe, which was a hip-n-hapnin place, I went in to look for a scooter but they didn't have any, only bikes and food.

Then Dad and I went to the street market next to the park. It's not as big or busy as the Maitland or Glebe markets, but it's got some good stuff. Especially freshly baked artisan bread, $3.50 a loaf, crocheted things, and some second hand books. I bought a WW casserole cookbook and a hardcover Neil Gaiman book.

Goulburn.

 

Mum, Dad and I visited Granny and Grandfather on the weekend. When we visit, very little ever changes. We sit at the same table in the same kitchen with the same biscuit tin that we did when I was little, and it's probably unchanged much from when my Mum was little. It's nice to have that sense of continuity. Also, it is quaint.

This is the kettle.

This is the can opener, it folds out from the wall.

This is the backyard.

These are the chooks.

I found an egg!

Restless. And I want to bake bread.

I think it must be the weather. It should be summer by now, but the forecast is for another week of rain. I'm feeling distinctly frustrated about my life and everything, my attention span for work is minuscule, I'm struggling with envy/contentment, I'm tired. And I still want to bake bread.

I'm too busy and it's too cold. I need warm and I need time. All my frustration is being focused down on this one obsession. I WANT TO BAKE BREAD.

One of the no-knead breads I want to try making.

Craft in small spaces.

Craft is notoriously cluttery. You have to collect the tools and materials, and once you finish something you have leftover scraps which "could be made into something one day". So you collect small balls of wool, bits of cloth, bags of beads, especially cos none of it is cheap and it is all so pretty. But that's the best case scenario: much more likely is that you start something and get bored after 2 weeks and then 6 months later when you feel crafty again you start something else.

In my drive to own less stuff and fit better into my room, I turned to my craft bags. My mum had a sewing room and a whole linen cupboard full of craft and clutter, I'm trying to contain my stuff to a small corner.

Hence, most of the sewing that I am blogging about is an attempt to clear out unfinished projects, use up scraps, or 'upcycle' clothes. I've got a cross stitch I started when I was 10, quite large, almost finished and not particularly to my taste anymore. I've got some patchwork which needs to be quilted. Unfortunately, if I finish projects like these I won't have more space, because a quilt or a picture is big, but at least they will be out of the sewing corner. And I get a sense of achievement. And something to blog.

Baking.

My next fad will be baking bread. I last did this 2 or 3 years ago. I don't have a bread maker, I just do it in the oven. It's a bit time consuming, but nice to do something different. I shall be using the No knead artisan bread recipe from here. I have purchased a pizza stone and some yeast, now I am waiting for a couple of hours free to get it going.

Learning to draw.

I did a fair bit of illustration in my design course. I picked illo electives because I fancied myself as a drawer. I actually haven't done a lot of drawing at all in the 5 years since I left uni. I don't make art for fun; since design is my job I prefer to sew or play piano or other things. I've drawn things like tractors for some jobs.

Now, the only way to be a really good drawer is to draw a lot. Like getting better at tennis or knitting. Practise makes perfect. So I did a few pretty bad drawings, then a lot of mediocre drawings, and finally a presentable set of illustrations. I think there is a real difference between my stuff and stuff done by people who draw for a living and draw all the time—their ease of drawing something beautiful. Being so good that you can be simple and eloquent at the same time. I'm not there, but maybe by the time I've done 20 books…

So anyway, there was a lot of work to get good at drawing before I published a picture.

Seriously ugly:

Has potential. Simple, but too cartoony:

Too real: 

Too real… but getting there. Sister, brother, mother actually look very similar in physical appearance to the finished versions, but haven't worked out a painting style yet.

My particular favourites:

I worked out the drawing style for these books with two illustrators as inspiration: Shirley Hughes and Freya Blackwood.

I love how modern and subtle Freya Blackwood's work is, and how people are half real half simplified. I later used her watercolour style as my guide to watercolouring—she's a lot better than me, but better trained and more devoted, so it's only fair. Oh, I wish I could draw like her.

I read some Shirley Hughes when I was little. I love how she fills her pages with childish details: grubby hands, frowns of concentration, pants falling down, wind-blown hair. She has a very unique style I have no hope of attempting!

I also used the photography on pumpkinpatch as a guide for little kid's proportions. By the way, they have a nice range of little girl clothes this summer with hardly any pink.

Coming soon: How I actually figured out my own style.

First sketches.

Starting many months ago...

This is the first thing I drew, I think. It is for a book in the MM series still in the pipeline about a toy picnic or something, and it was a test run when the idea for doing these kid's books was still a hazy potential. It's rather cute and very on the realism side. Realism is a lot of hard work, it was a good thing we didn't go down that path.

Storybook time!

I'm currently doing some illustration. I'm doing some freelance stuff, not very exciting: diagrams of the safe transportation of gas bottles. But at MM I am doing another children's book. Which is a lot cuter. I think I might run out of things to sew soon, so I'm going to share some illustration stuff. I think I might show you the work as I do it. The book will actually come out next September I think, so you are in for quite a ride!

Rosie's Walk is up there because I remembered about it yesterday. I loved it when they read it on Playschool. The sneaky fox steps on a rake and gets hit in the face, haha!! The pictures are cool. It's from 1968. It's so different from the style of drawing I try and do. 

Vegetable couscous.

I had massive pumpkin cravings for a few days. Really needed to eat some veg, after a few days of bread, toast and other simple carbs I wasn't feeling good.

I don't often buy these packets, because they all taste the same: salty. They are so salty. Curry, mozzarella, all are salty. But it inspired me as a base for this veggie and couscous meal. I baked some pumpkin, and some mushroom. I boiled some carrot and a tin of chick peas for a few minutes before I added the couscous packet. I added some garlic, of course. Then I mixed in the pumpkin and mushroom and scooped it onto a plate of baby spinach. Once I put some fetta on top, it looked pretty fancy. Tastes OK not amazing, but it makes me feel healthy, and it looks pretty gourmet for something I invented.

Big patchwork cushions: blue.

I finished the bigger bluer version of this pillow. I bought a sort of chenille upholstery fabric at Spotlight, it was pretty cheap and feels soft and sturdy. 

It's synthetic, not cotton, so it flops around more and is harder to sew, and the edges of my patchwork were not straight, but as always, once you turn it the right way and put it on the pillow it looks fine. European pillows are cool. Very nice to snuggle up on. I have the pink pillowcase folded away because this is my new favourite—the pink cover is smaller than the blue one, so the cushion inside is fuller and firmer. That's a good tip—overestimate your cushion insert size if you want plump pillows.

 

I have crossed a few tasks off my UFO list last weekend!

Skirt #2 finished!

Well, almost. A little hand sewing remains on the inside of the waist to finish off the lining. This is Apple's practise skirt, her first attempt, before she tries sewing with the lovely floral satin from Tessuti. This purple poplin was actually a bit hard to sew with, because it doesn't stretch or mould very well. So the inside of the hem is all scrunched, the blind hem was very awkward to sew. But you wouldn't know once it's being worn!

I'm wearing my green linen Skirt By Summer today, it is lovely. I think the quality of the fabric isn't just easy to sew, it helps it to sit nicely, the satin one will probably turn out the best.

Sherlock over...

It ended on a standoff. Gasp, growl. But there are promises of more to come! If only it was on the ABC and I could watch it without ads. How I love Martin Freeman as Watson. I am pleased that he is going to play Bilbo Baggins. Moriarty was awesomely creepy, such good acting.

In the meantime, The Mentalist is back on tonight. My other TV love. In the ads he seems like another friendly psychic, but he's really a nasty tricker, much more interesting.

I used to like Glee, but I've stopped watching it because I'm not home when it's on, and now that I've stopped watching it I've stopped liking it. The balance has tipped and the things I don't like are outweighing the things I do like. Sue and cover versions don't stand up to shallowness and sameness anymore.

Skirt #1 finished.

Hemmed my skirt and it is finished! I successfully did the hem on my sewing machine, which if you put it on the right stitch and fold the edge the right way, you get a hem which finishes the edge with a lot of zig-zags and doesn't have a seam show on the front (tiny stitches if you look carefully). It's so tricky I could never have invented it. Every time I want to do one I spend 15 minutes in confusion folding it wrong.

 

Mulberry time.

I'm walking along, staring at nothing, and suddenly I see on the ground the evidence: purple bird poo. I have now found two trees in my suburb. One is very sweet, one is less so but has more berries.

Library DVD review: The Man from Snowy River.

FIrst time watching this Australian classic. It is beautiful. The mountain country is just stunning.

I think it was made in the 80s when period stories were heavily romanticised and women wore a lot of lace and men wore puffy shirts, but they all seem to be wearing pretty normal clothes. Period clothes, but they were plain and real-looking, and also drizabones and boots. Very easy to identify with the place.

It's not an amazing script, and the story is pretty simple, but it's a really good piece of Australian rural culture. Girls on the ag college I use to work at loved it. It's a shame there isn't more like it, because I think bush culture is under represented. It was cool watching Australian men do rugged, useful things like crack whips and boil tea on a fire, foggy forests and horses running over mountains, and that stuff is still there today. The whips, the horses, the mountains, the roughness. I don't get into dramas like Mcleods or East of whatever it was. It shouldn't be a soap and it shouldn't be false nostalgia.

It is basically a coming-of-age story, which is another story rarely told in our age of delayed adulthood. I've been hearing a lot of media conversation about when do boys become men in our society, how do we mark that... so there is a line in the movie that stuck out to me. The young bloke says "it's more than a man can take" and the old fellas say "Man?" and he answers "my dad raised me to be a man".

Anyway, it was good. Sigrid Thornton and Tom Burlinson are quite good. The horse ride down the cliff is very good. The landscape is the best part, and the people on horses improve it. Make another one and I'll watch it.

Skirt by summer.

Apple and I have a skirt sewing project, first we chose a pattern and bought materials, then we spent another saturday cutting out the pattern and pinning bits.

I had a bit of time to sew on the weekend and I decided it would be easier if I did my sewing bit ahead of her, so that I would know what to do and we wouldn't have to keep swapping our threads in the machine. It was very quick, the actual sewing bit. Even the zipper. All I have to do now is hem it. I'm considering trying some fancy pin tucks around the bottom, but the fabric might be a bit heavy.

Note the pincushion: I made it myself. It was so annoying when Jess came over and we had to put the pins in and out of the packaging, I gave up and made this the next day.

Anyway, I shall photo the skirt once I've finished it. Currently it is "hanging up to let the bias hang out" for a few days so that the hem is straight.