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.