Stich n Bitch at Chez Auden 29/08/07

It was a small group of SnBers that turned up this week. Poor Princess Bek was off 'Florence Nightingaling' her sick Hugo and Princess Em was too busy with Gem club (which is obviously more important than us! Hrumph!) So Princess Viv, Kate, Eleri and Alana settled in to our various stitchings and Princess Eleri finished a beautiful shrug which she modelled very professionally for us.





However we quickly grew tired off our various stitchings especially when we discovered that Princess Kate had never experienced Rapidoh before. So after a delicious dinner of cheesy (or not so cheesy in Princess Kate's case) pasta bake and fulfilling our bitching quotient we settled in for a quiet game. For those of you who have not experienced Rapidoh before (you poor, pooor souls) it is basically Pictionary except instead of drawing a picture you have to sculpt it out of play-doh instead. So much more fun. After spending about five minutes trying to decide on teams (P. Eleri and P. Viv must be kept separate by all means as they appear to have some weird psychic Rapidoh mental connection) and managing to avoid 'paper, scissors, rock' even though we all secretly wanted to do it, we teamed up with the person opposite which was rather sensible as it meant no one had to move. So it was P. Viv and P. Alana against P. Eleri and P. Kate. Team Red (V and A) didn't do so well although Viv's donkey was a piece of beautiful sculpting even if everyone else thought it was a demented rabbit, but I knew what it was (clearly the tail would be a lot shorter if it was actually a rabbit).




However it was no match for Team Blue's Princess Kate's apple core which was very life like except for the colour of course.



Special mention needs to go to Princess Eleri and Princess Kate for attempting to sculpt 'coach' which proved far harder than initally thought. They began by sculpting a carriage but when that failed to deliver the correct response Princess Eleri moved on to sculpt a bus which can be also called a coach but somehow I just couldn't get past the bus so then P. Eleri sculpted two tennis players complete with rackets and then a third figure without a tennis racket that in hindsight was obviously a coach but at the time I though he was trying to shoot the tennis players which did not help matters. Rapidoh provided a good belly laugh for us all, so much so there was crying involved (it was emotional) and I think the term 'Power Drill' will never be thought of in the same light again, hey Princess Viv!

Recipe for Chocolate Apple Cake:

185g butter, softened
1 1/4 cup castor sugar
3 eggs
2 cups self raising flour
1/3 cup cocoa
1/4 teaspoon bicarb of soda
1/3 cup water
2 medium apples, peeled, cored and grated

Combine all ingredients in bowl and mix until well combined. Pour into 20cm lined round cake tin and bake in moderate oven (180 degrees celcius) for 1 and 1/4 hours. Cool and top with chocolate icing. Delicious!

Skink or Lizard? Mansion d'Eleri 22nd August 2007

OK, so this post is a little out of order, as it was actually Princess Eleri's turn to host S&B three weeks ago on 22nd August. In spite of lovely intentions to arrange a prompt posting (naturally including some rather fabulous photos), all this was put on hold due to the calamitous loss of the cable to connect camera to computer to download photos! In fact, I'm still unable to find it, although Princess Bek has helpfully suggested I scour Ed's wardrobe*

Anyway, photos coming soon, as there was some very good stitching done by all. Bek has done masses of her new rag rug (which, by the way, is yet another excellent exercise in recycling and reusing), and I did a bit of knitting before somehow messing it up and then having to beg for the knitting pro Kate to rescue me and undo a couple of rows (which she seemed to do in a couple of minutes! She is, surely, a genius.)

BTW, we were all missing Princess Alana terribly – she has been absent for weeks and weeks and weeks! Because of this, I have found her an amigurumi pattern site, which has some excellent crochet animal patterns—check them out here: http://amigurumipatterns.blogspot.com/

In other learning, for some reason we ended up talking about the Australian creature which has a tail that looks pretty much exactly like a head. I looked it up and (re-)discovered the name; a) a stumpy-tailed lizard, or b) a shingleback lizard. For picture see here:

Anyway, they’re very cool as the tail-that-looks-like-a-head fools evil predators, so the predators get confused about which “head” to go for and slam into the ground with their sharp pointy beaks, and then stagger around feeling dazed.
I wasn’t sure whether the tail came off (as lizard tails tend to), though, as it is quite, well, stumpy, and then if the stump came off, they would clearly be a no-tail lizard.
So then Bek suggested that it might actually be called a stump-tailed skink, and might not be a lizard at all.

Which confused me, as—due to my British background—I had assumed that “skink” was simply the Australian word for “lizard”.

But no—how wrong I was!
In fact, lizards and skinks are completely different, and apparently there are no true lizards in Australia at all. Skinks are the Scincidae family, while lizards are the Lacertidae (or wall lizards) family. Both are part of the order “squamata”, or “scaled reptiles”.
Skinks look roughly like lizards, but most species have no pronounced neck and relatively small legs. Several genera (e.g., Typhiosaurus) have no limbs at all, others, such as Neoseps, have only reduced limbs. Often, their way of moving resembles that of snakes more that that of other lizards. Skinks usually have long, tapering tails that can be regenerated, while lizards can not only regenerate tails, but can regenerate limbs! Oh, also, skinks have live young, while lizards lay eggses.
How cool is that?!
Now, you be the judge – pick the skink.

Oh, and, on food, I copied Princess Emily’s dessert of raspberry jelly with fresh raspberries as it was utterly delicious (although I did have to do an emergency freezing to get it to solidify before we all ate it and everyone went home), and I actually can’t think of what we had for mains at all…

*As her recent calamitous loss of her cable for connecting camera to computer was brought to a joyous conclusion when she found said cable in Hugo's wardrobe. Impeccable logic, m’lud.

I nearly called off Stitch & Bitch on Wednesday night as I had a pretty bad cold, but I'm so glad I didn't. It was a great night and it's so therapeutic to get into the stitching. I also think that if I hadn't had the push of having you guys over I might not have got around to creating Della's costume before Friday.

Here are the photos of some of the projects - unfortunately I didn't get one of Princess Eleri's stars, which are coming along beautifully. Only seven more to go, I think.

Princess Bek left her red scraps at home, so she started a new pink and denim rag rug.

Princess Emily started a knitting project - it's going to be a really cool jumper, in not-quite-mustard-yellow-and-this-is much-nicer coloured yarn.

I have finished Della's jumper, in record time for any knitting project for me. It took less than two months from the first cast on to ending off the final seam. And yes, it does look much better with the V neck being in the centre and the shoulders at the same height!

And here is Happy Unicorn Della at school on Book Day. I couldn't get the horn to stay upright too well so she was a bit of a floppy unicorn. By the end of the day Della had decided that unicorn horns were uncomfortable and that she didn't want to be one any more - I suspect that the number of bobby pins on her head contributed to that :(

Due to popular demand, here is the old family recipe for Gingerbread:

• 120g butter
• 1 cup sugar
• ¼ cup golden syrup
• 1 cup milk
• 1 heaped tsp bicarb soda
• 2 cups flour
• 1 dstsp allspice
• 2 dstsp ground ginger

Cream butter and sugar, add golden syrup. Dissolve soda in milk, add to mixture. Add the rest of the ingredients. Bake 60 – 75 minutes at 180ºC.