vampy – Page 7 – stuff and things

I win…for now

So, I bought and erected a fence around the veg area, so the chickens can’t get in and trash everything. They are pretty unimpressed, they saw me heading that way with a fork earlier, and came running after me hoping for wormy treats, but they were foiled by the gate. It all looks chicken-proof, but i am taking bets as to how long it’ll take them to break in.

The compost bin I had was full, and over winter I’d just been putting the straw from cleaning out the chickens in a big bucket. So the other day I built a new compost area out of chicken wire, and emptied the bucket and old compost bin into it. The straw from last year had hardly broken down at all, the whole thing was too dry…I need to use more kitchen scraps on it. And possibly pee on it. Hopefully the wire will allow for more water and airflow than the bin, so it’ll start working its composty magic all by itself now.

Now I just need to figure out what to plant. I have the remaining strawberries and raspberries, and I’m going to fill that bed with more of the same, and I have 3 blueberry plants in pots which have also been relocated to the veg area…they did ok on the patio last year until Polly started eating them. The newest bed will be for peas to help make the soil nicer, and because I love peas, but I’m still not sure what to put in the other two beds. I’ll definitely do some radish and lettuce, but I’m undecided as to what else. I may ask my LSG hoars for suggestions.

Oh, and i made this crappy panoramic pic of the garden just for reference so i can see how it changes over the year/s. Though now i want to try and do a proper one with a lens that doesn’t have crazy distortion at the edges.

It’s that time of year

Well, it’s been that time of year for a while, but I’ve mostly been in bed for the last 2 weeks cos I had a horrible cold. Now I’m just slightly coughy, I thought it was time I got on with stuff I’ve been putting off. So I cleaned out the chickens, sorted out the big bin I store the feed/corn/straw/medicine in, and started on the veggie patches. The furthest one in the pic had awful soil in last year, so I grew potatoes to break it up, which seems to have worked. The other 2 weren’t so bad, but were very weedy when i got to them today, so i dug them as best as i could, and spent most of my time just sitting on the edge of the bed pulling weeds and squishing lumps of soil with my hands. Most of the raspberry plants have survived, but only 3 strawberries made it. Before I plant this year I’m going to build a fence so the chickens can’t sit on or dig up everything. And when I say ‘I’, I mean, hope gren and or my dad will help me.

Every time I turned round today, I had a row of chickens following me. I kept telling them not to eat ALL the worms, but I don’t think they listened.

Before I got ill, I discovered the eye-searing Oranje on Knitty. Orange is SO not my colour, but I decided I had to knit it. I am trying not to buy yarn, so I had to knit from stash. I chose Faithful Beauty Bugga! for the main colour, and a green and a blue for the CC’s. It knitted up SO fast, and although it was my first project involving steeks, it was all very easy and uneventful. I put plenty of notes on my rav project page if anyone else is thinking of making it and is unsure of anything. I mostly followed the pattern, but made the collar a little shorter and did the bands differently as I’m going to be using a zip rather than buttons. Currently the zip is tacked in place, awaiting a battle with the sewing machine. Here’s a zipless pic.

The pattern looks a little daunting because it’s so long, but that’s a good thing, because it means it’s really clear and easy to follow. HUGE props to the designer for writing such a good pattern, and for generally being an awesome person. This is the first colourwork I’ve done on a garment (other than little things like socks, gloves, and hats), and the charts were easy to follow, easy to remember, and even the few rows that involved 3 colours in one row weren’t too traumatic. I love it so much I’m considering making another in worsted/aran weight so I can wear it as a jacket.

Dear vampy, you are crazy. love vampy

The kitchen is finished! Well, it was finished just before Xmas, and amazingly it’s still pretty clean and tidy. Having an awesome clean kitchen motivated me to work on the rest of the house, and I’ve since repainted my bedroom and put down new flooring, and generally been cleaning and tidying and getting rid of carloads of crap. I should have taken before and after pics, cos that is much more impressive, but generally I forgot. Just imagine it pretty much the same but with STUFF everywhere. Gren came in as I was resizing the pics and said I should have done his room too, which I didnt, cos, you know, it’s rude to take pics of other people’s bedrooms, but then he said it would have been useless without a before pic anyway, showing the 50+ beer cans he got rid of. Either way, Gren’s room is tidy now, which is nothing short of a miracle.

So, here’s my awesome kitchen when it was finished:

And here it is after a few weeks, showing the relative state of tidiness:

Stuff that still needs doing: put in coving above cupboards on the right, paint bare plaster there and inside cupboard above boiler. Replaster and paint area behind the fridge.

I didnt get proper before and after pics of my bedroom cos I am useless, but here’s a semi-before one, from after I took out all the furniture except my bed and computer (hey, i knew it was gonna take a few days and needed to keep the essentials!).

I did actually really love the red, but it’s been that way for at least 10 years, so I needed a change, and if I was gonna put down new floor, it made sense to repaint beforehand. So here it is now:

I did one coat of gloss on the windowsill today, and will do another tomorrow, then I just need to paint the radiator, and glue down the edging for the floor. Oh, and get some non-ugly curtains if i can find any that are super cheap.

The living room is mostly unchanged, I just put away the contents of the boxes of stuff that migrated here when the kitchen was being done, and bought some new cubbies for my yarn, cos the old ones didn’t match, and the set of shelves I had up was showing serious signs of wear after snargle kept climbing up to the top.

New shelves, and they were a super bargain in the argos sale…cost less than Â£32 for the lot, including delivery!

Stuff that still needs doing: Paint over the holes from the cavity wall insulation, sort out old yarn shelves so it looks pretty, sell one of the spinning wheels.

The spare room has looked like a bombsite for a while, especially while I was doing my room and had the entire contents of it in there. It’s not very impressive from the pics, but I sorted out all the fleeces and clothes and photography kit and other junk in there, and put it in a way that i can hopefully find things in future. And people can still actually sleep in the bed.

Stuff that needs doing: clear junk off windowsill, put up some curtains.

The bathroom is generally kept reasonably tidy, but the windowsill seemed to fill up with tons of junk, so I brought one of the old yarn cubbies up from the living room to put behind the door:

Still to do: Repaint walls, probably white or cream. Repaint coving where the paint is coming off. Get a new shower curtain. Put up a decent mirror instead of the ugly one that I found in the back of my dad’s shed 12 years ago.

And here’s the bombsite rooms….dining room and utility type room. They are tidier now than in the pics, but still…yeah.

Oh, and here’s an idea of the level of cleaning that was needed beforehand….this is the hallway after the builders had left.

I miss cooking.

Work on the kitchen is slow but steady. Here it is last wednesday:

And here it is today:

Now they just need to do a tiny bit more plumbing to get the sink fully working, and bring in and hook up the washing machine and dishwasher, finish and grout the tiles, install the hob and oven, finish the cupboard over the boiler, put in the floor, and do a few bits of finishing touches adding trims and stuff. I’ve still not actually seen the hob or oven, but i’ve been assured that they have definitely been ordered, so i hope they show up tomorrow.

I have no kitchen

This is what it was like yesterday. Now there is a hole in the wall and boxes with new cupboards in. And all day it’s been BANG BANG BANG BRRRRRR CRASH. But at least it’s getting there…yay! I am getting over a cold so I’ve been hiding in bed sneezing and coughing and wishing that putting the covers over my head and squeezing my eyes closed would make the noise go away.

Let me tell you about my kitchen

It had a magpie in it the other day. It was pretty awesome, aside from being 7am. I am actually impressed that a magpie and cat could fit through the catflap at the same time. I am less impressed at being woken up at 7am and not have long enough arms to reach both window safety catches at the same time to get the thing out. It was all ok in the end though.

And that isn’t the point.

The point is, my kitchen is pretty nasty. When I moved in 11 years ago it was even nastier, it was yellow with a beige floor and white cupboards. I put down a new floor, which would have been ok, cept it’s got white in, and it was cheap, and the white is no longer white. I’ve painted the walls and cabinets several times, this yukky dusky pink was really only decided upon as it was the only cabinet paint on super special offer and they really needed doing cos i’d used non-cabinet paint the time before and it was all scratched up.

I AM GETTING A NEW KITCHEN!!!

Sadly budget constraints have meant my dream kitchen with sparkly granite worktops and glass spashbacks won’t be appearing any time soon, but it will have awesome things….like more storage space…and a totally flat wipe clean hob, and a mid-height oven so i dont have to bend over and whine getting heavy stuff out. Well, given that the current oven blew up a few weeks ago, ANY oven would be good round about now. AND a one and a half bowl sink! This makes me very happy. There should be enough space to store all the cooking things, AND the wine making things AND the soap making things AND all the things for any other kitchen related hobbies I decide i need to do.

So I decided to take before and after pics so i could remember the horribleness of before.

This is the side of the kitchen we actually use for cooking. It is a little cleaner than normal.

This is the side of the kitchen that gren uses cos it has a deep fat fryer in. It is way messier than normal cos I’ve been emptying old stuff out of cupboards. Also it’s generally ugly cos the cupboards are horrible, and there’s big bits missing from the coving cos there used to be a cupboard around the old boiler. Also I bottled a ton of cider vinegar the other day, so that needs a home finding for it. The entire space behind the small bin is full of carrier bags. I really need to remember to reuse them and stop collecting them

And this is, in theory, what it will look like. I am not sure why the boiler looks like a train in the pic, but i asked him to leave it cos it amused me.

Also, the floor will not be so scary. It’s gonna be hardwearing laminate in a fake slate tile effect, to match the worktops. But without the huge tiles and white grout.

And i want it done now now now. But the contractor is a bit rubbish and unable to use a tape measure, so he sent the place the wrong measurements (the plan above was done from estimates I gave), so I’ve had to send the proper measurements in for it to be done again. He has promised it’ll all be in and done way before xmas though, so that’s all good.

woohoo new kitchen!

Wow. I’m a hippy.

This may come as no surprise to some of you, but to me it was a bit of a shock!

A couple of weeks ago I had a shower. It wasn’t a momentous occasion in itself, I promise, I do clean myself more regularly than fortnightly. The reason this particular shower was significant is that clearly I didn’t have enough yarn projects or boobs or whatever the hell else I think about in the shower to keep me distracted, so I started thinking about what I was actually doing.

In the space of around 15 minutes, I’d used shampoo, conditioner, facial wash, shower gel, soap, leave-in conditioner, deodorant, facial moisturiser, body lotion, toothpaste and mouthwash. That’s kinda a lot of stuff, right? For someone who claims not to be a girly girl? Granted, most days involve about half the number of items…I don’t wash my hair that often cos I’m trying to avoid the grease stripping/scalp panic and makes grease cycle, and I only use body lotion when I’ve shaved my legs so my skin doesn’t get dry and itchy, but even so….that’s a lot of stuff. And I’d hazard a guess that I don’t even know what 50% of the ingredients are for.

Last week I cut my hair, from navel length to just below my boobs, just to get rid of all the split ends and really dry bits, and now I’m planning to look after it properly as I grow it. I stopped bleaching it when I started growing it, and I never use a hairdryer, but I started reading a no-poo thread on LSG, and everyone was talking about SLS and parabens and *cones and oh my! I’d tried the baking soda/apple cider vinegar thing before, and that didn’t work for me, it made my hair feel dry and stringy and gross, but the logic behind it all made sense…I don’t want to be stripping the oils from my hair with SLS, then adding condition with stuff with silicones in, which need something strong like SLS to remove. Since reducing my shampooing to about once a week last year, I’ve not really had a problem with grease build-up, but my hair does get pretty dry, and as it’s getting to winter, it’ll probably get worse. So with a heavy heart I’m going to be ditching my awesome-smelling Lush shampoo bar and conditioners full of crap, and making my own hair products.

I’ve been sporadically using an oil cleansing method to wash my face for the last year (a mix of castor and olive oils), and it does work really well, but I keep forgetting to put the facecloth back in the bathroom after I wash it, so it has been very sporadic. I’m going to try and stick to it this time though, but i’m not so sure about giving up the moisturiser…my skin doesn’t feel dry using the oil cleansing, but I like using moisturiser with SPF15 in it…I don’t want wrinkles!

But aaaanyway, the point of this huge ramble was…I made soap!! I looked around the internet for recipes, decided I wanted to make castile soap, but then decided I wanted something more foamy and easier to blend, so settled on something with coconut oil in. Then I read the quantities involved. I neither wanted nor needed 7 fucking lbs of soap, especially if it all went horribly wrong. All the sites warned against making smaller batches because you need to measure more accurately, and use a proportion of a can of lye. Well, given that most of the sites were in the states, I was going to have to measure the lye myself anyway, and I am perfectly capable of using a set of scales, so I came across this saponification chart and decided to just make it up as I went along (using the 5% discount numbers, cos I’d rather have a soap that’s a bit oily than one that could give me chemical burns!). The recipe I ended up with was (don’t copy this btw, cos I don’t know if it worked yet!):

443g olive oil, 220g soybean oil, 211g coconut oil, 291g water, 123g NaOH

I mixed the oils in a pan and put it on a low heat, then made up the lye in a big mug outside the backdoor. The second I was working with dangerous chemicals, the cats were all ‘OH HAI THERE!’, so I had to shout at them a lot, then eventually bring it inside and put it in a pan of water to cool on the countertop next to the open back door.

Then I realised my candy thermometer had got smashed in the drawer, so the temperatures I used were…oils: just above body temp, probably about 40 degrees C, lye, about the temperature of a cup of tea that had been sitting around for 10 minutes. But I didnt put my finger in that to test it, so I could be wrong!

I took the oil off the heat, poured in the lye slowly, and blended it with my bargain Â£4 tesco stick blender. It took less than 5 minutes until I got trace. Not actually knowing what trace was for sure, I carried on a bit until it was like thick custard, then poured into my mould, which was a loaf tin lined with clingfilm, which I then put over the top of the soap too, partly cos of OMG ASH, but mostly so i could wrap it in towels with no mess. I then put the towel wrapped bundle under a cardboard box to prevent unwanted feline attentions.

I kept peeking at it for a couple of hours, and it was soooo hot…and then it looked like it had swollen a bit, then looked a bit more transparent, and then I went to bed. The internets said to leave for 24 hours before cutting, but I am impatient, and this morning it was cold and looked solid enough, so I pulled it out of the tin and sliced it up. IT LOOKS (and smells) LIKE REAL SOAP!!!! It currently feels a littttle greasy, I’m not sure if that’s because I overdid the oils a little, or whether it’ll be okay after it’s cured.

I’m planning to leave a couple of bars as they are, then in a few days when the texture is right I’ll grate the others up, some for rebatching with essential oils, some for making shampoo, and some for trying to make my own laundry detergent.

Here are some not-so-impressive pictures.Â You know, it’s soap, really, not that interesting. But there are no air bubbles or pockets of goo or anything else untoward, so yay I guess!

Dear sewing machine. suck it. love vampy

As I have the memory span of a goldfish, I decided I wanted to make some dresses. I KNOW I am shit at sewing, but somehow a combination of forgetting how much I whined last time, desire to have pretty dresses, and pretty much complete denial that there is something I am useless at allowed me to think I can make myself a dress.

I bought this dress a while ago, and I LOVE it. But I don’t really like the fact that it’s a halterneck, and the net is itchy. A sensible plan would have been to make an underskirt and deal with the halterneck, but well, that was sensible, so instead i decided I will make a similar dress based on this shape but with real straps and no net….and if i do make a petticoat for it to add volume, it’ll be from non-itchy net.

I bought pretty fabric with blueberries on, partly cos it was pretty, and partly cos it was cheap. I forgot to photograph it though, but well, it has blueberries on, use your imagination. Ok, someone on rav asked for a pic, so i guess you get to see it too. Here, blueberries.

Being a cheapass with a strange body shape, I gave up fairly fast on the idea of finding a pattern that would do what I want (seriously ebay, fucking Â£15 for a vintage pattern, REALLY??)…I may consider spending that on a pattern that I knew would actually fit me, but seeing as I’d have to adjust it in lots of places, Â£15 can fuck right off. Hell, that’s more than the fabric cost.

So I sat on my living room floor with a couple of dresses for inspiration, and approximately 12 miles of muslin. I did some tracing and highly technical drawing in biro, then a bit of cutting and pinning, finally I actually did some damn sewing, and I came up with this:

After a contemplative nap, i realised i didn’t like those straps, so i took it apart and redid it, and came up with this:

It looks a little crappy cos it’s big on the ribcage and the straps are too long, but on the real thing i will actually measure and fix the straps myself rather than getting gren to do it, and the back will be smocked or shirred or whatever the correct technical term is for ‘made elasticy so it fits without me needing to subject myself to the trauma of trying to sew in a zip’. I am hoping that this, and the use of a fabric that is considerably heavier than muslin will mean that the real thing will fit better and look better. At the very least, at least my nipples won’t be visible through it.

I have defeated you in round one of this battle sewing machine, please play nice tomorrow when i begin work on the real thing. Thank you.

The internet has ruined me

The weather has been strange here the last week or so, changing from sunny to rainy at the drop of a hat. This has meant that twice this week, on an early evening drive to the next village, we have seen rainbows. My first thought was ‘omg cool, damn, why didn’t I bring the camera’…closely followed by ‘WHAT DOES IT MEAN????’.

For the entire car journey, both times, we alternated shouting ‘single rainbow half the way!!…omg single rainbow ALL the way, WHAT DOES IT MEAN? omg wait, double fucking rainbow…ALL THE WAY’, and laughing hysterically. For anyone who has no idea what i am referring to, hand in your internet membership card immediately.

Also, unrelated to the internet, today’s rainbow was REALLY fucking awesome…as we were driving out of the village, we could actually see the end of it skipping from garden to garden. I have never seen the bottom of a rainbow before, so that was really cool. Also, when we got to the next village we were at a better angle than in my village, so it had got brighter throughout the whole journey, and once I’d stopped driving, I noticed that right at the top of the arc there were 3 rainbows…not like the normal extra rainbows you get spaced really far apart, but 3 all squooshed up together. I made gren take a pic on his phone, so if it comes out, i’ll post it.

Aaaaaaaaand, part 2 of how the internet has ruined me, after the first rainbow incident, we went to the shop, and as my uterus was still rebelling at the time, I decided I needed cake. However, as I rounded the corner to the cake aisle, I noticed something shocking and amazing. CHERRY PIE WAS ON SALE FOR 1/3RD OFF. While gren was buying his beer, meat, and toilet paper, and whatever other crap he buys, I conducted a long conversation with myself about the relative merits of cake vs. pie. Sadly I was unable to reach a satisfactory conclusion before gren found me and asked why the fuck I was standing staring at the dessert shelf drooling and muttering to myself. So naturally i bought both. Even with hindsight, that was a wise decision. And i still have pie left. nom.

The internet is also mostly to blame for my obession with goatse, LSG girls’ boobs, and expensive German yarn… for that matter, the internet is entirely to blame for the fact that I now share a house with a man who pretty much only buys large quantities of meat, chips, toilet paper and beer whenever we go to the supermarket, and then invariably looks at his purchases and says ‘it’s gonna be a good night’ to the cashier. To be fair though, while his dietary habits are somewhat disgusting, he’s a pretty fucking awesome lodger…there aren’t many people who would sit in a car with me for 10 minutes screaming ‘WHAT DOES IT MEAN???’ and laughing like a crazy person.

So yay for the internet, I guess.

Also, I am sad today for a reason that is SECRET so I’m not gonna tell you. BUT, I still managed to write a mostly coherent post with no wahhing. I also realised that I have approximately 90 pints of homemade cider waiting to be drunk, and a bottle is in the fridge right now. OMG, and apple mead that needs bottling. If I can find 6 bottles, I’m gonna go do that RIGHT NOW.

soooo wiiiiiiiiiiiide

new lens. love.

took a quick wander up the road to get a few shots to explore the wideness of the lens. I love it, there’s very little distortion of the edges at 20mm…a considerable amount more at 10mm, but I like how it looks, cept when i’m taking pics of myself and it makes my arms wider than my head. Still, love love. I just have to wait until i can go somewhere pretty to use it properly.