Improvised carrot bread

Today we're getting a visitor! My father-in-law is coming to stay with us for a week, to help out now that we're swamped with work on the house and garage. In two weeks it all has to be done!

However, today I just wanted to show you a bit of kitchen craft: bread baking, the Fny way. I bake a lot of bread, but almost never use recipes. Plus I rarely measure anything. This inevitably leads to all batches being different from each other, which I find nice.

Yesterday as I looked in the fridge, I noticed we had some left over carrots. Great, I can use that. From the pantry I got ordinary wheat flour and barley flour, salt and dry yeast. Usually I just use water but since we're having a guest over I decided to go fancy - so I ran out and bought some milk.


I mixed it all together (with the milk heated to approximately 37 degrees C), simply added flour until the dough felt good (mostly wheat, perhaps 3 or 4 dl of barley...), and left it to rest for 50 minutes. Afterwards I cut the dough into 24 pieces and rolled them into round balls, and the left them to rest and rise again for another 30 minutes. After that they went into the oven for half an hour (225 degrees C).


They turned out absolutely DELICIOUS! I can't tell you how pleased I am with the result, but it's probably one of the best I've baked ever! *nomnomnom*

(Written a couple of days ago, but I wanted to wait for the pics, so here it is...)

Granny squares - testing a new pattern

Last night I found this exciting granny square pattern (I'm sorry it's only in Swedish) and I just had to try it. Here is the result!

It turned out to be considerably larger than the other (traditional) squares I've done, so unfortunately they don't fit together. However, I'm thinking of trying to make a smaller version of this one. If I crochet the two inner parts (the lilac and white) it's ALMOST the size I want it to be, so if I can just make a smaller square frame around it then... it could work. Not sure how to do it though, I'm still kinda new at doing crochet... Any suggestions? And when on the subject, do you have any favourite granny square versions? I'd love to see more! Do you know of any that fits together (in size) with the traditional (at least, the one I've heard is the most traditional here! You can see them in the second pic.) granny square?

Creating a stone path...

Laying down stones to form a path to what will eventually be an earth cellar... Like a puzzle, always trying to find the best way to fit the stones together. Marvellous, I love this kind of very creative and hands-on gardening!








As much as possible I want to avoid buying stones for paths and decorative features in the garden. We certainly have enough rocks to work with on our small patch of land, plus I really like things not to be perfect and symmetrical.

Crochet ("mormorsrutor")

I've finally learned how to make so called "mormorsrutor" (whatever it's called in english...), I'm so proud!

First time ever - an entire dress sewn by hand! No sewing machine!

Good evening dear friends! It is getting late and I'm getting pretty sleepy, so I'll make this a short entry.

For the last two weeks or so I've sewn more by hand than I've ever done before; for the first time making an entire garment by hand! No sewing machine, not even a little! And here is the result: A short dress in 100% wool, by my own pattern.

As you can see, there is a decorative v-shape both in the front and in the back of the collar. The three buttons on the chest were also made by me, using the same technique that I use while doing medieval cloth buttons.

So there you have it, my first dress sewn all by hand! And I enjoyed it, yay!




(The grey blouse beneath the dress is the one I made a couple of months ago, shown here...)

What we've been up to this summer...

I've mentioned before that we are about to move out of the city and finally get our own house. The house itself isn't actually there yet, though... but it's coming quite quickly!

So instead of playing around at home with sewing, candlemaking or whatever I usually do, this summer we've been crafting on a different scale. We're not actually building the house ourselves, but we have been busy working on other stuff.

And now, time for some pictures! Finally, yay!

Photo update in-between cramps: Mead, paper and painting.

Today is one of those days when I spend every other minute laying down with intense cramps (menstruation from hell!), and I'm thus unable to work. The small chunks of time where I'm NOT actually beaten down with cramps, I thought I'd take some pics of stuff I should show you...

 These bottles are filled with mead, made this spring/early summer. It turned out great and should only improve with time! It's also stronger than it seems and may provide one mean hangover.








I'm particularly proud of these labels. Not only have I finally gotten a hang of writing with an old-fashioned dip-in-ink pen, I've also made the paper myself!

For the paper, I recycled scrap paper and mixed with water. It wasn't a hundred percent successful (the home made frame and mesh could use some improvement, more on that in a later post!) but it was FUN! I'll definitely be making more paper later on, when I have the time. And then I'll try to remember to write a blog post about it right away! :P







Now what on earth is this? Ehm... well, sometimes I paint. Nothing fancy, I'm no artist for sure but I like it. This is my favorite so far.

Well, that's all for now. Time for me to curl up into a ball and try to get through the pain. It's rising again now, like a dark wave knocking me out. Ajajaj...