Shirt Recycling

My most popular elephant mobiles are my yellow and grey colour combinations, and whilst I have not struggled to find yellow and white fabric scraps to use for the details, I have found it very hard to find suitable grey options.

On another note, my strange boyfriend, in the winter, sleeps in shirts. Yes, you read that right. It's weird. His logic is that he's worn the shirt in the day so it's silly to get a T-shirt dirty to wear to bed. I don't think he quite understands that he could wear pyjamas but never mind, it's getting warmer so he should stop soon.

So one night, he rolled over, and there was the unmistakable 'crrrkkkk' of ripping fabric. Rather than offering to mend it, I immediately thought 'oh good, that's perfect for my mobiles' and so pounced on it, and have already started chopping it up. 

So, in my favoured spirit of recycling, here are some of my latest mobiles with the perfect, soft grey and white striped fabric. 

Craving Sunshine

This is the time of year when I am seriously craving sunshine. I'm fed up of it being cold and grey and I just feel all bleurgh - like I'm also a bit grey looking and desperately in need of some vitamin D!

So I was very excited to book a last minute Easter holiday with a teacher friend, to get away somewhere warm for the weekend.We went to Majorca for a few days, staying just outside of Palma, which is a beautiful city.

The Cathedral - stunning!

Beautiful, narrow, windy backstreets

Lovely architechture

Amazing sunsets

It was crazy how many people in our hotel seemed scared of how 'foreign' Majorca was, and so wouldn't leave the grounds, but we had a great time wandering around, and testing out our Spanish, even if we only understood about a third of the response as they do tend to speak very very fast!!

Anyway, it was a great holiday and I now feel amazing to have got so much sun!!

Cauliflower Pizza

I posted about my boyfriends love for pizza in my last update, and then realised I hadn't written anything about my new found love for cauliflower pizza!!

I discovered this amazing recipe, after reading an article in stylist magazine about cauliflower being a new superfood, and so I just had to try out the recipe.

Here is the recipe:

makes one approx. 10-12 inch pizza

1 small to medium sized head of cauliflower
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon dried basil (crush it even more between your fingers)
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano (crust it even more between you fingers)
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 cup shredded parmesan cheese
1/4 cup mozzarella cheese
1 egg

Myself and a friend made the pizza on a fun baking Sunday, and fed it to my boyfriend (the pizza expert) without telling him what it was made from!

To start, we put a sheet of baking paper onto my pizza stone, and then lightly covered it in olive oil. If you don't have a pizza stone then a baking tray will be fine. Preheat the oven and place the pizza stone in the oven to heat up while you're making the dough.

Here's what to do:

1. Chop off the stalk, and blend the whole head of cauliflower until it's like breadcrumbs.

2. Put it into a microwave safe bowl, and microwave it for 4 minutes.

(If you don't have a microwave, chop the head into small florets, then steam them, and then blend them)

3. Put the cooked cauliflower into a clean tea towel, and squeeze it until you think you can't get any more liquid out of it. Then squeeze it some more. The more liquid you can get out, the lass soggy your base will be and no one wants a soggy bottom.

4. Put this cauliflower flour into a bowl, and mix in all the dry ingredients listed about.

5. Whisk an egg in a bowl, and then mix this in, until you have a crumbly, mushy sort of dough. It's best to mix this with your hand.

6. Put the dough onto the baking parchment and press it out into a circle with your fingers. Do not worry that at this stage it is not making any effort to stay together - it will.

7. Place the pizza stone in the oven, and cook for about 10 mins. At this point you will start to see the dough binding together.

8. Take it out and add toppings. Cook for another 10-15 mins then enjoy!!

Although it is more fragile than normal pizza base, you can still cut it into slices and pick up a slice to eat it! It's amazing!

So amazing, that my boyfriend didn't even guess that it was any different from normal pizza (he is very unobservant!). When we told him that the base was made of cauliflower, he didn't believe us!!

If you don't believe me - try it out, you will be amazed!!

Pizza-fest!

I have a boyfriend who is a pizza addict. Thankfully, his metabolism is amazing, so he can eat loads and not get fat, but he would happily eat pizza every day if he could. That is what he did before we met, and that is what he does when I go away.

So I thought it was only appropriate, to take him to some pizza making classes for his birthday, oh and make him a pizza birthday cake.

We went to the lovely Franco Manca's in Chiswick for the classes and it was great fun! It turns out it's a lot harder than you'd imagine to actually make the pizza dough round without making holes in it! It has now also made me really want a wood fired pizza over in my garden as it makes the pizza taste amazing!!! Details of how to book are here: http://www.francomanca.co.uk/information-pages/faq/ but for £20 each it was amazing!

Yum! So on that note, when thinking about what sort of birthday cake to make for him, I decided it would only be appropriate to make a pizza birthday cake!!

I made 2 flat-ish victoria sandwiches, so it would look about the thickness of a very deep pan pizza, and then covered it with natural marzipan which is conveniently a very good dough colour. I then added various icing and marzipan toppings to make it look like a pizza (pepperoni of course) and viola!

  

I think he liked it (and thought I was very strange, but no change from normal) and it was very tasty! So a very successful birthday!

Updating Old Furniture

I found some photos of some furniture which I covered for a photo shoot last year, and I'd completely forgotten about them as I think the shoot images weren't used in the end.

I hadn't upholstered anything for a while and so I was quite pleased with the results.....it always makes me tempted to see what I can do in our house!!

I was particularly pleased with how I got the flower image to match up on the top and bottom cushions, especially as I only had 1 piece of fabric to use!!