Value in Art

It’s been a while since the boys did any formal art learning and we needed some new paintings to brighten the room up, so yesterday we did a lesson from a book we have called “Masterpiece of the Month” to help the boys with their understanding of how differences in value and size can affect perspecitve in a piece of art. The idea is to select a single colour for your landscape, then paint gradually lighter and lighter bands of this colour to show distance. Then, to choose an object that might be in that particular landscape and cut out three sizes of it for another aspect of showing perspective.

Gman chose to portray a muddy landscape with pot bellied pigs:

Waif made a desert landscape with prickly cacti:

And because I like to join in with the kids’ art projects I did cows in green fields (organic, grass-fed cows of course!):

And while on the subject of art, I would love to share with you this wonderful card I received from my very talented and lovely blog friend Janet:

I love old clock faces and texts, so this is right up my street.

Janet blogs over at Just Me and My Art and is super talented and creative. I thoroughly recommend checking out her blog!

Nourishing Books and Foods

Check out my new books!! I had some money given to me for my birthday this month, and this is what I chose to buy. All three books are excellent, but I particularly love Nourishing Traditions. Yes, it does live up to the hype! It is a wonderful mixture of information, recipes, history, and general instruction. Definitely a book to be treasured.

The Gut and Psychology Syndrome book certainly sheds a lot of light on some of the digestive difficulties that many children with autistic spectrum disorders (amongst other things) suffer from. Although I don’t think Gman’s symptoms warrant the strictness of this diet, it has certainly given us a lot to think about with regards to reducing our intake of grains and other starchy carbohydrates together with increasing the amounts of healthy fats and probiotic foods we eat.

Full Moon Feast I haven’t looked at in depth yet, but looks to be fascinating reading with some super recipes. I will report back when I’ve read more of it!

This weekend, we paid our first visit to a farmer’s market not too far from home – on the Sandringham Estate. It was well worth the trip! We came back with venison mince and burgers, pheasant breast and fresh prawns.

In case you think it’s all about the meat , I did get armfuls of veggies as well, including some magnificent red curly kale:

Kale has been quite a revelation to me since getting my Excalibur dehydrator. It makes the most wonderful snack food – tossed in a mixture of olive oil, honey and chilli then dehydrated until it’s crispy. Nomnomnom.

In other food news, I had my first go at making stock this weekend, something emphasised as important in both the GAPS and Nourishing Traditions book. For some reason, I’d always thought making stock was way beyond my skill set, but it was EASY and so worth it. Yesterday I used the stock in a scrumptious home made venison chilli, and today used it to make gravy. And there’s more left to use tomorrow and more in the freezer! And basically all I had to do was cover a chicken with water, throw in a few chopped veg and a little cider vinegar and simmer it for hours – which of course filled the house with delicious aromas – wonderful

I am linking this post up to Kelly the Kitchen Kop’s Real Food Wednesday and Food Renegades Fight Back Friday.

Twelve Rings of Hexagons!

Phew, I have completed another “round” of hexagons on my English paper pieced charm quilt.    It’s too big to photograph indoors now, so I took it outside and pegged on the line to take the pictures.  It was a bit blowy, so didn’t get a full flat shot, but think you can get the idea

I love how this quilt is evolving. For those new to this blog here’s how it has progressed:

August 2010:

September 2010:

October 2010:

July 2011:

August 2011:

September 2011:

November 2011:

As you can tell from the dates, I haven’t worked consistently on this, but have stuck at it. It’s certainly not fast sewing, but I find it relaxing and therapeutic, and I love seeing how it slowly evolves and changes with each ring of hexagons. Next round will be very dark fabrics. But don’t expect it any day soon

Thinking About Family Nourishment

Lately, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the best way of feeding my family. As some of you many know, Gman (my eldest son) has a dx of Asperger’s Syndrome, an autistic spectrum disorder. Since his diagnosis over three years’ ago, he has been following a gluten free casein free diet (and as we all eat all our meals together, the whole family has too, more or less). Without a doubt, Gman’s symptoms have improved on this diet. However, I am concerned that gfcf may not tell the whole story, and that we still have a lot to learn about what constitutes a healthy diet. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking of a food item “it’s gluten and dairy free so it must be ok” no matter what it is. At the end of the day, highly processed crap is highly processed crap whether or not it’s gluten and dairy free. How much processing does an essentially indigestable bean have to go through to make it look like something resembling cheese spread? How many items on this ingredient list do you stock in your pantry?

Water, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, isolated soy protein, corn sweeteners, tofu, non dairy lactic acid, sugar, stabiliser (carob bean, guar and carrageenan gums), spices, garlic, parsley, salt, vegetable mono and diglycerides, preservative (potassium sorbate).

Not too many,huh?

This is not real food and to me, that’s a problem. As Michael Pollan puts it “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”.

A combination of reading “Wild Fermentation” and stumbling upon fabulous sites such as Food Renegades, Real Food Forager and Our Nourishing Roots, I have discovered a whole host of reasons to make eating real food a top priority.

As a family, we already eat a wide range of foods including fruit, veg, meat and eggs, but I realise that we have a long way to go in eliminating processed rubbish. So, here’s where I am going to start:

1. Cut down on, and eventually eliminate altogether, soya products (read this article for compelling reasons why)
2. Start eating lacto-fermented vegetables (starting with sour beets – blogged about here)
3. Reduce the number of processed gfcf foods we buy and eat

I think this whole philosophy can be nicely summed up by Michael Pollan (again), with this rule from his book “Food Rules”:

“If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”

I am linking this post up with Food Renegade’s Fight Back Friday – check it out!

Pinktastic

Last year, I promised to make a quilt for a friend’s litte girl, and I thought it was about time I made a start on it. I have been gathering fabrics for it for a while but couldn’t decide what to do with them. In the end I have decided to keep it simple and make a disappearing nine patch design. Here’s the first four blocks made:

I think it will work!

Still on a pink theme, I have done a little more on my first crazy quilt block for the CQJP2012 challenge. I used the first two stitches from Sharon’s Take a Stitch Tuesday challenge – fly stitch and buttonhole stitch:

I am not really convinced I will stick with either challenge, for the reasons I mentioned in this post on my old sewing blog. Instead of being inspired by the work shown by other participants, I am feeling that I don’t quite measure up. Plus I am not sure if I was doing it for “me” or to have something to show.

So maybe I’ll just keep crafting along, without participating in challenges – just making things I want to make, at my own pace, in my own style…Fitting in has never been my style!!!

Numeracy Skills – Home Education Style!

(18 x 3) + 5 anyone?

Beet the System!

A recent addition to our family library has been Sandor Ellix Katz’s rather wonderful book  Wild Fermentation.  I defy anyone to read this book and not be swept along by the author’s fervent enthusiasm for fermented and live-culture foods!  I love the analogies he makes between fermenting food and fermenting social change:

“Food offers us many opportunities to resist the culture of mass marketing and commodification (…) We can merge appetite with activism and choose to involve ourselves in food as cocreators.” 

Now this is a form of activism I am more than happy to involve myself in!  Hence “Beet the System”

I could have started with sauerkraut I suppose, but I had a ton of beetroots that MIL brought from the market this week, so I started there.  And anyway, I wouldn’t have been able to use the terrific pun if I had used cabbage

I started out with this bag full of beetroot:

peeled and grated until I had a bowlful like this:

As always when I attempt to grate beetroot, I ended up with a lovely mess all over the kitchen! Although I thought I did quite well not to get any on the walls this time…

I then started packing the beetroot down into a jar. I put a spoonful in at a time, sprinkled on sea salt and a few caraway seeds before pressing down each time.

Unfortunately, after I took this photo, I realised I didn’t have anything I could use to weigh the mixture down in the jar, so I had to decant the contents somewhere else! I ended up putting it in an old Kenwood mixer bowl, using the Kilner jar full of water to press down. I hope this is ok. Now all I have to do is wait for the fermentation process to unfold. How exciting!!

Simplify Simplify Simplify

First of all, if you’ve come here via http://home-edible.blogspot.com/ or  http://sewmuchprogress.blogspot.com/ then I would like to warmly welcome you and thank you for coming here to read this.

Why this new blog?

Well, my good friend Motherfunker wrote a post the other day about how we label ourselves and it got me thinking.  Why do I have a blog about my sewing life, then another blog about my life as a home educating mother, an abandoned blog about my attempts to be more “green”, a never-started one about my spiritual life?  As well as social networks where I share photos, or book reviews.  Why am I trying to label these different aspects and separate them? – they are all ME!

So, in the interests of simplifying my life I have decided to combine all these aspects in this little blog.  I will talk about my life, my thoughts, my progress towards my hopes and dreams.  And along the way that will include musings on the aspects mentioned in this blog’s name:

GROW – Yes, growing food, but also growing as a person, and helping my two wonderful sons to do the same through our shared adventures in home education.

NOURISH – Food for the body and for the soul

CREATE – Yes, this will also be the place where I share my creativity – quilting, embroidery, journalling, wherever my muse leads me next…

And the first part of the blog name LIVE!  This is my life.  I hope by sharing some of my endeavours to provide inspiration, thought provocation, entertainment, whatever those may be.  I guess I will lose some of the readership from my sewing blog and my home education blog, because this one will be a lot more “off-topic” but hope that those of you who know me will stick around.

I have chosen wordpress for this blog rather than continuing with blogger as something of a fresh start.  I got to the stage where I was following literally hundreds of other blogs (all too easy to click that “follow” button!) and missing  posts from those that I really connected with.  So, I’ll be bringing across a blogroll of my favourite blogs – some sewing related, some home education related, some spiritual, and these will be the blogs I love, written by the people I feel a genuine connection with or interest in.  An eclectic mix for sure, but isn’t that what life is all about?

Thank you for joining me here – I hope some of you will stay a while