Butterflies and Colourway Dilemmas

A fluttery little print I've been working on today - question is: what colourway do you like best?! I can't decide myself...

Trees Please Louise

I worked on this pattern today. And one with butterflies, but I haven't quite finished that one yet. :-)

Watercolour Traumas

I've returned to painting of late instead of my usual drawing/scanning/digital colouring combo. It's been a little traumatic, I won't lie - there is no undo button! I also like the ability of being able to play around with compositions on Photoshop... Hum ho. Here's a little sneak peak of one such watercolour I worked on in the garden today:


It's a happy smiley girl cycling down a summery country lane. With a cat in the basket, as you do. I also took some pics of my 'office':






Fifi the sausage cat:


Hello Fifi.

Porky Weekend

I did a little bit of baking over the bank holiday weekend - on Saturday I made scones and then on Monday I made some brownies. Since the sun was shining so gloriously on Saturday, I thought it'd be rude not to sit out in the garden and partake in a cream tea - after all, the scones were still warm from the oven and I was a mere whisk of cream away from having all the necessary components. Admittedly, I could have done a bit better on the serving front, i.e. prettier plates and made use of a teapot, but I was that desperate to stuff my face (the most ladylike of terminology, I know) that a frantic fling of a paper doily was as much as I could muster when it came to dressing the table.




By Monday, all the scones were gawn. Well, by Sunday afternoon in fact, when I had another cream tea avec ma famille after a trip to the garden centre. So I fancied making something else, something devilishly chocolatey... Queue the entrance of Cookies and Cream Fudge Brownies. Mm hmm. I'd watched the lovely Lorraine Pascale make these beauties a while back on her BBC 2 show, and I happened across the recipe again whilst browsing through her book at a friend's house on Saturday. Now, the recipe says it makes sixteen brownies, but I got.. well, nine. I think this was purely down to how big I cut them, (3x3 as opposed to 4x4? I think that makes sense. My maths ain't all that) as I do like a generous slab of brownie. I also didn't have enough dark chocolate - recipe requires 200g but I only had a 100g bar (bright spark)... Fear not, this is the Peajeux house after all, and I was sure I could muster enough chocolate to make up the extra 100g. I snuffled out a 1/4 eaten 40g bar of the dark stuff and chopped up some fruit and nut to make up the rest. I was two squares over actually, which was fortunate, as I was on the verge of using some Easter egg - an incredibly distressing prospect.

Here's the chopped choc:


The melted butter, just in case you can't imagine what melted butter looks like:


The chopped chocolate, added to the melted butter and the whisked eggs and sugar. Plus a wee bit of flour, cocoa powder, vanilla extract and possibly something else but I can't quite remember. Oh! Oreos, yes yes, some Oreos:


Pouring into the greased and lined baking tray:


The rest of the Oreos waiting patiently to be broken and scattered:


There they go:

Close up. Mmm:


Out of the oven, 25 minutes later:


Cut into squares. Now honestly, 3x3 is way better than 4x4. (Excuse the blurriness, I think it was down to the excitement):


And there we have it! Now I really should get back to updating this blog with drawings...

Cakes and Courgettes

Afternoon all!

Thought I'd share with you a few snaps I took over the weekend... mostly of my Easter cake (NB, the most problematic cake I have ever had the displeasure of creating) and some seedlings in the greenhouse.

First of all the cake:





Looks fairly pleasant, but my, the copious amount of butter-cream was for a reason - to hide many a flaw!!

Here's a couple of snaps of what's in the greenhouse at the mo, too:



I've been growing runner beans, dwarf beans, a couple of pumpkins, tomatoes, courgettes and sweet peppers from seed. This lot were planted about two weeks ago - the vigor of those beans has been quite remarkable! Unfortunately, some of the courgettes don't seem to have germinated (only four out of ten have shoots), so I'm not too sure what's gone on there...

Out in the veg patch there's lettuce, beetroot, carrots and potatoes that went straight into the ground and have been starting to germinate. My bedtime reading of late has been completely vegetable related! And I don't mind admitting I am quite concerned by the prospect of carrot fly. It would also seem that I haven't been particularly wise with my choice of planting location - potatoes like a different soil to carrots apparently, and mine are side by side. But we shall see, eh?! In the words of Edmund Burke "Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." And who dares question a Burke?

Spring Sunshine

Some of my day in pictures...

Just My Type

A couple more patterned-type greeting card designs.