Something for Em

I have finally started making some period toys for Em to play with at Events and at the moment at home as she totally loves them. I have made 2 dolls, and going collect/make a few more from knuckles, felt/leather balls, wooden top, a horse etc etc.

Hahaha they look funny! will keep practicing. Dimitrii helped with embroidery on their faces. I had trouble with sewing around the head. You can't see the hair to well in this photo. The female doll has wool hair and the male (daddy doll as Em calls it) has a faux fur hat. Still have to make boots/shoes which I will actually attach to the doll to save lossing them or Em eatting them.

I have two weeks to finish an outfit for Knights of the North and 1 saturday is taken up with RH collergia, taking a friend who is very interested in the SCA so that leaves me with 1 to get the idea of pin pleating and putting it all togethor - which I can get done!!! I will get done or I will be in trouble :)

This weeks adentures

It has been an interesting week for me but have caught up with my homework and have 4 dresses piled up ready for the next step. Have had trouble getting heavy demin over the Northside tried Lincraft, JJ's, Stafford & Morayfield spotlight and any other material shops i came acrossed. I did a 2nd hand shop hunt for good material but no luck there as well. I needed the heavy demin for inner lining for my bodies - I did use a demin skirt that I got from a garage sale for 50c I was able to get 1 1/2 bodices out of it - it was a long and big skirt - see sometimes having a big bottom comes in handy :) The material was very thick, heavy & non stretch and purple... YEah!! love purple!! I also had lost my rules - Thanks EM so I made up a hard cardboard ruler that was 5cm thick, and this saved me measuring everytime... I was also given heavy calico so I had a look at using for inner lining but i doubled the number of pieces and put the remaining purple lining with it so the front has 2 demin and 2 calico lining and the back only 2 calico. So I am going to see how that goes - doesn't hurt to experiment. I have had some help with week with cutting out patterns, so all my patterning this week has been cat approved...

But don't you just hate it when the cat jumps and tries to play with the scissors when you are cutting.... She loves the sewing machine too!!!

I am going to be doing underskirts this week - will go through my material cupboard to see what I have got.. Plan to do atleast 4 of different colours so that I can mix n match.

I also have had some ingredients from festival storage and have gotten sick of it being in the way so I have started making Apples in Pastry for morning tea snacks.

Baked Apples in Pastry - it's modern contemporary recipe but it uses period ingredients - still naughty but it's a nice recipe.

You use 6 apples, 3 cups of flour, 1.5 tsp salkt, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2cup butter 10-12 tab ice cold eater, 3/4 cup vegetable shortening, 1/2 cup shredded Cheddar cheese, 1/4 clupl ground or chopped walnuts, 1/2 tsp spices of combination of cinnamon, nutmeg & cloves.

Sift flour and salt in bowl cut shortening until crumbly, stir in cheese & walnuts to the flour and shortening. sprinkle wat over the mixture, mix lightly with fork until patry holds together and leavs the side of the bowl. Remove form bowl and knead into a smooth ball add more flour if needed and set aside. Pare apples and core just to the bottom, leaving the bottom intact. Remove any seeds. combine butter, sugar and spices in a bowl until smooth paste like. Spoon into centers of apples. roll out the pastry, cut into 7 inch squares and place the square on top of the apple and press pastry firmly around the apple, sealing at the bottome. Add pastry 'leaves' and stems if desired. place in a lightly grease baking sheet and bake at 435*f for 45 mins. Serve warm. serves 6

I have changed the recipe and method to suit our needs. Firstly I didn't have any vege shortening so I used 1 egg yolk and butter to make up the amount needed. This worked well and still did the desired affect. you would normally use egg yolk & butter in pastry making so not a biggy. See that we want finger food for Festy I am making the apples & spices togethor and rolling them into small balls and then wrapping them into the pastry. Rather then using a whole apple. I like this recipe because some period food was made to look like a shape or decorated food and this recipe does this.. I would like to find a period recipe that is similar to this to see if they did prepared apples in this way... I plan to make them into small apples the size of a large marble...

The pastry rocks!!! Tasted very nice on it's own. The cheese, walnut in the pastry gives this a nice twist to the pastry. I cut the pastry into 4 balls and rolled out to half a cm thick. I then rolled out a layer of glad wrap, then a layer of grease proof paper and then the pastry, then another piece of grease proof paper, repeated until all pastry is use. wrapped it up and in the fridge ready to be used.