First, the good news. I actually have something products for sale! (Before you rush off to etsy to snap up these long foretold items, patience dear reader – more on that soon).

Also, I’ve found a career path I’m excited about. And it’s not craft. It’s not even within the creative industry. It’s orthopedic massage  (just a fancy term to make massage sound less flaky). I’m eight months in and I love it. I love working with bodies. I love the anatomy lessons. God, I even love the cadaver lessons, though formaldehyde is not science’s most appealing perfume.

Now, the other news.

I started this blog with a plan to run a craft business. Over the years, I have had occasional spurts of activity in that direction. But something always seemed to get in the way. This last year, it’s been serious illnesses in my family.

So, what’s the news? I don’t want to have a craft business.

But I do want to make things. I love the process of creating something new, but repeating the feat? No so much. Instead, I’ve shifted focus to design. Popcorn November is the new name of Phoebe-made and I’ve got five pun-inspired T-Shirt designs up on Redbubble actually available for sale!

Phoebe C the blog is going to shift focus a little. The appreciation of beautiful things (natural, manmade or DIY) and good food will stay but maybe more focus on things other people have made as well. However, these will become part of a larger focus on matching the importance of an aestheric external world with an internal one.

Phoebe C on etsy will be for the sale of excess crafting supplies – so beads and probably some fabric parcels later down the track.

In the meantime, the spirit of Phoebe C. remains almost the same; make, feel, appreciate, eat cake.

Thusly, behold the Inverted Chocolate Blueberry Loaf: a perfect balance of sweet with salt, soft caramel with bready springiness and blueberries with chocolate.

Although the loaf has three layers it’s pretty easy to make.

Method

Firstly grease a loaf tin, then preheat the oven to 170°C.

Next, cream the first lot of butter and the brown sugar then add the maple syrup. Mix until well combined. Scrape the mixture into the loaf tin to cover the bottom 1cm or so up the sides.

Pour the blueberries in the tin in a single layer. Press gently into the butter mix.

In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt.

Back in the original bowl, cream the second lot of butter and sugar (don’t worry about the residue left from the first lot – less washing up is always good in my book). Add the egg and beat until light and soft.

Finally, stir through flour mixture and milk in alternate batches until all the ingredients are well combined. Carefully scrape mixture into the pan, taking care not to dislodge the blueberries.

Stick it in the oven for 50-60 minutes. The loaf is cooked when a skewer comes out clean. Invert the tin onto a plate as soon as it comes out of the oven and leave to sit for a few minutes before removing the pan completely. The loaf is delicious either hot or cold.

Based on a Margaret Fulton recipe for Pineapple Upside Down Cake.

Then, disaster. No internet. No internet, as it turned out, for a month; a whole entire month with no blog, no email, no funny pictures of cats.

After a cavalcade of tradies coming though to decide who’s responsible, the cable that caused all the problems has finally been replaced. Hooray!

I have been busy though, possibly more so with out the procrastinatory (my dictionary says that’s a real word) potential of the net. I’ve been experimenting with fabric jewellery and playing with Illustrator some more. Oh, and a bit of furniture DIY.

We’d been on the look out for bedside tables for over a year, making do with a little set of Ikea ply drawers sitting on the floor. Jazzing up what we already had seemed like the sensible solution to a never-ending search, so we sanded the finish off the drawers then painted them in a gloss red with chrome legs for a fun retro-esque feel. The chrome legs I’d imagined were difficult to track down in the real world – we ended up using door stops.

I’m now happy with this corner of our bedroom. Quarter of the way there…

I love the clean lines you get using Illustrator; it has a much more graphic look, which I figure will be useful when I’m designing new stencils. So, back to the computer to play around some more…

I now dream in anchor points.

This time, instead of the cool and damp mountains of Tasmania, I’ve been up to dryer central Victoria.

There, amongst the orange dirt, grey boulders and slender muted gums, you can find the most amazing microscapes of moss, lichen and tiny plants

John and I were visiting his parents who, like my parents a whole state and strait away, have a large bush block also with (weirdly enough) a rusting car out over the ridge…

Nice spider web huh? Well, there are more of the webs everywhere, complete with big fat spiders.

There were other minibeasts too; ones without huge hairy legs and who refrained from jumping at my face when I got too close with the camera.

Back in the grey city, sometimes I think about moving to place where trees come in forests, not as lone straggly reminders that out there, somewhere, are places where you can’t hear your neighbours playing chopsticks on an electric piano.

But then where would I get a good coffee? Tree-hugger out.

One book in particular has reminded me of this recently: Lolita, the faux autobiographical account of Humbert Humbert (what a great name for a perv) and his erotic obsession with a twelve year old girl.

At first I was completely absorbed by the smoothly ironic and lyrically beautiful writing (not even Nabakov’s native tongue… damn smart people…). But then there’s a jolt: a sudden realisation that the object of this enthralling literary eroticism is a twelve year old girl. Twelve. Years. Old. All Nabakov’s considerable skill draws you into collusion with Humbert; is Lolita actually seducing Humbert or is it just his obsession clouding his sense of reality? Even if you take Humbert’s account as an accurate reflection of reality, it’s a uncomfortable experience being lead into identification with a morally suspect protagonist.

So, a book that is engrossing, skilfully crafted and thematically stimulating? A good excuse for Saturday on the couch if you ask me.

Oh, and if anyone asks, tell them you’re participating in cultural enbigenment – hey, you’re reading a literary classic, you can make up as many words you like.

Ta dah!

How is this going to be a product you say? Well, here’s some I prepared (a year) earlier…

They’re fabric banners I made to go above the bed, paranoid I might end up sleeping permanently should a framed picture leap off the wall during the night.  They’re from photos I ‘shopped into block colours, printed, cut out then stencilled on to fabric. I added the silk ends to give them a better finish.

This time around I’m hand drawing my designs first so I can manipulate my material, creating a more graphic look from the outset. So the next step in transforming my wedge tailed eagle illustration into a non-killer wall hanging cum fabric banner is slaving over a print-out of said illustration with an X-Acto knife.

Seeing as I haven’t got that far yet, I thought I’d demonstrate how I stencil my designs in the meantime with a quick and relatively simple stencil of a Bush Robin* (and here is the promised present); you can download the files here to have a crack at the robin stencil too!

First print the stencil layers on to your pieces of card. Next is the fiddly bit; cutting out the details with a craft knife, including the right hand corner of the stencil from above the reference lines (the third picture down shows the paint-ready stencil).

Once I’ve cut along all the stencil lines from the front, I flip mine over to re-cut any incisions that haven’t come clear through the card, so that when I pull the negative out I don’t rip the bits with fine detail.

Erm, if you cut through the wrong bit at any stage, DO NOT PANIC. I was going fine with my craft-knifing until I vagued out imagining the choc-fest of upcoming Easter… Mm… chocolate… Anyhoo, I cut a really wonky line, so I just stuck regular sticky tape over the front and back of the affected area, then re-cut the line properly.

Next put reference lines corresponding to the ones on the stencil on to the right hand corner of the printing surface, then align the fist layer and tape it down with removable tape. So this is my paint-ready stencil:

For the painting stage, mix up a dark grey for the first layer, sponging on the paint with a make-up sponge (for the density of the foam) – pre-blotted to prevent the paint from splodging underneath the stencil. Mind you, I was too impatient to blot the example below properly and I think it still looks cute.

Carefully lift the stencil off as soon as you’ve finished painting so it doesn’t stick to the printing surface. Once the first layer has completely dried do the next (second/middle) layer, the black of the body. Once that’s dried, you can do the final layer; black for the branch on the bottom and white for the eye at the top. In the example above I refined the shape of the eye a little with some black paint  on a fine brush once the white had dried for a more realistic finish. Otherwise, the finished (patiently blotted) stencil turned out like this:

Happy stencilling!

* Thank you to Henrietta Norris for use of the original photo

In the meantime, I thought it was time for more cake.

This is another oil cake. I love them; they’re pretty much fool proof, take seconds to mix up (no faffing about with creaming butter and sugar here) and result in a cake that is soft and moist yet still robust.

The first bit is easy: pre-heat the oven to 180°c. Whoah, cordon bleu techniques I know. Next lightly whisk eggs together in a large bowl, then whisk in orange juice and oil.

Add sugar and almond meal, sift in flour; stir until all ingredients well combined.

Add the orange zest. Stir through.

This is the hardest bit – split open the cardamon pods (*also known as cardamom but I just can’t bring myself to say it like that – it’s my verbal equivalent of a mullet), separate out the little black seeds then crush or grind them – I used a mortar and pestle – into a rough powder. Stir through the batter.

I usually prep my tins at this point, but if you want to feel super organised you can do it before you make the mix. I used a loaf tin with a piece of baking paper covering the long sides and the base.

Pour mix into prepared tin then bake for 45-50 minutes – it’s cooked if you poke through it with a skewer that comes out clean. If there’s mix adhering to the skewer, leave it in the oven for another 5-10 minutes. Cool for a few minutes in the tin, then turn on to a cooling rack.

Cut, then eat. Or I suppose you could pick the whole thing up and eat it like that… Not that I’m advocating gluttony.

Mmm… more cake…

I brought the new camera down (now that I know how to use one or two of the buttons) and have spent a very relaxing two days photographing mushrooms. And a car.

Mm, I think it’s time for a hot chocolate. Then maybe I might go photograph some lichen; another day of life in the fast lane.