Bread and Butter

Dixon woke me up this morning at 7:30 am, on my day off no less, and istead of being able to get back to sleep I decided to make dough, ah the Rock 'n' Roll lifestyle! I hope that I kneaded the dough long enough, cause I don't have a mixer so it was hand kneading all the way but I let it rise for quite a while so tha seems to have worked cause it definately rose in the oven! But the proof is in the taste! And it tastes awesome!

This is the Recipe I used;

500g Wholemeal Flour

(I used 300g Whole Meal and 200g White)

25g Butter

1 1/4 tsp Salt

1 1/2 tsp Yeast

350 ml Warm Water

2 tsp Sugar for more flavour and thicker crust (optional)

1) In a large bowl mix the flour, sugar (if using) and salt, rub in the butter and then stir in the yeast.

(Instead of stiring in the dry yeast I added it to the warm water to wake it up while I was incorperating the other ingredents)

2) Stir in the water and mix into a soft dough by hand

3) Knead dough with a Mixer with paddle attachment for five minutes or hand knead for 10

4)Shape dough and place into a 2lb tin or baking tray and cover with a clean damp tea towel and let rise for 1 1/2 to 2 hours

5) Uncover and bake for 30-35 mins

The baked loaf should sound hollow when tapped underneath!

6)Let Cool out of the tin

Now I wanna make some thing else!

Zesting Time

It is a beautiful day outside today, and even after three solid days of rain , I have decided to stay indoors and bake cupcakes. And delicious cupcakes they will be!

Hayley got me a cookbook from the Hummingbird Bakery so I have been pretty excited to try to make most of the things in there, I started simple with the Vanilla cupcakes you might have heard me talk about before and now I am making Lemon Cupcakes! Mostly the same but now I get to use my nifty lemon zester. Soon I will graduate to something a bit more challenging but for now I think I will play it safe and bake something I think I can do! Though I do think I need to invest in som piping bags. My icing skills are not what they used to be.

Now that all the baking is done and the cleaning is moooostly done, only need to wash the floors now I think I will take a wee break! Maybe I can convince Dixon to go for a walk later, just a wee one.. he has been working though. So.. we will see C:

Just Thinkin

I haven't had a lot of ambition to do too much of anything especially blogging. Its a bit because there hasn't been too much to blog about. My film is still waiting for me to finish another roll or two before I will go get it developed, so that probably means next month, the film from my Grandma's camera hasn't made any progress as far as I am aware. I sent an email but no news yet, they did say August so I can't really complain.

I had to lighten it a bit so you could see it better the lines on the Nautilus are a bit more defined

I have only just today done a bit of sketching, so there went my drawing at least once a day way way way out of the window. But I have done two sketches today and hopefully more later, so if I do more or hopfully a painting that might come tomorrow.

Facinating Mummies

Caryn and I also went to the Mummy Exhibit, you are going to start to think all we did was go to Exhibits and Galleries, we are so cultured, haha. Again we were not allowed to take any photos, but it was amazing.  It was such an interesting new way of looking at mummies with the x rays and digital imaging of the insides of the wrapped up mummies. I did get a couple postcards of the artifacts so I have those to share.

Pinchy Pinchy

I like making the wee crab for the post card so much that I really wanted to make a big one which is cook cause I haven't drawn very much lately so it is nice to be inspired! I do now feel like the rose isn't neccisary if I would have just moved the crab down a bit, maybe if I had made the rose a but bigger it wouldn't feel so much like a space filler but it was fun to use new colours in that style.

 Sorry about the rubbish photos for these two I am just actually quite proud that I remembered to take pictures through each process, should have maybe took one of the sketch...

Edvard Munch Exhibit

The National Gallery of Modern Art is showing an personal collection of Edvard Munch of over 50 lithographs and wood cuts, including a rare lithograph of the infamous, "The Scream". Needless to say I was pretty excited to go to it, I have wanted to go to the Museum of Modern Art mostly because I have been to most of the major galleries in Edinburgh except this one, but previuos to this I didn't really have the inclanation to go. With the added draw of Edvard Munch I mostly mentioned it in every conversation with Caryn so I think she got the hint that I wanted to go, though I am pretty sure I can safely say she enjoyed it as well!

The National Gallery of Modern Art

 The Front Garden

Because we weren't allowed to take photos inside the actual exhibit, Caryn got me this shadow box. I should have taken a picture of the instructions, it was basicall cut, fold, glue haha what more could you need! It looks aweosme though!

I wish I could have been more brazen and took photos but I'm not so I don't have any. Seeing them was really exciting though! I also took fairly similar photos with the holga of the outside of the gallery so once I finish that roll undoubtedly you will see them again. Though I think this time it will be black and white.

I also did a wee postcard, hope Tiffany and Danny like it!

Holga 2; Edinburgh Zoo

I think I am getting the hang of this! Caryn was just here  so that meant that I get to go to the zoo! Which also meant great opportunity to take some more photos with my Holga and see if I can't figure it out some more! Unfortunately I had a slight disaster and the back fell off my camera and I think I lost most of my panda pictures. So now I keep a pony tail around the camera and that has seemed to keep it in place for now until I can find some gaffa tape. But I still got one great one and one pretty cool double exposure if not a little dark, I should probably invest in photoshop and then I could fix these things but thats a project for a later day I think.

So when I realised that the back was off I just finished up the roll so I could start a new one so there are quite a few pictures of the sunbears, I almost think that the back falling off made the pictures a bit brighter. Probably No but some came out awesome!

The Sun Bears just got fed so they were out and about getting their food!

  The black but in the centre is a Sun Bear I swear!

I was really impressed with the Panda exhibit, when they said that you would be going in with groups of 50 I really thought that it would be horrible to try to get a good photo or even a opportunity to see them but they did a great job!

Tian Tian

Yang Guang

The King penguins were awasy so there was no penguin parade, but the gentoos were nesting so watching them steal eachothers pebbles for nests was pretty funny, definately worth the trade off for the penguin parade.

And after all of that walking I felt about the same a the Sea Lion.

I really wanted to get this film developed so I ran on my lunch break taking photos along the way to finish off the roll and I got surprisingly good photos!

I have another film in the works, a black and white one this time! I am super excited to take more photos with this one, so far I took some at the National Gallery of Modern Art, we were there for the Edvard Munch exhibit of Lithographs but more on that soon!

Holga

So very recently I got my first analogue camera that I know (mostly) how to use, I do have the Ensign Ranger II but I don't really know how confident I am with actually trying it out! So I decided to start small and work my way up to big! Introducing the Holga 120CFN..

Now I am chalking this up to inexperience cause I messed up quite a few of these photos! But it was my first film and I wanted to try a whole bunch of things on it!

So here are a couple of picture I really liked.

Double Exposure of Castle and Cherry Tree.

St Giles. 

I have two more rolls at the printers and this time I am getting it on CD as well so hopefully no more pictures of pictures.

So hopefully more from me soon cause Caryn is visiting so I am sure I will have lots to post about!

Moley Moley

I have been fairly addicted to video games as of late and as such haven't been doing as much drawing as I would like to have done. I have completed a few sketches that I would like to turn into paintings but everytime I think to myself I want to paint today I find myself just sitting back and playing video games.

Procrastination is a bitch. That is until a couple days ago I stumbled on this blog Moleskine Exchange and it made me think about how little used my moleskine is and how I definately could do more with it! So I started sketching with pen again in my moleskine! I like the results so far though some could be more polished.

I was really hoping to be blogging more this month so lets see if I can keep up the sketching in my moleskin and get some painting done!

A Lot Of Pictures Cause It's Spring!

The weather has been super nice here for the past few days and it made me feel all summery and happy (and a bit smug, I'm talking to you snow covered relatives out there)! 

But maybe I won't gloat too much so here are some pictures.

No drawings today, not that there aren't any but I haven't taken any photos of them yet but hopefully soon, March has been a pretty lax month for posting so I will leave with a lingering hope that the end of March will have more updates.