In my recipe folder I have added a note at the top of this particular recipe that says: ‘Wonderful + good for travel’ thus they are becoming our family travel snack of choice (along with sausage or egg sandwiches for long car journeys.)

We went away last week and along with little boxes of organic raisins, made a big batch of these.

And so I thought I’d share the recipe with you. 🙂

Easy Cheesy Biscuits

100g plain flour

50g butter

50g cheese

splash of milk

1 egg yoke

1tspn paprika

1) Mix flour and paprika.

2) Add butter – rub till fine like breadcrumbs.

3) Add grated cheese and make a well in the middle.

4) Add yolk and milk and mix all together to make a firm dough.

5) Knead on a flat surface for a bit, then divide in two, and roll each half and cut biscuits till there is no dough left. (The biscuits shrink a bit when cooked, just so you know.)

6) Cook at Gas Mark 5 for 10-15 minutes until golden brown.

Enjoy!

(A little boys with BIG shoes.)

My mum got me The Children’s Year for my birthday this year. (Have I mentioned how much I love Hawthorn Press? I really do. I also love that they’re British!)

It’s a wonderful book, stuffed full of things that I want to make, and do – both now and in the future when FB (and his sibling!) are older. However this apron pattern, which is sized for 18 months to 2 years (ish) was yelling to be made NOW, and I had the perfect Japanese linen/cotton from The Eternal Maker, which I bought at last year’s Festival of Quilts.

And thus was started my love affair with bias binding. (I find the hand sewing bit ever so soothing.)

It’s too tricky for him to put on by himself, and I still have to finish the pocket, but he seems to love it, and so do I. 🙂

The night before I went to the Quilting exhibition at the V&A* with Jaq and Kim, I saw this post at the Purl Bee, and thought ‘I want some of that!’

I had already been planning to go to Liberty while we were in town, but now I had a mission. 🙂

I bought a half metre of the map fabric (which comes in other great colourways, including a barely there pale grey, which would make an incredible lining for something) and a full metre of the edging fabric (it has berries on it!), just because I loved it so much and wanted to have some left over.

I decided to make itlong and thin, rather than square, so chopped my half metre in half along it’s length, and joined the two pieces together (using my first ever french seam – very nice). A half hour cutting and making binding with my clover binding maker, a couple of hours pinning and sewing, and then a few pleasant evening hand-sewing the binding complete, and I was done.

Of course now it’s got pretty warm here, but it will be great as a in between scarf when the woollies are still in storage, but you need to wrap up just a bit. And yes it’s long! Two metres plus. But that means lots of wrapping which I like.

*I liked the exhibition. The most striking thing to me was how current the fabrics seemed. I was looking at fabric from 1750(!) and it looked like the fabric I might buy now. I don’t particularly mean the fabrics they have reproduced and are selling – though they are good too. But there were lots of other fabrics that had me drooling, and felt very modern. Very aussie-handprinted, or japanese-zakka.

My one criticsm is that they seemed to suggest that quilting is only being kept alive by artists, and the only modern quilts were conceptual pieces by artists. This is all well and good, but it’s not true, and to not even mention someone like Kaffe Fassett (though his book was in the shop) – to name but one – was a big over sight. But I guess it wasn’t exhaustive. For the best in quilt design right now, a trip to the Festival of Quilts at the NEC in August would be in order (though sadly I’m not going this year.)