Autumn Zebra

The Farmer's Market was good as usual, but I didn't take pictures of what I bought, and now we've started eating a lot of it! However, what I got is: Lebanese "pizza" - flat bread with cumin and other spices on it, pretty good, I warmed mine up in the microwave and wrapped it around bits of roast chicken Lebanese olive dip and hummus- two little pots go a surprisingly long way giant plums and apricots from my favourite, primarily organic, fruit place - they were about twice as big as normal plums and apricots! And yummy! also from the above people - a big bag of greengages. I was wondering why supermarkets don't sell these - and then yesterday I saw that they do, at nearly twice the price, and the Farmer's Market ones are organic! also one red pear - they have red skins and are yummy and good for preserving in jars. I'll buy some more for preserving later, because they are the best preserving fruit I've found so far again from the fruit place, I go...

When I did the draping class in the fashion design certificate, we obviously had to drape a dress for the assignment. In a way it wasn't much of a class. She just got us to copy a dress she brought in, draping it on a mannequin and basically we just made it up while she supervised. Then she gave as an assignment. Theoretically the brief was a quote (from Vionnet?) about how a dress is beautiful because it is well-cut. This didn't seem like much of a brief to me. Like, it didn't really inspire anything or send my mind off on any ideas... I created a slightly more restricting framework than the one given as it's generally a lot easier to create something within restrictions than within a completely open space (i.e. the frameword given was basically that it had to flatter the body and be well-cut. Not only was this both very open and a completely obvious and expected goal of making clothing anyway, as a beginning draper, I figured we would be lucky if my dress was human-sh...

I got some fabric from my favourite seller on TradeMe, with the intention mostly of using it for crafty things like bags, because sometimes it just doesn't work making clothes out of "fun" fabrics. I asked Mum which she liked, so that when I got round to making bags, I could whip one up for her too. Then, it was a couple of days before her birthday so I thought I'd make it to put her presents in. I started out trying to make a pattern from what I remembered of a bag I saw on the internet, but it wasn't working, and it didn't really seem actually possible. I booted up my computer and went and actually looked at her bag, and it was in fact different from what I had been trying to make. So the pattern for THAT bag, was obvious, and what I was trying to do had in fact been impossible after all. I try to make a lot of impossible things. It's annoying. I need a different type of material to make stuff out of. Anyway, the site in question is this one . I basicall...

As we all know, we're supposed to eat lots of different coloured vegetables all the time, etc. I don't like making more than one dish per meal, if possible. Today we had really easy nachoes - tinned beans in chilli sauce, wow, we're almost done already! Defrosted some ham and fried that with onion and garlic before adding the tinned beans, so that's most of dinner. Guacamole which I have made probably a couple of hundred times now, so that is easy. So, we get to have extra vegetables! Quartered mini capsicums that were on special at the supermarket ages ago and have somehow survived in the fridge all this time (the "baby" veges are always expensive, but as soon as they're a couple of days old, they put them on special, yay!), and yellow round beans and flat green beans from the farmer's market, fried over a high heat in some olive oil. Mixing them around every couple of seconds until they all have spots of browning, but are essentially only barely cook...