anna bananna

It makes me breathless just thinking about it: a whole area of town devoted to beads (tirtir in Arabic, in case you ever need to know), buttons, bindings, edgings and sequins, plus other haberdashery bits and bobs. The area is as jam packed full of people as it is of beads and buttons, but such a fantastic place to mosey around in. Of course, coming back empty handed isn’t exactly an option!

Better late than not at all. Right? I haven’t seen these before, or if I have, I haven’t paid any attention to them. By golly they are satisfying though! A minute or so and the work is done. Just my thing.

After being given a canvas bag instead of a plastic one in a shop recently, I set about prettifying it yesterday. One hot iron, one piece of baking/parchment paper and hey presto, job done! The baking paper was my addition to what the man in the shop told me (stick design to fabric and hot iron it on), or at least what I understood of what he told me, foreseeing copious amounts of plastic stuck to my iron (not sure if non-stick covers molten plastic).

Ta da!

(It’s amazing how clever I feel for doing, well, nothing!)

There is a strange stock control system in operation that can see one shelf of every shop in Cairo choca-block with one product for a week, after which, it disappears for months. So when you find something you want, grabbing as much of it as possible is essential. Today, after looking for tartlette cases (just because I thought they’d be good to have) and a coffee grinder for a good six months, I stumbled across both of them when I was looking for, wait for it, shelves!

Of course, there was only one coffee grinder left, so following a mad dash home in 42C to get more money, the six month search was over. Rather coincidentally, Mr S has been dropping not so subtle hints over the past couple of weeks about how he really wants a fruit tart. A French fruit tart. Since we are yet to find a fruity tart here up to the specifications of my cute, but gastronomically demanding, Frenchman’s taste buds, it involves me making said tart – entirely from scratch. No nipping out to M&S for pastry shells, chopped fruit and custard here, no siree! And I must fess up to not being the best pastry chef.

So, whether it was out of love, or excitement at finding the tartlette cases, I’m not sure, but I embarked on pastry making (in hot weather – not advised), creme patissiere making and pitting cherries…

The French taste buds were, thankfully, very happy. More importantly, I’m over the moon that I managed to not burn anything, not undercook anything and get 6 out of 7 tartlettes out of the cases without breaking them!

Mr S wasn’t too happy with the spare bed being covered in scraps of fabric. I can’t say it bothered me all that much – far easier to know what you have when it’s all spread out I say – but hey, I choose my battles wisely. So, time for a scrap bag made from a remnant. I had the bright embroidery thread and was dying to use it on something that would be mine.

I searched fonts online, found some interesting ones (dafont has rather a lot), but then decided to just go for my own scrawl.

I embroidered it after I’d finished the bag. I’ve no idea if that was the ‘proper’ way to do it, but it worked for me!

I know birds are overdone – every crafty blog has some birds on it somewhere – but I can’t help it. I just couldn’t resist these from Spool (free pattern to download in the top left of their page). They started out as a trial for a friend’s newborn, but not sure I can face giving them away.