a few yummy things

Big deadline tomorrow, so here are a few snapshots. I went for a walk yesterday and saw this gorgeous dress in a shop window. It was very small and priced at £250, so it shall remain a lovely window shopping memory.

This weekend was Stuart’s birthday. He’s developed a sudden excitement about baking, and he was desperately hankering after one of those little ceramic birdies you stick in the middle of the pie to let out the steam while it’s baking. So I got him a pie dish and a birdie and Nigella’s How to be a Domestic Goddess, which thrilled him to no end. Stuart is already a domestic goddess but these items will add that final touch.

And I bought a jar of this Tiptree ‘Little Scarlet’ jam and finished it off embarrassingly quickly, so I think I’ll have to allow a proper amount of time to pass before I buy it again. It’s so nice you can’t even spread it on something and thereby downplay the flavour, you have to eat it straight. We were joking about that scene from Gosford Park, where one of the cooks finds a houseguest cowering in the dark downstairs, eating her jam with a spoon; he explains, saying ‘I feel a little bruised.’ So that’s what we have to say if we’re caught eating jam with a spoon.

Have a look at the new webcomic called tiny kitten teeth drawn by Becky Dreistadt and written by Frank Gibson (beckyandfrank). The draw on influences such as Mary Blair and a bunch of other sources I should know and it’s very lovely.

Thanks to my fab writer friend Laura Hurwitz for the plug on her blog. She posted a portrait I drew of her family several years ago. (So if you want to see how I painted before art college, go have a look there.) Congratulations to her son, Jake, and his friend Amir for starring in a new MTV show called College Humor. Yay, Jake!