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Hello from my sickbed. I am feeling very crap at the moment - all achey and headachey and coughy and sniffly. You get the idea. So if things are quiet here for the next few days that is where I am. Sleeping in bed or watching bad telly.

Quite a lot happened in the last week but now I can’t really be bothered writing much or fiddling with photos in Photoshop so it will just be a quickie this time.

Tuesday was very eventful - I drove up to Sydney for the day (about 3 1/2 hours away) with my sister and her daughter to visit Ikea. My niece is 18. We had a great trip up - lots of loud music and singing along - and then I decided that we needed to turn onto the M4 instead of staying on the M3 and we drove the wrong way for about 25 minutes. So we had to turn back and then discovered that if we had just stayed on the M3 we were only 5 minutes away from Ikea. There was some arguing and huffing about that little mistake of mine. Anyway we got to Ikea and had a wonderful and exhausting time. Too much excitement and not enough to eat meant that we had to stop for some sustenance at around 2pm and ate lots of yummy food. Then back to shopping! We all had headaches and were tired by the end of the day. My sister spent $500! I spent $110. She always goes crazy at Ikea.

On the way home, I was driving, it was dark and cold and rainy and soon enough I found my headache turning into one mega migraine! While I was driving! And I’ve never had a migraine before. Tiredness, too many lollies and concentrating on all the headlights in the darkness took its toll and I had to hand the driving over to my sister while I huddled on the back seat, under a blanket so that no light got in and trying very hard not to vomit. A horrible trip home - we didn’t get back till 10pm! It rained hard the whole way home and my poor sister did a great job - she had a headache and was tired too.

Something a bit nicer to talk about: I scored this great old wrapping paper dispenser complete with a big roll of vintage paper at the op shop (thrift store) on Wednesday. It is really heavy and lovely. I will be packaging any orders with this vintage paper, wrapped with red ribbon. Love it!

This is some great fabric I scored recently. Great old sheets that I see as shirts for me.  No sewing for a little while though, not when I feel like this.

That’s enough for now, I’m all tired out now.  Back in a couple of days.

You might have seen this apple cake on this blog before - I have been making it for years and it’s one of my favourite cakes ever. So easy to make too!

I made another cake yesterday (actually two, I always double up the recipe as it goes fast in our house) so I thought I would take some photos and give you the recipe.

I don’t normally start this way, but Emma keeps eating a little bit of an apple and then leaving the remains on the kitchen bench so I gathered a few up over two days and naturally thought of my apple cakes. I got what I could from these apples plus I chopped up a couple more new apples for good measure.

Remember I double the recipe so I needed 4 apples. I will give the recipe for one cake here, you can double it for two cakes if you like.

APPLE CAKE

2 chopped, peeled apples

4 oz (1/2 stick) butter  (125gm)
1 cup sugar

1 beaten egg

1 1/2 cups plain flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon allspice

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon cinnamon

Peel and chop apples and then add sugar.

Melt butter, add beaten egg. Mix into sugar/apples.

Sift in flour, baking soda and spices.

Stir just enough to mix.

Put in the oven for 50-60 minutes at 180 C (350 F).

Dust with icing sugar when cool.

Enjoy! Feel free to link to this recipe and if you make it, let me know what you think. Isn’t it just the yummiest cake?

I need to send out a couple of thankyous for recent mentions:

I was considered the Spirit of ZNE on the 1st of July - thank you!

My tissue cozies were mentioned at the Bag Lady blog - thank you!

I am the current Fly Girl of the Week over at the Fly Girls blog - thank you!

And to top it off, one of my Gocco prints (the fish print) was pictured in this month’s My Home magazine - thank you!

Aw, shucks - thanks everyone.

I’m not sure if you are interested in my shoes or not, but today I got a bit organised and cleaned my cupboard up a bit. I got rid of bags and bags of clothes (some to Mum, some to my 18 year old niece and most to charity shops) and I sorted out my shoes.

I pulled them all out (they were just a big tangled mess) and I was shocked at how many shoes I have! And how many great shoes I have! There were dusty shoes that had lain forgotten under the big pile so I dusted them all off and looked through them all.

Then I had to take a quick trip to Howard’s Storage World to buy some awesome shoe racks and I got busy setting up an organised display for myself. I keep opening my cupboard just to look at them all, neat and pretty all in order.

In another smaller area of the cupboard I put all my boots together. I didn’t know I had so many boots either! Yes, there’s six pairs there. Back at the right are my very high and very sexy lace up boots (that I wore with a suitably tiny outfit for Sleaze many years ago - oh I could tell you some stories from that night!) and there are some Army boots in there (I worked - as a civvy - on the RAAF Base at Townsville more many years ago and got a pair of boots) and there’s my brown ugh boots on the left, and my black more practical height, zip up boots at front on the right.

Shoes and boots can hold so many memories can’t they? Special occasion shoes and boots can serve as happy reminders of a special night (or many special nights) and it is so nice to be able to see them all now - I’m sure I will be wearing more of the forgotten ones a bit more often now.