The plan: 23 litres of dark wheat beer – a dunkelweizen.

First up; the recipe:

• 3250g Wheat malt
• 2180g Munich malt
• 140g Pale chocolate malt
• 44g Hallertau Hersbrucker Hops (60 minutes)
• 11g Hallertau Hersbrucker Hops (15 minutes)
• 1 Wyeast 3068 Weihenstephan yeast

This recipe is approximately a metric-converted recipe I found here.

Yeast starter (chilled)

The brewing actually started on Thursday, when the gear turned up and I realised that the Wyeast packet which I received was a “propagator” pack and not an “activator” pack. The difference between the two is in the quantity of yeast in the packet; an activator pack containing enough to pitch straight into your beer and the propagator needing a starter culture. To make a starter culture just requires a small amount of malt extract and some boiling water, but having not realised I needed to do this I had failed to order any.

After a hasty conversation with a work colleague, I appropriated some extract and added my yeast packet to the boiled wort (water containing the sugars extracted from malt) in a sterilised milk bottle (also appropriated). I then stuck an airlock in the top and left it in a warm place until Sunday. This left me with a cloudy solution full of yeast, so on Sunday morning I stuck the bottle in the fridge to cause the yeast to form sediment at the bottom.

Water on to boil

After sterlising and rinsing out the boiler, I filled it up, added some campden powder to reduce the chlorine and set it to heat. As discussed in my last post, I opted not to go for much in the way of water treatment. I was, however, worried about the hardness of my water. I opted, therefore, to boil the water forcing the calcium to precipitate in the water.

This was all well and good, and after letting the water settle for a few minutes once boiled I’d separated out some of the crap. Unfortunately this left me with water at ~90°C; not helpful for a mashing temperature of 50°C. Rather than wait for ages for the water to cool down, I decided to speed the process along with the help of the wort chiller. This also gave me a chance to test that I had managed to procure the correct hoses for it.

Wort chiller

Everything hooked up smoothly and soon the chiller was running quite merrily. Too merrily, in fact; I balanced my thermometer on the edge of the bin, which caused it to fail to notice the temperature of the bulk of the water to fall to about 30°C. Not the best start. Back on with the boiler, then, whilst I calculated the temperature of the mash water.

I decided quite early on that I wanted to perform a “stepped” mash. This involves mashing at one temperature for a period of time and then raising it in a number of stages. The temperature of the mash affects the extraction process in a highly scientific way. I read somewhere that it was more authentic to have a 2-step mash for weissbier, and so that’s what I decided to do, with an initial half-hour at 50°C and then one hour at 66°C.

Dry grains in mash tun

With the grain at room temperature, it’s important for the water you add to the mash tun to be hotter than your intended mashing temperature. Using a helpful calculator in the beer engine software, I calculated the heat of the water (strike heat) to be 55°C, and tested the water often so I knew when it hit this temperature.

Meanwhile, I warmed up the mash tun for 20 minutes with a couple of litres of boiling water. When the boiler hit 55°C, I drained the tun and added my dry grains. Then, using a big jug that I’d drawn some volume markers on with a sharpie, I measured out 14 litres of water from the boiler into the tun, stirred it and put the lid on; the grain at a perfect 50°C.

At this point I needed to figure out how to raise the temperature of the mash to 66°C. Using the very good (but sadly imperial) calculator here, I discovered that I needed about 9 litres of boiling water. And I needed it in the next 20 minutes. Unfortunately, I’d cleverly filled the boiler with  cold water after drawing off my mash water to prepare for sparging. This left me with a boiler-full of lukewarm water and a long wait.

By draining a lot of the water back out of the boiler and judicious use of the kitchen kettle, I was able to raise the temperature of the mash to the desired level, but I ended up with more of a 5-step than 2-step mash:

Draining the mash

Whilst I left the mash to infuse, the boiler was once again working away to heat up some water for sparging. When I ordered my gear, I opted to go for a spinning sparge arm and attempt fly sparging; in theory more efficient than batch sparging and more fun. Sadly, I couldn’t find a hose reducer anywhere locally and hadn’t quite twigged that the sparging arm didn’t come with one. This left me with batch sparging; draining out some wort, filling the tun back up and letting the grain settle once more.

With the optimum sparge water temperature about 78°C, I once again heated my water too much, but figured this wasn’t too much of an issue; I had some time before the mash was complete. I ran it off into my newly insulted fermenting bin to prepare the boiler for the run-off from the mash.

Placing the boiler under the mash tun, I turned the tap and collected the first few litres in a jug. This allowed me to see that the wort was very cloudy and thus the grain bed had not settled so I returned the wort to the tun and repeated until it was running clearer. Then I let the tun drain into the boiler.

Soggy malty goodness

I’d collected about 15 litres of wort and my boiler takes around 25 to the brim so I needed to run about another 10 litres through the tun (sparging). I decided to split this in half and checked the temperature of my sparge water. This was now sitting at about 65°C; so much for worrying about it being too hot. Cursing my failure with temperatures once more I stuck the lid on the bin to stop it losing any more heat and used a 5 litre stock pot to bring 7.5 litres more water up to temperature and added it to the mash tun.

After a quick stir and 10 minutes to infuse, I once again drew off wort from the mash tun into the boiler. Then sparged a final time with another 5 litres heated up in a stock pot. This last sparge resulted in a much lighter wort and I measured the last runnings with a hydrometer to have a specific gravity of nearing 1.010; a sign that I’d got all the sugars I was going to get and I was in danger of over-sparging which can result in an excess of tannins.

Boiling wort

During the first sparge, I noticed my next disaster of the day; I’d forgotten to fit the hop strainer to the boiler. I now had a half-full bucket of 60°C liquid to try and fit it to. Fortunately, by the time I’d heated the water and allowed the sparge water to infuse, the boiler had cooled sufficiently for me to place my arm (well cooled with cold tap water) under long enough to stuff the strainer in. I then turned the boiler on to start getting the wort up to temperature.

With the second sparge complete, I had about 23 litres of hot wort which I measured at a specific gravity of 1.0457 (adjusted for temperature); way short of the 1.051 I was aiming for. This meant my beer was going to be closer to 4.5% ABV than the intended 5.1%.

Adding hops

When the boiler was up to speed and bubbling away, I tweaked the thermostat in an attempt to find the sweet spot where the wort would boil but not boil over; especially concerning as the bin was so full. I had one minor over-boil, but in general was ok; maybe a sign I under-boiled. After 30 minutes I added the first round of hops, and then the last 11g with 15 minutes to go; a total boil time of 1 hour 30 minutes. I then let it cool for about half an hour to let the hops and other gunk to settle out.

With the end in sight, I made sure my fermenting bin and wort chiller were sterilised then rigged up a sieve ready to catch any rogue hop debris that made it through the hop strainer.

Draining the boiled wort

Once the wort was run into the fermenting bin, I remeasured the specific gravity. I now had about 19/20 litres at 1.049 due to losses in the boil. As I was down on my target gravity anyway, I opted not to top this back up to 23 litres, which should give me a final ABV of around 4.8%.

I hooked the chiller back up and started it again, this time keeping an eye on the thermometer stuck to the side of the bin. In hindsight, I should have been keeping an eye on the hose, which not once but twice disconnected itself from the chiller and sprayed cold water all over the kitchen.

I did, of course, over-chill the water. Somewhat predictable given how the rest of the day went, but fortunately not too seriously. All that was left was to pour off the excess wort from the yeast starter, swirl up the remainder to pick up the yeast sediment and chuck it into the bin.

Lid on, job done… Except the washing up

oh yeah, I really should get around to ordering some stuff and doing it

This started around 10 years ago with a home-brew kit: a thick goop that you boiled up with some water, added some sugar and left in a bucket for a couple of weeks. A while later I teamed up with a friend and actually ordered some stuff. Unfortunately, we never actually got around to doing anything with it.

That was then and this is now, however, and the idea has once-more bubbled to the surface (there’s a pun in there somewhere). Over the last year or so, I’ve almost raised the enthusiasm to dive in but always been stumped by the vast array of techniques and equipment and ingredients and just decided it’s too much hassle and I’ll look into it more later. Finally, this month, I resolved to get off my arse and sort it out once and for all, and on Sunday 16th January I finally hit submit on my order. Here’s a run-down of what I bought and why.

I’ve broken it down by brewing stage, which is not how I approached the research and selection process but probably makes more logical sense for the reader.

Sterlisation

Like -INSERT HATED GROUP OF PEOPLE HERE-, your equipment needs to be sterlised. In brewing this is to remove bacteria that can make your beer taste bad and go off quickly; neither of which are desirable. In each stage up to and including boiling, it’s not too bad; the boiling will kill off everything anyway. As soon as the liquid hits the fermenting vessel though, everything has to be sterile.

Back in’t’ day, sterilisation was all done with sodium metabisulphate. In trying to determine if this was still the done thing, I ended up reading a 3-page discussion on whether the correct word is sanitise, sterilise or disinfect. Joyful.

I read posts on using bleach (with much detail on dilution levels) or boiling water, but finally settled on some simple powder as someone else somewhere said they used it. What more of a glowing endorsement could a man want?

Item:	VWP sterlization tablets
Quantity:	400g
Price:	£4.49

Water Treatment

I bought some stuff for water treatment, but at this stage am undecided what – if anything – I’m actually going to do to my water before mashing. Jim’s Beer Kit guide suggests at the minimum to remove the chlorine from the water using campden tablets, so I got some of those (well… powder).

Item:	Campden powder
Quantity:	90g
Price:	£2.20

As water treatment is all about mash pH (NB: not the pH of the water that goes in!), I got some test strips to see what happens.

Item:	PH Test Strips
Quantity:	20
Price:	£4.25

Then a couple of other chemicals that may or may not be used

Item:	Calcium chloride flakes
Quantity:	200g
Price:	£2.50

Item:	Magnesium Sulphate
Quantity:	200g
Price:	£2.30

Mashing and Sparging

Mashing is the process of extracting sugars from the malted grain. Basically, this involves steeping the grains in hot water in a vessel (mash tun) for an hour or two. Once this is done, the water is drained off and the grains rinsed. This rinsing process is known as sparging. The expensive option for mashing is to have a separate vessel, often made from a coolbox for insulation, with some form of grain filter for mashing. This allows the mash and sparge to be drained straight into the boiler which speeds up heating. The cheaper option is to use a mesh bag in your boiler. There are a number of options when it comes to sparging, but in simple terms for the beginner like me there are two options: pour some more water in, swill it around and drain it again (batch) or sprinkle water over the top of the grain (fly sparging). As far as I can tell, there’s not a great deal of difference between the two and there are pros and cons. The biggest issue is mash tun capacity; batch sparging requires a larger volume of tun. Fly sparging, on the other hand, means you get to play with a cool spinning arm.

Item:	Mash tun and rotating sparging arm
Quantity:	1
Price:	£84.28

Boiling

Once sparged, the sugar-filled water (now called wort) is boiled for a time. This can be done in a (huge) stock pot on the stove or in a single-purpose boiler. I opted for a boiler thinking that would be the easy option; it’s a plastic bucket with a kettle element in the bottom. Oh no. You can use a Burco or one made for brewers. You can have thermostatic or non-thermostatic (useful for warming up your mash water which is sub-100 degrees Celsius). You can have a pre-fitted element or rip one out of a supermarket kettle. You can have 1 element or 2 for faster boiling. I opted for the thermostatically controlled single-element Electrim boiler.

Item:	Electrim boiler
Quantity:	1
Price:	£68.99

Cleverly, for a single-purpose boiler, the Electrim doesn’t come with any facility to filter out the hops that are added during the boiling process. Hop and Grape sell a strainer, which is basically a few lengths of copper pipe with some holes in.

Item:	Hop strainer
Quantity:	1
Price:	£14.59

Once boiled, it is important to cool the wort quickly to achieve the cold break. This can be done quite easily by dumping the bucket into cold water or an ice bath. Alternatively, you can spend a bunch of money on a wort chiller

Item:	Wort chiller
Quantity:	1
Price:	£28.09

Fermenting

Once the wort is chilled, then it’s ready for fermenting. There’s not much really to decide here; you want a big bucket…

Item:	7 gallon fermenting bin
Quantity:	1
Price:	£15.09

… a thermometer to check the temperature …

Item:	Sticky thermometer
Quantity:	1
Price:	£2.20

… and an airlock to let the CO2 out.

Item:	Airlock
Quantity:	1
Price:	£0.89

And the Rest

I already had a hydrometer and long thermometer from my Dad’s brewing collection. Similarly, whilst at the time of ordering I had not decided whether to condition in bottles or a pressure barrel, I knew I could source a pressure barrel at short notice.

To keep the fermenting wort at a constant temperature, I also ordered a 75w thermostatic aquarium heater from a fish shop.

Item:	Aquarium heater
Quantity:	1
Price:	£8.99

So there it is. I still need to get some plastic tubing for the sparge arm and wort chiller, as well as some insulation for the fermenting bin. Brew day is Sunday, and I will hopefully update the blog and twitter as the day progresses.

Kindle in Box

Back in August – the 20th to be precise – it was my birthday.

Despite the highly-useful stuff I want page, my parent’s didn’t get me a gift (there were reasons why!), and asked me to let them know what I wanted.

Originally, I was leaning towards a synthetic jacket to keep me warm in those cold Scottish winter days, but eventually I started hankering after an Amazon Kindle.

I suspect I was suckered in by a combination of advertising and a few other people I know having one, but once I’d had the idea it started growing quite rapidly.

When I was a kid, I used to read quite a lot, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found less spare time to dedicate to books. This year, however, I have made a conscious effort to read more and am slowly regaining my reading speed.

So when stock came back in, I was offered a Kindle and I jumped at the chance.

Today it arrived while I was at work, and was awaiting my homecoming.

Inside the box, you are immediately presented with the device itself, with a piece of protective plastic on top. Written on this are the getting-started instructions; plug in and switch on. So far so good.

Peeling the plastic off, I got a surprise; the getting-started guide was not printed on the plastic, it was the e-ink screen. The screen really is that good;  I was genuinely impressed at just how crisp even that simple diagram was.

So I fired it up and started flicking through the user guide which is provided as a book on the device. The manual is pretty good – I even read the first couple of pages, before deciding I just wanted to play and work it out for myself.

The first place to head was the online book store to grab some books from my wishlist on Amazon. This was quick and easy and I selected what I thought was the “sample” option.

Bugger; I’d selected purchase.

Caught in 2 minds now… I do actually want the book, but also wanted to test the sample option.

Fortunately, there’s a cancel download button.

Phew.

Download cancelled, sample obtained… fine, now I want to buy the book.

“You have already bought this book, resync”.

Ok… so I resync, but it still says sample. I’m in limbo.

I play around for a bit, and then go back to buy and it lets me buy it. Great. Except now looking at my Amazon account, I’ve now bought 2 copies!

ARG!

Phone call to Amazon, and it’s registered the refund but takes 1-2 days to refund the money for the cock-up. Rubbish.

In short; the screen is amazing, but the system needs work. And it wont read the ePub files you can download from Hampshire library

I’m looking forward to getting some reading in!

Gash in head

There are those times in life, lying flat on your back in Wetherspoon’s with blood leaking from you head, when you think perhaps you shouldn’t have attempted to jump down those stairs.

Admittedly, these times are probably quite rare.

The circumstances leading up to this event are not really of interest, but suffice to say at around 10 o’clock on Friday night I was sat enjoying my beer “upstairs” in Winchester’s ‘spoons. For those of you who haven’t been to the Old Gaol House, when I say upstairs I mean 2 stairs.

Events conspired such that I no longer wanted to be upstairs but needed to be downstairs in a short space of time. So, whilst running, I encountered the stairs and felt the quickest way to tackle them was a short jump.

Looking up from my position on the floor, the kindly chap at the table next to the foot of the stairs inquired as to my being OK. I rapidly surmised that there must have been a step in the roof. Arse. At this stage I figured I just had a bruise, but when taking my hands from my head, I observed not a small amount of blood.

As I was cleaning myself up in the toilet, the manager came in and asked if I was OK, and if I’d been drinking. At first I was a little offended at the implication that my accident was related to my drinking. That might sound odd, but I’m reasonably happy that I’m clumsy enough when sober to do something so dumb; I don’t think the beer was a major factor. As it happens, he told me has was going to offer paracetamol but thought beer + paracetamol wasn’t a good combination. Fair enough.

With the bleeding not stopping and the worst headache I’ve ever had rapidly invading, the decision was made to go to A&E; about 10 minutes walk. We made it there at about 10:30, and was triaged at about 11:00. The nurse asked the obvious question: what have you done?

How do you answer that?

Well… I.. Uhh.. Jumped into the ceiling…

It sounds pretty dumb, but I couldn’t think of a better way to phrase it. Seems the nurse couldn’t, either, as she pretty much wrote it down verbatim on the form. She did laugh at it though

The nurse asked if I’d taken any painkillers, and I mentioned the offer from the manager of the ‘spoons. She asked how much I’d had to drink, and then wrote it down on the form. Had 4 pints.

No context.

And this is what bothers me most about the whole experience. I don’t mind making a tit of myself, I can cope with a bit of superglue in my hair and a banging headache. But those 3 words on the form, I’m fairly sure mean I’ve contributed to the alcohol-related incident statistics. And as I mentioned before, I really don’t think the alcohol was relevant.

4 pints of beer over 4 hours, including a curry for tea, is not exactly heavy drinking. Without that context though, the form just reads “Jumped into ceiling, had 4 pints”. The last thing I want is to provide ammunition for the statistics manipulation that goes in daily in Britain’s excuse for media.

Next time I see some story about the increase in alcohol-related incidents, I will experience a little more sadness.

Oh well, at least the superglue used to close my head up makes it look like I have semen in my hair.

30th November 2009.

Bugger.

You see, about 6 months ago I moved house. I phoned BT to cancel with them; they screwed up badly and cancelled my line too early. And then tried to bill me lots for it. I told Southern Water I wouldn’t be responsible for billing at my new address, they set up a new Direct Debit. I moved my bank accounts, my council tax, my power, my gas… I moved pretty much everything. Except the registration document for my car.

You see, whilst everything else could be done over the phone or internet, changing the address on your car requires actual writing and enveloping and posting. Faff. I had the document on the floor by my bed all this time, ready to fill in, I just didn’t get around to it.

The downside of not updating your address is that you don’t get the reminder by post to go update your tax, hence the expired disc. As it was a Sunday, there wasn’t really much I could do until the following day, except contemplate the potential fines.

The next day, I went to the Post Office; I couldn’t renew online as they’d send the tax disc to the old house. Sadly, the Post Office still lives in the dark ages; where the online tool automatically looks up your insurance/MOT the Post Office requires the physical documents. Trip home and back then.

Once armed with the appropriate documentation I paid my £120 and was legal to drive again. The lady in the Post Office also mentioned that if I was quick I could phone up the DVLA and pay the back-tax and escape a fine. This sounded good to me, but as the process of buying the tax disc had flagged that I’d missed a month I had to be quick.

A call to the central line suggested I /could/ pay the back-tax but had to send a cheque/postal order to my local DVLA office. More dark-ages. That meant actually locating my chequebook, and deciding which of the 3? chequebooks I had were valid.

You can find the begging letter I sent them here, should you need to do the same.

Yesterday in the post I received a receipt for my back-tax. Hopefully I’m in the clear :-/

Despite it being something like a 5 hour drive from here, I was also keen. Despite the nation whining incessantly about the “bad” weather, I for one was loving it. Conditions like this a pretty rare thing in much of England and getting out on the hills is even more fun than usual in the snow.

Chatting with Dave about the idea, I found he was less convinced about the driving part but still keen to get out and about in the hills. Remembering the slightly shorter drive but gorgeous scenery during our stay at Graig Wen last October, a plan started to form…

With Jen and Mark also in, we booked up the Mountain View holiday cottage at Graig Wen, and started looking forward to the weekend.

How, given the aforementioned hysterics the country’s been having over the weather, it was not surprising to find that most people thought we were a bit mad to head to Wales. Given that the whole holiday idea was largely spurred by Anna, it was a little surprising that she was a proponent of the you’re-not-going-to-get-there-you’re-going-to-break-down-and-die-on-the-road theory. Other backers of this belief were my mother (“I think you’d better cancel, don’t you?”), my father (“you’re sure that’s a good idea?”), and my boss (“you’re mad”).

The beauty of mass-panic, however, is that the roads were utterly devoid of traffic so we had a great run through, making it just in time for a couple of pints and dinner at the George III Hotel in Penmaenpool. Tasty Snowdonia ale and some great hearty food. A few glasses of whisky at the cottage then off to bed.

Possibly due to the whisky, it was a slightly slow start in the morning, and it was around 11 o’clock when we finally set off towards our objective for the day; Cadair Idris. The largest mountain in the region, Anna and I had walked up Cadair via the pony path on our last visit, traversing the ridge east to Gau Graig and then down. Because we wanted to do the ridge, we’d missed out on the Fox’s path; a steep scree-slope ascent of the mountain from Llyn y Gadair; the lake in the bowl to the north of the peak.

We trekked up the path to the lake, marvelling at the snow; it was not packed at all as in the lakes, but a fine powder up to about knee-depth in places. After some lunch near the lake, and some ice axe arrest practice, we set off up the Fox’s path. Or at least roughly up the Fox’s path. We were pretty much the only other walkers out, and had to forge our own path up the slope. Hard work, according to Mark; I wasn’t convinced though, as I had nice footsteps to follow . As we walked, we spotted others on the mountain, enjoying the winter conditions to climb the central gully, which we later heard was a bit “interesting”.

The snow varied in density, but was good-going for the first half of the slope. A thinning of the snow layer forced us to change course a couple of times, and probably took us off what is the path in summer, but we continued on and slowly but surely we made progress. After another path petered out with a thinning of snow, I broke out from lower down than Mark and took the lead on a new trail.

About a hundred metres from the top, the snow gave way to an icy crust. This made kicking steps a lot more effort, and progress slowed, with everyone being careful not to slip. Eventually, after a bit of back-and-forth and a couple of us wearing crampons the whole team made it to the top happy and safe. Conditions were windy on top, so we didn’t hang about, strolling up the final leg to the trig-point and rapidly continuing on. Underfoot, though, it was not too icy or deep and the going was good, and we found ourselves smoothly heading for the pony path and the car, a delightful sunset en route a beautiful finish to the day.

The Sunday was spent on a nice walk up past the Arthog waterfalls – sadly not iced up much – and Gregennen lakes – about 3-inch crust of ice – with a good cup of tea and a scone in a Dolgellau tea room to finish; cream first obviously!

Check out the photo album for more pics.

There are a few things, however, I do not like about it. The rampant racism of its readers, for example. That is easily avoided, however, and it’s occasionally fun to dip in for some sport.

I’ve typed about the bad use of language before, but that’s not as bad as today’s example. Today we have an excellent example of laziness or incompetence.

This article reports, through its headline, that

Three rescued after suffering injuries on Snowdon

It goes on to say

Three people have been airlifted to safety by an RAF helicopter in two separate rescues in Snowdonia.

So far so good. Snowdon is definitely in Snowdonia; the clue’s in the name. However, we read a little further and discover that the accidents actually happened on Y Garn (about 3.5 miles away, peak-to-peak as the crow flies) and Tryfan (just over 4.5 miles away).

It’s just so damn shoddy.

Nevertheless, Anna was keen to try and during a flying visit to Southampton we dove into paperchase, after wading past the throngs of people walking slower than slow people in slow land. With arthritis. And a broken leg. I hate going to Southampton.

Of course, by the time we actually got as far as making any cards I had only vague memories of the article. And, predictably, it was me that needed to make cards first. Thus, I became the self-crafted card guinea pig.

The only thing I could remember was that the article said to use simple shapes, as complex designs were the path to oblivion. We’d only selected a single wrapping paper for our card-creation, and so it was going to be somewhat hard to achieve delineation between parts of the design. I figured that by leaving gaps in between shapes I could achieve what I wanted.

So what to draw? My first thought was to draw a robin. Attempts were not successful. I drew the shapes onto paper first, to avoid wasting the wrapping paper. I’m going with the “robin too complicated” excuse for my failure to draw.

For my next effort, I went with a snowman. I tried to make a curved-top rectangle for a body, circular head and top hat. In retrospect, I think it needed either a scarf, or a 3-blob body approach. Either way, things weren’t looking good; my initial fears seemed to be becoming realised.

The next card I made was a christmas tree. Using the ol’ fold-the-paper-in-half-and-only-cut-one-half-of-the-shape trick, I cut the body of the tree with no trunk or pot. The tree was a standard school-level tree with ever-extending triangles and about 3 tiers. A simple trapezium for the bucket, with a few mm gap, and things were starting to look up. At worst, I now had 1 design that was passable.

Feeling a bit more confident, I stepped up my act and went for a christmas pudding. Re-reading the Guardian article now, I see that this is a shape specifically advised against. Oh well. I drew and cut out a reasonable-sized circle, but wanted to go for the icing-covered top effect. By cutting a squiggly line across the circle at about 1/3 height and spacing the 2 halves out on the card, I had what vaguely resembled a pudding. And as far as I am concerned, vaguely resembles == win. I topped off the pudding with 2 holly leaves and a couple of balls. Oo-err. I drew 1 holly leaf, and used it as a template for the 2nd… I was getting cocky.

For the next design, I had a brainwave; I could draw a present. I was scrabbling for christmas-sy ideas a bit at this point, and for some reason it seemed like a good idea. Armed with no ruler (I guess I could have got up and looked for one, but meh), I sketched a simple cube, and split all faces with a cross of ribbon. I then cut the pieces not only from the background, but also removed the ribbon sections. Reassembling on the front of the card, leaving space where the ribbon used to be, the design looked pretty good, but the odd line here, or width there didn’t quite line up. If you don’t look too closely, I think it was ok though, and if one took the time to use a ruler I think this one, though straying into too-complex territory, is actually a pretty workable design.

The final card (I thought) was a simple angel. Circle for head, tall trapezium for the body, simple triangles with curved ends for the wings and an oval for a halo. I cut the wings too thick, but ho hum.

Of course, having made the cards for myself, Anna then wanted me to make hers. I was having fun, so didn’t mind, but possibly fell into the trap of complication. My next effort was the most detailed I attempted. I started with a candle, drawing dripping wax at the top. This was fine, but a bit bare, so I added a light-halo and then a candle-holder. It looked good in doodle-form, but I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to transform it into a suitable likeness in the wrapping paper.

In the end, the only part which didn’t really work was the wax. The drips were too thin, and so when pulled apart there wasn’t enough gap in most places. I made a crown, which I pritt-stuck the wrong way on a card, which killed a card, and then a stocking. Finally a bell, which turned out a very bold and simple design; very quick and easy to draw, cut and stick.

All-in-all a reasonable success. Yes, it’s cheaper to buy a bumper 100-card crap-pack from Wilkinson’s in the January sales. And yes, trying to create a unique design for every card is probably overkill; you could save a lot of time by making 1 or 2 templates and being more production-line like. But I have to say, I’m suitably chuffed.

There’s a few more photos in the album. Let’s hope the recipients like them!

All 12 people that signed up were present and correct and a good time was had by all (I hope!).

At the moment, I’ve managed to put up details of the menu we went with, including links to all the recipes. There’s also a photo gallery, and a timeline of the day’s preparations. The (now updated) page on making the christmas puds is included, as is the new page on how I created the perfect turkey. Hopefully more details will emerge, but who knows.

P.S. There’s a great recipe for leftovers on BBCGoodFood. Mmmm.

But, with the best intentions, I’ve started at the beginning. With the dessert.