mutteringhousewife

February 19, 2013

School Camp

Everyone is excited about school camp. The Muffet, because she’s the one going and is the least sentimental of my children, she won’t miss us even slightly. The boys, because there’ll be no more arguments about what to watch on TV. Us parents because of the lack of fighting when any one of the three is removed from the group. But then there’s the Camp List…

It’s more a treasure hunt list than anything else. They’ll only be gone two nights. Yet here I have a closely typed A4 page of essentials to be packed if you don’t want your daughter to die of exposure. They’ll be staying in a cabin one night and a tent very close to the cabin the next, but that hasn’t stopped a whole group of parents with only one overprotected daughter being convinced that they’ll be eaten by bears. Or worse, get all muddy.

Muffet has a father who has actually been to war, so is very excited to be packing some of his Army kit. The sleeping bag, the camelback water pack, the sleeping mat, the giant waterproof bag are all khaki. Also one of those shawl arrangements that men in Afghanistan wear over their heads when caught in a sandstorm, you never can be too prepared. But what child of twelve whose feet are going up a size every six months has more than one pair of sneakers? I can’t buy the ones in Kmart for four dollars, they may well dissolve if they get wet. It’s Volleys from Target for the spare set of shoes in the pack. I wasn’t planning to get her new track suit pants until winter, so she’s also going to have to put up with ones from Target as well rather than the velour ones I was going to have to go on a quest to find. Thermal underwear, oh come on. Next. Torch, I’m sure we have one somewhere, I may have to pay the Horror two dollars to find one for me. Plastic plate, bowl and etcetera, we definitely have a picnic set somewhere that someone gave us for Christmas about ten years ago, or possibly as a wedding present. Two fleece jumpers, no way. I did go up to the Kathmandu outlet store to get her a zip up fleece jacket that is so bright that she may not need that torch, but I wasn’t buying two. She won’t wear jumpers, none of my kids like pulling them over their enormous heads. She’ll have to pack a track suit top or something.

I thought we had everything covered until she tells me this afternoon that she needs mid length shorts for wearing under a harness. I suggested she borrow a pair of the Horror’s, they’re a similar size. Her reaction indicated that she may have misheard me and that she thought I suggested she actually eat his shorts. We may have to do some work there this afternoon, there’s no way I’m going back out to the shops. Undies, sunscreen, insect repellent, framed photograph of her brothers, all checked. We’re nearly ready for camp.

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February 18, 2013

In defence of Housewifery

Society has started to raise its eyebrows at me and go “So. When are you going back to work?” And after a great deal of thought, hours on seek.com and LinkedIn and many coffees with the girls, I’m just not. Have you seen the kinds of jobs offered to people like me? People who would like to work part time, with a bit of flexibility around swimming carnival time, who have been out of the workforce for fifteen years? I’ll tell you so you don’t have to find out for yourself. Admin, reception, maybe sales. Back when I had a real job I was an IT manager. I have a PhD in statistical mechanics. In my most recent volunteer position I’ve become an expert on the not for profit sector, including the various legal entities they can take on, GST obligations, super obligations, reporting obligations, their relationship with various government departments and different acts of parliament that govern their behaviour. Ah, but I wasn’t getting paid for that, was I. So it doesn’t really count. I can get a job opening the mail and doing the filing. Or making phone calls to sales prospects, the thought of which actually brings me out in a blotchy rash. The message is that if you want a real job, girly, you’ll need to do real hours and show real commitment. Well, up yours, workforce. I don’t need you.

Of course it’s easy for me to say that, because I happen to have a workaholic husband with a brain the size of a planet, so we’re fairly tidily off financially. I’d be going back to work so I could have conversations with adults and have performance assessments and be useful to people I haven’t actually grown in my own body. It turns out that the easiest way to achieve those things is to get into volunteer work. Nudge up against anyone in a committee and they’ll grab you with both hands and before you know it you’ll be booking the Town Hall for a Verdi extravaganza, hiring a sixty piece orchestra and organising public liability insurance. Just speaking from my own experience there. Seriously, I have found that being on school and community committees has been extremely nourishing to my soul, exercised the atrophying brain and made me a lot of friends in many walks of life. So that’s taken care of.

The actual housework stuff isn’t so bad either. We got a cleaner very early on in our marriage, it saved us many a futile argument and I recommend it to anyone who doesn’t have OCD. So all I do is shop for food almost every day, wash clothes, go on quests for obscure musical instrument parts, prepare food and sew capes. The kids never take processed food to school except for bread, and I’m working on that. I also have the time to drive the kids to and from school when their timetables don’t clash and I highly recommend it. You have them captive for twenty minutes and there’s a lot you can learn in that time. I believe I’m the only mother of my acquaintance that has an almost fourteen year old son that still gives me a full and frank report of what he’s been up to at school every day. I can also go to school assemblies when an offspring is singing a song about a cloud or receiving a piece of paper for not biting anyone on the leg this week and sports carnivals, even though that isn’t my favourite thing in the world. Then when the kids are home I’ve done all my household administration and am free to shout at them for jumping on the lounge and answer difficult maths questions.

There’s nothing in the housewife book to say it is a female role. Or that it’s a role that must be present in each family. It works for us and I don’t think it makes me less of a modern woman. I just wish I didn’t blush when people ask me, inevitably, what I do and I answer straight up that I’m a housewife. I must work on that.

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February 15, 2013

Hot Cross Buns

I’ve waited until February to make them. Yes, it is very distressing to see them in the shops before Australia Day. I like having a bit of usually pointless seasonal rhythm to my baking. Fruit cake at Christmas. Hot cross buns in Ent. Curse you iPad autocorrect. Lent. An Ent wouldn’t eat a hot cross bun. Actually, that’s it really, everything else I make year round.

This is one of those just bung all the ingredients together recipes. I’m pretty sure it’s a Donna Hay one, and I haven’t even played with it at all, it’s good as is.

I sometimes think I should start a YouTube channel for a real cooking show. There’s a gaping niche there. Today it would go like this. Search for metal bowl, not the one with the rubber bottom because we want to put it in the oven. Realise it’s in the fridge and it’s full of chicken stock. Rummage in the pantry for the Glad mini zip locks I decant half cups of chicken stock into to put in the freezer. Discover three empty boxes. Toss these in recycling. Realise recycling is full and take out same. Etcetera. That’s how real people cook, nobody ever has everything all lined up in glass bowls before they start.

Anyway, once you’ve washed your metal bowl until it doesn’t smell of chicken stock any more, place in it the following ingredients. Twenty grams of fresh yeast and a cup and a half of milk. Get in there with your fingers and squish the yeast until it has dissolved into the milk. Go wash your hands. Now add the rest. Four and a quarter cups of flour (sounds a little fussy, I grant you, you could definitely use four cups, then add the rest when you’re kneading), two teaspoons of mixed spice, two teaspoons of cinnamon, an egg, a cup of sultanas, half a cup of currants and fifty grams of melted butter. Mash all that together until you have a sticky heterogeneous lump, then dump it onto a flour covered workbench. Dust it with a good handful of flour and start kneading. The recipe suggests to keep going for eight minutes, but not even I’m anal enough to time myself and besides, I did a pump class this morning. You knead it until the dough feels smooth in between the fruit, but still a little sticky. It will have sucked up a bit of flour by then.

Wash the mixing bowl and tip a little oil into it. Wipe it around and place the dough back into it, you can now leave it to its thoughts if you have all day, or if it’s hot, but I don’t and it isn’t, so it’s going in the oven with just the light on. Wait until it has doubled in bulk, then get out that roasting pan that I seem to make everything, or a jelly roll tin if you have such a thing and line it with baking paper. Divide the dough in half, then in half again. Take one quarter and stretch it out so it’s like a very fat sausage. Divide that in three and shape each bit so it’s round and place it in the tin. Repeat until you have twelve buns. Cover it with a cloth, and back under the light. After about an hour they should have risen to be all squashed together.

Take a mini zip lock bag and place in it one third of a cup of flour and a quarter of a cup of water. Mix it around until it has combined, then seal the bag. Snip off a tiny corner, about half a centimetre. Squeeze lines of flour paste across the buns to form crosses. Or any pattern you like really. They spread out, so don’t get too fancy.

Bake them for about forty minutes at one hundred and eighty degrees. As soon as they come out of the oven brush them liberally with sugar syrup. You make sugar syrup by putting a quarter of a cup of sugar in a tiny saucepan with about an eighth of a cup of water and heating until the sugar dissolves. You don’t really have to do this, but it does make them very shiny.

Yes I know my crosses suck. Let this be a lesson to you, children, don’t let your mind wander when making the flour paste. Also, if you drop some on your toes you’ll notice a bit later when you’re picking the kids up from school that it looks as if your pedicure has gone mouldy.

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February 14, 2013

Standard Chocolate Chip Biscuits

When I was a new mum I leaned towards the “chocolate? I may as well feed my children broken glass dipped in arsenic” school of thought. Don’t deny it, you’ve been there. And gradually, year by year I’ve been worn down by shopkeepers giving the kids a bit of chocolate, school teachers handing it out, relatives sneaking it to them, the kids finding my secret stash, Easter. Now I’m looking for any way I can to hold them between coming home from school and dinner. I’m not at the point where I’d buy them a chocolate bar, but I’m on that slippery slope.

I was looking for the classic chocolate chip cookie. Actually, I was being nagged by the Horror to find the recipe for those big ones with the twenty cent sized choc chips that you get in nicer cafes. Specifically the cafe near his school which we sometimes frequent in the morning after dropping the Moose off at some ungodly hour. Well, that cafe doesn’t stock them any more, I don’t know why but I’m guessing that too many of them were breaking in half. Fortunately the Horror has grudgingly agreed to have a croissant instead, so I can still enjoy their delicious coffee, but he wanted that cookie again. This recipe is just listed as chocolate chip cookies in my Pillsbury book of family recipes, but it’s very close indeed to the classic Toll House cookie recipe.

Cream together 170 grams of butter with a cup of brown sugar and a quarter of a cup of white sugar. Mix in an egg and a teaspoon and a half of vanilla essence. Mix in 2 cups of flour and a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. Mix in half a cup of dark chocolate chips. Flatten apricot sized chunks of dough onto a baking paper lined tray. Press into each biscuit a large dark chocolate chip. I thought it would be too fiddly to use the big ones all the way through, you don’t get an even mix.

I use the Belcolade chocolate drops for the big ones, the Callebaut for the small ones. Bake for ten to twelve minutes at 180 degrees, or until golden on top.

Of course they’re not exactly the same as the ones at the cafe, they’re slightly softer. The Horror, in the interest of science, had to have two to make sure they weren’t the same.

I should stop caring what he thinks. But it’s hard to resist a tough audience

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February 13, 2013

How do you do it?

I was asked again last night. “How do you do it?” Three kids who, with a whoop and a holler, have joined everything their expensive schools have to offer, two choirs for me, two jobs plus soccer for my husband, committees galore for both of us. It’s very simple, really. There’s this thing, you may have heard of it. It’s called a calendar.

Of course, a paper calendar has no chance with a schedule like ours. I use Microsoft Outlook, and we put EVERYTHING in it. Every kids activity (use the recurrence function), every birthday party, every P&F meeting, every doctor’s appointment. My husband even puts reminders in it for cleaning the pool or calling people. His brain is full of cricket statistics, he has no room for minutiae. Then we synchronise every day with both my phone and my husband’s. Even the Moose is starting to occasionally load the family calendar onto his laptop. Early in our marriage my husband proposed this system and he used our mutual sanctimoniousness to get our whole lives onto it. “Well, you couldn’t possibly be going to the pub after soccer, it isn’t in the calendar”, is rarely heard any more. Our relationship has been a long struggle for moral superiority. I think I pinched that from Marge Simpson.

Here’s what the evenings for this week look like:

The rule is that if there’s space in the calendar, you can go ahead with the proposed activity. Saves all that marital bickering about who told whom what and when. Synchronising has occasionally been a problem. We do it manually with a cable to the computer at the moment. I tried synchronising it with Google Calendar and it crashed the entire computer. I also tried iCloud but ended up with duplicates and even triplicates, so we’re waiting for either technology to catch up with us, or for us to go completely Apple. It may happen. Stranger things have.

No, I don’t think we’re trying to fit too much in. All of the kids activities have been volunteered for, in some cases begged for. They must be completing their homework with ease and getting sufficient sleep if they want to cram something else in. And what would I be doing with more time at home? Cleaning? Watching TV? Tchah. When we do all see each other, we have much to talk about. Much.

So what I want to know is, how do those of you who don’t use this system do it? How do you ever remember to get anywhere?

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February 12, 2013

Swimming Carnival

Not the one I made the cape for, that was last week. My daughter’s swimming carnival was a high school one, all girls, so the swimming was well organised, the cheering was shrill and the costumes were elaborate. The one I’m telling you about today was the Horror’s one, full of primary school boys and therefore much more dramatic.

One starts off the day of a swimming carnival by dropping the swimming child at school so he can get the bus to the pool with his friends. This leaves me time to go and get a reliably good coffee from the local coffee wranglers for me to consume while I spend an hour being grateful that I never usually need to deal with this kind of traffic. This morning’s half hour snarl up Lyons Road appeared to have been caused by an elderly man attempting to reverse park in front of a school, ignoring the execrations of the commuters whose road he was blocking. He wanted to get in perfectly parallel and he had all the time in the world.

Upon arriving at the pool and parking some blocks away I went to locate my last born. All the kids sit in their colour coded houses on concrete steps, and the parents squeeze in with them. I could feel my hair curling into a perfectly spherical pom pom around my head in the humidity even before I’d squashed in between the new Irish kid and the Horror and some of his wrigglier friends. I thought he was bad enough, but one of his mates managed to kick me in the shin, the foot, both elbows and numerous times in the back by the end of the day. Perhaps next time I should bring a sharp stick.

My favourite bit of the primary school swimming carnival is watching the eight and nine year olds swim. It’s usually their first ever carnival and they’re full of excitement and a can do attitude. A highlight came early on in the freestyle when a little one started struggling at the twenty five metre mark, causing a strapping young student teacher to strip off his shirt and dive in to the rescue. Most of the potential rescues were identified before the kids jumped in, they were put in lane one so they could be hauled out at the side. One little kid leapt in for the start of the breaststroke only to immediately realise he couldn’t swim at all, he was gaffed and pulled in within seconds. Another little champ managed to swim the twenty five metre breaststroke entirely in butterfly. I don’t think I could swim twenty five metres of butterfly.

Girls schools do elaborate chants to support their houses, with melodies and verse and one that springs from house to house like a musical Mexican wave. Boys shout their double syllable house name (if it’s a single syllable they stick in a diphthong) followed by three claps. My ears are still ringing. They don’t sit still and watch their colleagues swim, they wrestle and draw on each other and play scissors paper rock and drum on the garbage bins and make hats out of their towels and stand and sit and lie down and head butt each other. No wonder the teachers in charge of the audience not falling in the pool (almost a continuous line of them) looked filleted by the end of the last relay.

The once a year swimmers like the Horror only get to go in their age races for freestyle and breaststroke. He managed to come third out of five in the freestyle (the last two hauled themselves to the finish line on the lane ropes) and fifth out of eight in the breaststroke. He did point out that that heat was won by the under ten overall champion, so good on him. He’s starting squads this very Thursday morning, so next year I can do a lot more cheering.

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February 11, 2013

Choc Mint Slice

My husband likes to make requests of me, he thinks it makes me feel useful. Some make me furrow my brow not inconsiderably, like the “please sort out the Outlook 2010/IMAP problems”, which has defeated greater minds than mine. Some I greet with whoops of joy, like “please can I have morning tea for ten people for a meeting on Sunday morning”. Catering, but without the paperwork.

I decide to give him tea scented shortbread, ANZAC biscuits, hazelnut biscotti and something chocolate. He put on his sad face and said “but, there aren’t any ginger nuts!”. He keeps asking not to make those because he’ll just be compelled to eat them all, and then where will the schoolgirl figure be? Men. I can just about make them in my sleep, so he got a batch of those. The chocolate brownies I usually make just weren’t quite right, so the kids get them (there’s only three pieces left). I’m wondering if Pepe Saya butter isn’t so great with chocolate or what’s going on. It was the perfect opportunity to make some chocolate mint slice, something I’ve been contemplating for quite some time.

I knew what I wanted was a more robust version of the after dinner mints that I’ve stopped refining because I kept eating them. The Internet wasn’t the place for recipes because a mint slice appears to be one of those weird recipes that people want to make with crushed up mint chocolate bars. Why wouldn’t you just eat the chocolate bar? Women’s Weekly Cakes and Slices had the closest to what I was looking for, but it will need to undergo further refinement, so let me know if you want to volunteer for testing.

Even so, this looked like one of those recipes where they’d let their attention wander a bit. The base was unusual, but I took them at their word and it produced a fairly dense cake layer, which worked well when the slice was at room temperature, but not when it had been refrigerated. Here’s how to make the base:
Mix together 2/3 cup of flour, 1 teaspoon of baking powder, 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder, 1/4 of a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, 1/3 of a cup of caster sugar and their grams of softened butter. Stir in a third of a cup of water. Stir in an egg. Pour this lot into a baking paper lined 25 by 30 cm slice tin or, in my case, roasting pan. Bake at 180 degrees for about twenty minutes.

I was happy with the peppermint filling. You mix a tablespoon of vegetable oil with two and quarter cups of icing sugar and one and a half teaspoons of peppermint essence in a heat proof bowl. Actually, it doesn’t mix at all, so you add in three tablespoons of milk. When you’ve incorporated most of the icing sugar and you have a stiff paste, starting mixing it over a saucepan of boiling water until it becomes spreadable. I’d suggest wrapping you hands in a teatowel, steam burns are unpleasant. If you can’t get it to form a paste, add a touch more milk. The recipe oddly didn’t specify the amount of peppermint essence, but I thought one and a half teaspoons was about right. Spread the paste over the slightly cooled base. You want to wait a bit, otherwise you’ll tear the base up. Stick this into the fridge until it’s firm.

They then suggest melting 125 grams of dark chocolate with 90 grams of unsalted butter (in a bowl over boiling water) to spread over the top. Now I know from experience that if you just melt straight chocolate and spread it on the slice you’ll get a chocolate layer that is very delicious but impossible to cut without shattering unless you want to muck around with a hot knife. The butter is to make it softer, but as it turns out I think this combination is too soft, you have to lick your fingers after eating. I might try 40 grams of butter with 170 grams of chocolate next time.

I’m also going to try for more of a biscuit base next time, then I can have the soft chocolate on top and serve it refrigerated. Or if I stick with the cake base, a much firmer chocolate layer. I wouldn’t mind trying this version of peppermint fondant in an after dinner mint either, maybe in disc form dipped in chocolate. But perhaps I should be thinking of my schoolgirl figure.

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February 8, 2013

The Kids’ Favourite Ice Block – So Far

It is mango season, but I’m finding the classic eating mango, the Kensington Pride, a little pricey at the moment, and I’m not willing to commit to a case of them. There are a lot more varieties of mango about than there used to be in the olden days, and the ones I’m buying are the giant ones that evoke Star Wars for us, the R2E2. The kids aren’t that keen to eat them straight, though will at a pinch, but there’s such a lot of flesh on them that they just groan with potential.

The first thing to do when you get the kids all hot and sweaty from school is to cut the cheeks off an R2E2 and scoop the flesh into the blender. Pour in a slug of the lime syrup we made a few blogs ago, add a cup of ice and press Smoothie on your fancy blender. Instant refreshment for three kids, if you use the small glasses. But the way they like them best is in iceblock form.

My iceblock moulds are the rocket shaped Avanti ones that you can put a wooden paddle pop stick into. It makes them feel like a real iceblock. So take the flesh of one giant mango and insert it into your blender. Add the flesh of half a pineapple, cut that really hard core bit out. Add one lime, from which you have removed the peel and hopefully saved the zest for cola syrup. Add a third of a cup of coconut cream. You put the rest of the tin into a little Decor plastic container for the next batch that you will inevitably be making the next time Graham Creed talks about high pressure systems over central Australia. Press the Smoothie button on the aforementioned fancy blender. I get about twelve ice blocks out of this, which annoys me a little because the moulds are in sets of eight. The kids whinge a little about the fibrousness of the result, because I will insist on making the iceblocks with an actual pineapple rather than a chemical facsimile, but it’s still their favourite.

So far.

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February 7, 2013

Super for Beginners

I was going to write about the lemon ricotta muffins which are currently holding off my kids from eating the cat, but they’re going to have to wait. For I have spent the day deep in treasury and I think there’s a lot about super you don’t know. In fact, I’m sure there is.

You may think that you don’t need to know about super. What would I, a humble housewife, have to do with it anyway? I, my friends, am treasurer for the Sydney University Graduate Choir. They employ a conductor, a rehearsal pianist, orchestra members and soloists. They all have to be paid super. It’s all very unpleasant, but it’s true, I’ve tried to wriggle out of it. Not as hard as the musicians have, though, they hate all that financial stuff, except for the getting paid bit. If you are a not for profit, an association, a company, a family trust, incorporated or not, you have to pay super if you pay any individual over $450 in one month. It doesn’t matter if they give you an ABN or come through an agency, or if they try to have super waived in their contract, you still have to pay it. It doesn’t matter if they’re still studying at the Con. It doesn’t matter if they don’t even have a super fund. You have to pick one and set them up and pay it in there, causing them innumerable headaches in later life.

I tell you what, there’s a niche in the market for someone to cater to organisations like us. Medicare, don’t ask me why, run a clearing house to make it easy for small businesses to pay super to their less than twenty employees. Because of employee choice, most employees will have different super funds, which means that every quarter you have to make a payment to each of those twenty institutions, each of which have their own logins and methods of payment. Through Medicare you can just set it all up and type it in like a spreadsheet. We can’t have that though, oh no. We have more than twenty employees. Usually not all at the same time, and many of them only once before they become too expensive for us to afford. So after I pay their super I’ll get letters from their super funds for years after wondering why I’m not paying in a quarterly amount. I just toss them in the recycling. The system isn’t set up for organisations like ours.

There’s also the fairly important matter of calculating the amounts you are required to pay. Well, it’s just 9%, everybody knows that. Ah yes, but 9% of what? It took me ages to figure it out, I’m not the type just to tap it into a Super Calculator, I want to know what’s going on. We pay our artists nice round numbers. Say we agree to pay a lovely young soloist $600 for a moderately taxing role in the Messiah. $600 is the total amount we’re prepared to fork over, we’re not paying super on top of it. You might think that you calculate 9% of $600 and take it off the total, but you would be very very wrong indeed. $600 is the bucks that they get in their bank account plus their 9% super so, follow me closely here, $600 is actually 109% of the payment they get. You divide the $600 by 109 then multiply it by 100, shove that into their bank account and spend three hours attempting to put the rest into their super account.

Man I hope I’ve got all that right. Do you want to hear about the Register of Cultural Organisations next? It’s almost as riveting. Oh, and there’s the Australian Charities and Not for Profit Commission just fired up, it’s the next thing on my list to fill my fluffy little head with. Keeps me off the streets, you know.

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February 6, 2013

Swimming Carnival Accessories

“Mum, we’re allowed to dress up for the swimming carnival! Can you make me something?”. Year 7 is so exciting for the Muffet, they’re allowed just that little bit more freedom and it’s going to their heads. Swimming carnival is on Friday, and it isn’t compulsory to attend, unlike primary school. It is, however, very strongly encouraged and the Muffet wouldn’t miss it for quids. Especially as you can dress up. Looks like it’s time to get out the ole sewing machine again.

The first thing is to decide what to make. A hat? Hair’s going to be wet for some of the time, so no. Some kind of outfit? I still haven’t recovered from the school play. You know what I’m pretty good at. Capes. They’re only a step up from baby blankets and I’ve made wizard ones, fairy ones, a Red Riding Hood and a Jedi one. With or without hoods, they are dead easy and you don’t need a pattern. Muffet wants a swirly one in her house colours, so I stuff her house shirt in my handbag and it’s off to Spotlight I go.

Her house colour is maroon, so if we lived in Brisbane I’m sure the whole house would be decked out in footy memorabilia. As it is, I’m surprised at the choice of materials available that exactly match her shirt. Dance satin is on special, so I get three metres of it and six metres of maroon fringe, plus some black and white balls of that yarn you knit into spirally scarves and a set of knitting needles to replace the ones the dog ate.

For a travelling cape you make trapezoid panels, a big one for the back and two halves for the front and it sits close to the body. For a swirly cape you need a semicircle. I spread the material out on the floor and measure the width. It’s one hundred and thirteen centimetres, so I draw on the wrong side a semicircle of that radius. See, you should pay attention in maths. I cut out a semicircle for the neck of radius twenty centimetres. I’m not going to get all fussy about finishing touches, but I don’t want to leave the neck edge raw and I don’t want to muck about with facing and fusible interfacing, so I make a smaller cape to shoulder height to sit on top with exactly the same neck cutout. This has a fifty centimetre radius. I hem the front edges of the larger and smaller capes, then sew the maroon fringing around the edge of the smaller cape. Then, concentrating tensely, I place the shiny side of the short cape against the rough side of the long cape, line the neck edges up and sew them together. I got it right first time! I don’t even need to press the seams as the material is heavy enough to sit properly. A tab of Velcro at the neck corners and I’m done in under an hour.

How popular am I going to be when the Muffet gets home? But then again, how long will that popularity last?

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