Why is it that, no matter how hard you try, the last couple of months of the year always disappear into a cloud of stress and rush and sleep deprivation?? And, in my case, crochet yarn - I currently have no less that four unfinished projects sitting around. I'd hoped to finish them all by the end of the year, but, erm, it's not going to happen... 

Aside from the flying crochet yarn, however, November and December have been pretty good for making here at Casa P&P. Not least because I did finish a couple of things, and I'm just tickled pink by how well they turned out.

1. Cardboard Box Bus - A super-easy toy made out of cardboard, paper and repurposed castors. Here is the tutorial.

2. A crochet scarf and beanie for the Bean! I love them, he has decided to just about tolerate the hat. And the scarf? Let's not go there. 
You can find a link to the beanie pattern in this write-up on it. I used the same motif for the scarf, and I'm currently trying to write up the pattern for it (it's surprisingly hard to do even though the scarf itself is easy!). 

3. A crochet granny square tutorial, my very own and very first! It's for the ongoing saga that is my "crochet meets patchwork" blanket. On hiatus until all the winter woollies are done. 

1. A big stack of foam blocks covered in pretty fabric. Why am I making these? Well, I bought a new DSLR and vowed I could make a better bag than the ugly and over-priced black things you get in the shop... and so I had better do it! It will look great, just wait and see (though goodness knows when). 

2. A crochet woolly jumper for the Bean, made from the loveliest rainbow yarn. Was meant to be done by Christmas, probably won't be, yadda yadda ya...

3. The crochet shrug of doom. I was so certain of the pattern and the colours when I bought this beautiful yarn, but it hasn't at all worked out the way I'd imagined it. Three weeks later I'm still screaming at it and it was meant to be finished by yadda bloody yadda YA...

It's a case of storm before the quiet here at Casa P&P, in that there are a mere four days of working, writing and making left before we head off to see our families for the festive season. We'll be gone for a whole two weeks, and I plan to do very little. 

In the meantime, we are scrabbling around the fridge and cupboards like mice, trying to finish every last crumb. As the week goes on I expect there to be some rather odd and minimalist dinners, but for today I'm planning this delicious pasta dish:

It's my go-to dish for those times when I'm in a rush but I still want to put something nutritious on the table. For when there's but a few staples in the cupboard, and for when I want to make our food budget stretch a bit further.

And so it's a bit of a gem, this dish, because as well as doing all that it tastes lovely. For it to really work it's best to use fresh and ripe cherry tomatoes, but if those are thin on the ground tinned tomatoes will be okay too. 

Serves: 4
Pots/pans to be washed up afterwards: 2 
Prep time: 10 mins
Cooking time: 10 mins

Ingredients
1 tin borlotti beans, drained
2 handfuls of cherry tomatoes, quartered
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 tsp of dried herbs, such as oregano, thyme or basil
250 g pasta (ribbed pasta is best)
olive oil
salt & pepper
grated Parmesan cheese, to serve

1. Boil the pasta according to the packet instructions.

2. While the pasta is cooking, heat a generous tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan. Add the cherry tomatoes and sprinkle with a pinch of salt. Simmer on a medium heat.

3. After 5 or so minutes (or once the tomatoes have started to disintegrate), add the borlotti beans, the herbs and the garlic. Stir to combine, then lower the heat and simmer for another 5 minutes. Season to taste. 

4. Drain the pasta & stir in the sauce. Serve with grated Parmesan and an extra drizzle of good quality olive oil.

Do you have any cheap, "cupboard staple" type dishes?

Come say hello: 

Happy blogiversay toooo meeee! December 10th marked Pasta & Patchwork's first birthday, so it's time for a litlle more Blog Love. After telling you about my top 5 blogs last week, in this post I'll be sharing my top 5 Pasta & Patchwork posts - as decided by you as well as me! 

But first for a little soppy moment: a huge thank you to everyone who has read and commented on my posts over the past year. It really means a lot to me, knowing that this dumping space for my thoughts, photos and projects is, somehow, a good read for others.

Right! Anyway! Without futher ado...

Well, it's been fun to look back through the archives, and thank you again for being there with me over the past year! Do you ever read your old posts? Do you have favourites?

Come say hello:

I was born in Belgium and Mr P&P is originally Brazilian, but we both grew up in Britain. It makes the concept of home a very fluid one, but if we were ever going to "go back" anywhere, it would be to the UK. Or would we?

As I wrote last month, it is coming up to crunch time for us: Mr P&P's work contract runs out at the end of July, and so we are looking for new opportunities. Most likely it will be one in his field that clinches it. I'm the more mobile one, needing only a desk, a computer and a decent internet connection to do my job. M-Big, on the other hand, needs a big lab full of shiny and expensive toys, the kind you don't really stick in a box and take with you. So we will probably go wherever he finds work.

As we search, we discuss the pros and cons of this place, the possibilities of that, the maybes of another. We have discussed "going back" to the UK. There are things we miss: our family and friends, the way people are completely open-minded about food. Paperchase and White Stuff and Riverford veg boxes. Cheddar cheese, retail websites that don't look utterly pants. MINCE PIES and CRUMPETS. Countryside you can walk through, everywhere. 

Britain is as close to "home" as is possible for two serial globetrotters to have, but would we go back? There are things that tell me we wouldn't:

The little Unfathomables

Why must the ceilings be so low the lampshades are threatened with decapitation every time someone takes off a jumper in their vicinity? WHO thought it was a good idea to only construct taps that give you either freezing cold or SCALDING hot water? And why can I not get onto a train without having to sell off a kidney first? 

Could somebody tell me who's brilliant idea it was to construct walls out of a material so flimsy I fear my toddler will fly through one on a particularly boisterous day? Oh and when did it become acceptable to charge £2.30 for a cup of hot brown water?

The Important Stuff: finances and quality of life

No matter how hard I try, I cannot make the numbers add up. Our combined salary here in Italy is significantly lower than what it was in the UK, and yet it still goes further. Despite us living in Italy's most expensive city. Despite the astronomical social security contributions and the myriad Silly Little Taxes we're subjected to. Despite food prices being much higher than they were when we arrived four years ago. 

We arrived as a couple on a cheapskate adventure, we'd go back as a family of three. While I don't believe having children should mean breaking the bank, they're not exactly free, are they? In the UK we would pay four to five times as much for childcare as we do here. It probably wouldn't make financial sense for me to keep working, which I think is a hideous situation for a parent to be in. We wouldn't have a hope of owning our first home until we were at least 40. 
It just doesn't add up. 

The ways in which WE have changed

Leave for long enough, and you come back a stranger in your own country. You open your mouth and sound like a local, but your brain is desperately trying to understand the cultural references to TV shows you haven't seen, celebrities you don't know, songs you haven't heard. Someone's built a road where your school used to be, and what do you mean I can't go to HMV any more?

Somewhere along the line, Mr P&P and I stopped drinking cappuccino after 11AM. We stick to monochrome in winter and join the masses to prance about with our toddler at 5PM on a Sunday. Ice cream in winter now seems, without doubt, like a very good idea.

I stopped huffing at shop assistants to leave me alone, and started agreeing that, yes indeed, "you dunno wadda you want, LUIGI nos wadda you want!". I can no longer see the sense of a pasta dish with more than five ingredients, and pineapple on pizza? Give me strength. 

It might be that none of these things are serious enough to stop us from going back, should a great opportunity arise. Maybe we would take a deep breath and learn to ignore the brutality of Osborne's cuts, in much the same way as we Don't Talk About the seemingly never-ending and entirely unnecessary building works all over northern Italy. Perhaps we would come to see paying at least a tenner for lunch as completely normal. 

It's hard to imagine, though, after nearly four years.

Come say hello:

I close the door behind them and wait for the incomprehensible mixture of physical missing and mental relief to subside. When I finally turn around, this is what I see:

Shoes higgledy-piggledy across the entrance, as the toddler searched for a pair with optimum flingy-ness.

The kitchen counter: dummy, water bottle, tissues and the 56 cooking implements he managed to nick as I wrestled him into his jacket.

The bedroom smells of sleep and milk stains. An unfathomable number of discarded pyjama bits - how can there be four sets when there are three of us? Damp towel, wayward sock. Bedsheet draped over the toddler’s cot, looking a little forlorn now after it was shoved into the limelight this morning as an impromptu tent sail.

Back to the living room. The monkey sits by the sofa, as dazed and confused as I am by the sudden lack of noise. The train is stranded mid-choo. It smells unmistakably of my boys: coffee, cream cheese, fruit. I find yet another lonely, cold cup of tea.

Then the bathroom: more damp towels and a very stinky night nappy. I sigh.

I work from home and Mr P&P does the morning nursery run, so it befalls me to clean up in the quiet after the chaos. I grumble sometimes, about the towels, the dirty clothes, the half-eaten bananas that impinge on what is supposed to be work time.

Hours later, when I take a break from work and wander through the flat, I still find traces of my boy. A plastic spoon clacks under my slipper. I look at the clock and think - he must be having lunch now. Hope he’s okay, hope he’s having fun. A book forgotten on the kitchen counter reminds me of what I have to look forward to once he’s back home.

I grumble, sometimes. I wonder what it would be like to close the door to all the mess and work in a 'proper' office, sometimes. But then I think, no. I'd rather not. I wouldn't want to miss these ordinary Toddler Traces. 

Come say hello:

There are many reasons to start a blog - to share snippets of your lives with far-away relatives, to have a bit of a "show and tell" of recipes or patterns or whatever floats your boat, to find a home for all the thoughts rattling around in your head. I suspect, however, that for many bloggers it was the "Blog Crush" that gave them the push to get started: a rather embarrassing infatuation with someone else's photography, someone else's writing that seems to be the exact words you have been thinking all day but funnier. A hope that you could, in some way, emulate those crushes and add to the conversation they have started with such wit or wisdom. 

Or so it was for me, at least. As part of the Pasta & Patchwork Blog Birthday Love celebration, in this post I want to share my biggest Blog Crushes with you. 

Before this here blog was even a twinkle in my eye, I came across Free our Kids by Hattie Garlick. At the time I was very pregnant, very poor, and very fretful about how on earth we were going to afford the many expensive and absolutely essential essentials that babies seem to require. Then Hattie came along and pointed out that *newsflash* children may not actually need bucketloads of special stuff to be happy. That it's okay to think "this is only going to last us 3 months, I'm not buying it". That something second-hand or cobbled together at home will do the job just as well (if not better). 

And so it was Hattie's blog that inspired me to take a long, hard look at all the things baby stores were attempting to lure me in with and reject 90% of it. I started making things for my baby and, as he grew, my toddler. I found the courage to write about my projects here and lo and behold, other parents actually seem to like them. 

Free our Kids is still one of my favourite blogs. It's been hugely successful, and deservedly so; I personally love both the premise it is built on but also the writing, the humour, the very British self-deprication (Hattie if you read this, that's a compliment!). 

Through Free our Kids I found Lucy AitkenRead's blog, Lulastic and the Hippyshake. It is Inspiring with a capital "I". Lucy makes me question my parenting (in a good way) and has me shouting YES! THAT! at the screen with posts on why compliance in children is not a desirable thing. Thanks to her blog we go nappy-free as often as possible, co-sleep when we feel like it, and take pride in all that is shaky, second-hand and very much loved in our house. 

In my dreams I live a life as hippyshakey as hers (in reality I am too much of an urban chicken). Her blog is the reason I am badgering my husband for a camper van (despite not being able to drive) and one day, ONE DAY I will make this floor. I love Lulastic and the Hippyshake, and I truly think the world would be a better place if there were more Lucies around. 

Carie's blog, Space for the Butterflies, was one of the first I added to my Bloglovin feed once I'd set up Pasta & Patchwork a year ago, and one whose updates I still look forward to eagerly. In my head at least, I feel like I have found a kindred spirit, one as obsessed with yarn, books and babies as I am. 

Carie's blog also proves that, despite what the blogging "experts" will tell you, posts need not necessarily be limited to 250 words of SEO punchiness in order to captivate. When the words are as lovely, the photography as gorgeous, and the sentiments behind it all as honest as in Carie's posts, I will gladly get a cup of tea and settle down for the long read. 

Steph's blog Little E and Bean is a more recent addition to my feed, after I came across this post written for International Women's Day via twitter. It was a bit of a 'Eureka!' post for me, providing the kick up the proverbial I needed to write down my own thoughts on feminism and children and not be afraid of hitting 'Publish'.

Since then I've fast developed a bonafide blog crush. If I had the skill, I would take photographs as beautiful as hers. My writing would be linger with readers as long as her posts do with me. If I had the courage, I would pour out my heart with the same poignancy, truthfulness and insight. There is talk of a book. I hope so much that it materialises. 

Another one of the blogs that I've read since the very beginning of my own blogging journey, Katie's Hurrah for Gin is the stuff of belly laughs and snorted-up tea. It's my tonic for the days when the under-eye bags could house a family more comfortably than your average, over-priced British home, when I'm tempted to lob the blocks aimed at my head back, when the ridiculousness of parenting makes me wonder whether I should laugh or cry. Then I read Hurrah for Gin, and I always laugh:

So there you have it, the five blogs that top my must-read list. Of course, there are many more that I enjoy reading (my Bloglovin' feed has 94 blogs!) and I'm certain there are even more fantastic ones I've yet to come across. So go on, share the blog love and tell me which blogs you love the most in the comments.

Come say hello:

December is Pasta & Patchwork’s birthday month! To celebrate I want to spread some love and write about all the things I hold dear, the people who I look to for inspiration, the ideals I cling to. 

One of those ideals is to raise my son without making a great big dent in the planet. For this reason we use cloth nappies rather than disposables, and we also try to think very carefully about the toys we bring into our home. And so I'm very excited that ethical baby product retailer Babipur has provided two gorgeous soft toys from the Charlie Bears ‘Little Organics’ collection for me to give away! 

We were lucky enough to receive a Charlie Bear ourselves recently as part of a promotion. Meet Barley, the lovely lamb:

He’s made from 100% organic cotton plush fleece and the filling is made from 100% recycled polyester filling. Barley and the other Charlie Bears are therefore not only safe but also environmentally friendly, making them a perfect cuddly companion for babies and toddlers (especially grumpy ones who've just woken up from their nap...). 

The fleece the Charlie Bears are made of is wonderfully soft, and I also like the attention to detail. For example, the ears and paws are lined with corduroy, to add a little extra texture. The other thing I immediately noticed was the smell! When we got him out of the packaging he smelled woolly, like that smell you get when walk into an Edinburgh Woollen Mill shop. It might sound like an odd thing to get excited about, but it was such a nice change from the synthetic, plasticky pong that usually comes off toys!

The lovely people at Babipur have given us two Charlie Bears Little Organics soft toys to give away: MeMe the Monkey and FiFi the Rabbit

Image credits: babipur.co.uk

If you would like to be in with a chance of winning, please enter using the widget below. Good luck! 

Entries close on 10th December, when two winners will be chosen at random. The winners will be sent their Charlie Bear directly by Babipur. UK residents only. 


Disclosure: Babipur have provided two Charlie Bears 'Little Organics' soft toys for the purpose of this giveaway. No other compensation or payment was received, and all words & opinions are genuine and my own.