I touched on this subject in a comment to my last entry, but it's worth taking up in more detail. Picture, if you will, a JPEG of a beautiful woman wearing, er, something white (I have to be careful in order to avoid risking a testosterone explosion from at least two gentlemen here... you know who you are!) Unfortunately, the original picture is so preposterously red that the poor lady looks like a boiled lobster, so you tinker with the colours, at which point you suddenly discover she's wearing green.

I've done my best and compromised to the limit of my ability, but there are some pictures - particularly from Charnos and Silhouette - where it has turned out to be totally impossible to get both the style illustrated and the unfortunate model's skin to a believable colour simultaneously. I just want to know this: how on earth did they get the pictures to turn out so badly in the first place? Pictures with an ordinary colour cast are fairly common, and understandable - it usually just means they were taken in the wrong light, and it's easy enough to correct them. Pictures with a selective colour cast which affects the skin more than anything else, however, are a major headache. I'm just glad I've finished them all now.

Oh well. Apart from that I have invented Chocolate Noodle Pudding, which was a bit of a desperate measure because I had forgotten to buy any ice cream and I wasn't going to use the rest of those rice noodles for anything else. (I'll eat rice with enthusiasm, brown for preference, but I am forced to conclude I don't much like rice noodles - they don't taste of anything.) I was hoping all the chocolate, ginger, cinnamon and so on would disguise the noodles, but it doesn't really. Perhaps David will eat the other three pots (it's very rich, so one ordinary serving of noodles makes four small pots of this stuff). He'll eat most sweet things without asking too many questions. ;-)

This evening I am going to write reams of valuable advice about caring for silk and other things useful to know, but since I shall be listening to the play-offs at the same time I may need to check it over in the morning!

I woke up late (perhaps inevitably), so this will be quick. Just to say that unless anything really untoward happens to prevent it, duck-feeding is scheduled for tomorrow.

Double yay with extra fries! :-)

If you've landed here on a random trawl, sorry about this. My journal is now friends only. It wasn't something I wished to do, but unfortunately I had a security scare, so I didn't really have an option.

If you would like me to add you, leave a comment and I'll consider it, though I can't promise that I'll actually add you because my friends list is already quite full. Please don't just add me without commenting, as I have an extremely busy life and I may not necessarily notice that you've added me. If you don't get a reply to a comment within a day or two, it means I won't be adding you; please don't take this personally - it probably means no more than that I've run out of room. I comment my friends regularly, and this takes quite a lot of time to do properly.

(NB This entry has been heavily edited, so I've screened all the comments to the original entry because they no longer directly follow from it. Subsequent requests to be added will not be screened.)

Whoever you are, thanks for visiting, and enjoy your day. :-)

This afternoon I went and had coffee with Nicola. Well, we always call it coffee, but what invariably happens is that she has a cup of tea and I have a glass of orange juice. We don't usually eat anything, but since neither of us had had lunch, we were hungry. I decided this was the moment to try the chocolate fudge cake, which always looks very tempting but far too much for me; for years I've been telling myself that I just had to try it one day. So this was the day, and Nicola, rather more restrainedly, had a scone. I have to say that there really is such a thing as too much chocolate; the cake was just as lovely as it looked, but I couldn't finish it, and I didn't feel inclined to eat anything else when I got home!

Nicola's baby is due in three and a half weeks, so she is quite impressively sized at the moment and not exactly moving around very fast. She looks very well for it, though - she clearly hasn't got any of the complications that Sue had with Rachael. She said the cats had to go to the vet the other day for their booster injections, for obvious reasons, but it proved to be an unexpectedly traumatic experience because they had only the one cat box. Although the cats are sisters, they don't get on in the least, and not even Mark could persuade them both to get into the same box. I'm not sure it would have been advisable; it wouldn't have been very nice if they had ended up trying to kill each other. They tried to borrow one from a neighbour, but she wasn't in, so eventually one of the cats got taken to the vet in one of those large all-purpose cardboard boxes from Ikea. I said if it ever happened again, they were welcome to borrow mine. I've taken kittens to the vet in a cardboard box, but I'd hesitate to do it for a full-grown and determined cat.

After Nicola left, I thought I'd go and have a browse round the fabric department in case there was anything suitable for that historical costume pattern, which there was, but at £35 a metre it was really rather out of the question. However, I did find some very pretty pastel polka-dot satin at half price, and I immediately thought of little Rachael. So I had a look through the Vogue catalogue and came up with number 7000, a sweet little dress and jacket; I bought that, some of the satin, some matching plain peachskin microfibre for the dress collar and the jacket (that stuff is vile to sew by hand, but it will be worth it for the effect), and a bit of lining fabric for the jacket. I had to get some more money out of the cash machine to get a zip, a couple of buttons, a pack of interfacing and some thread, so by the time I'd finished I must have spent about £25. I wouldn't spend that on anyone else, but then she is my only niece :-). The satin came in a choice of sugar pink, aqua or lavender, and I decided the lavender would look best with her hair. I may even be tempted to buy or make her a string of beads to match, as long as I can be sure I've got something which will be reasonably robust in the face of two-year-old curiosity. Sue and Daryl tend to put her in rather practical, everyday things, but every little girl should have something nice for going to birthday parties as well.

This evening I'm going to finish cataloguing David's stock, and with a bit of luck making a good start on the descriptions for the website. He's already in something of a tizzy over Harrogate. I shall bring a good book; I shall certainly get my tasks there finished well before he finishes his, and honestly, once you've seen one knicker show, you've seen them all.