beetrootle tootle

We are going on holiday next week, hooray. But we also had a glut of beetroot come ready at the same time, which we didn't want to go woody or get eaten by slugs. So I spent what I intended to be a day and ended up being the whole weekend in the kitchen. And as well as beetrooty things (pickled beetroot, beetroot relish,beetroot lip balm and roast beetroot hummus), I made mint syrup, piccalilli, and bottled apple and rhubarb.

Here are the results:





The inspirations came from a bunch of sources. The Mint syrup recipe was from make grow gather

The other recipes came from the Soil Association preserving book, which is amazing and I highly recommend it. And the beetroot hummus inspiration is from the River Cottage Everyday cook book.

The three books below seem to be where I'm drawing a fair bit of inspiration lately:



One was a wedding present from lovely friends in northern Ireland, the other a Christmas present, and one was a no-particular-reason present from Malcolm. I love the ease of the internet for recipes, but nothing beats leafing though a beautifully put together recipe book.

I love the colour of the beetroot hummus, wow, it's surreal. Looked great on the plate next to my parsley and sunflower pesto, with roast veg.



Here's the beetroot lip tint - World sweet world posted a project about this, but rather than follow their recipe I just pinched the idea and added a boiled down concentrated beetroot juice to some of my moisturiser - made a few months back, except with double the beeswax in it than the original recipe, so it's solid at room temperature and melts to touch. scrumptious colour, it just stains your lips, and it tastes sweet and beety.



Finally - look at this gorgeous fat spider living in our tomatoes. He spins lovely webs, but when I saw him this particular evening, he was feasting on some unfortunate ladybird.



I know I promised to put some felting on next, I have some sweet little projects recently completed - however, today I handed them over to Jo at Darn it and Stitch to photograph to advertise our upcoming felting workshops. This lovely and enterprising lady has focused her love of crafting and has opened a much needed haberdashery shop in Oxford. She has great taste and stocks a small but lovely selections of trimmings, fastenings and other crafty goodies. Whoop whoop - will blog about felting after our holidays. Till then....

T shirt shoes

My ever stylish friend Emma had some amazing shoes on the other day, made from stretch T-shirt knit, I though they were proper groovy. I also though they wouldn't be too hard to make. Which I shelved away in the back of my mind. Then, about three days later on one of the blogs I follow was a step by step, very nicely put together set of instructions.

Game on! here's the results - I'm not entirely happy with the result, I should have looked on this to that first and seen what glue to use. Instead, being impatient, I barged on ahead with a couple of charity shop t-shirts and flip flops and now have slightly messy glueish looking shoes. Also, the orange pair are from VERY stretchy fabric, which means when you walk in them they slop around a bit. Keep in mind for next time. Still pretty though, check them out...

Summer dresses and a broach

I'm not a seamstress at the best of times, but I do like dresses. They always look too complex, and the one or two half-hearted attempts I've made to make a dress from a pattern has never been a raging success.

but... here's some outworkings of dresses inspired by the warmer weather, and some fun 'up-cycling'.

The first one is a too-big mans shirt from a charity shop, and a £1 t-shirt from a charity shop, merged together. Add a nice green belt and voila. No pattern required.





The second one is composed of a tunic that wasn't quite long enough and a sleeveless top that wasn't quite long enough. Add the bottom 3/4 of the tunic to the top, and voila, another dress. I particularly like this one, with a belt, it's got a good high 50's waist (and it looks better on)





The last one is made from ribbing fabric and just sewed it pretty much straight up and down, and cut it without hemming, because ribbing doesn't fray easily. It's my fun take on a 1920's flapper dress. The best bit of all is the flowers, which are just different sized circles held together with a button, which then inspired me to make a broach.








The Broach, again is just circles of different fabric, but zig-zagged to stop the fray from going past the stitching. Great way to use up sripbbits and scrabbits of fabric too pretty to throw away. In the meantime, I've got my felting mojo back again will be blogging soon about that... watch this space.

flora

Two things that make my world more lovely at the moment: My African Violet, that I purchased for 26p from a charity shop and now lives happily in a tea cup, has flowered! African violets make me think of my Grandmum, who always keeps a few of them on her kitchen windowsill.




Also, on midsummer's day, which this year was our two year engagement anniversary, Malcolm and I bought our first ever orchid, a purple dendrobium. It has been looking lovely for over a month now...

Ghost forest

My usual trip to and from work each day takes me past one of my favourite Oxford places, the natural history and Pitt Rivers Musuem, it's exactly how I think a museum should be, dinosaur skeletons, a stuffed Kakapo, and cases full of live (1) giant millipedes or chongololos, as we knew them as kids in Zimbabwe. It houses the dodo that was the inspiration for from Alice in Wonderland's dodo. And it has some shrunken human heads, seriously creepy specimens.

It also owns almost 2/3rds of the collection of Wilfred Thesiger's African photographs, and is currently exhibiting some of these.

Here's a couple of photos that really don't do the place justice:







And Mum, this one's just for you...




But, I digress... one morning, when I was cycling past, I saw lots of activity, and trucks and cranes and all sorts. And later that day, Ghost Forest was there, on the lawn of the Museum. It gave me goosebumps, it's a stunning exhibition, an incredible feat of logistics to raise awareness of the plight of rain forests. I felt like I was walking among the bones of giants.

bunting fun-thing punting

I have been a bit slow to catch on to the bunting fever that seems to have struck my crafty friends. but now, I seem to have come down with it big time. It all began when I was in London helping the site vibing team for Greenbelt, lead by the well talented Saga Arpino (great name too) get things ready for Greenbelt in August. I sewed a fair few flags... and a bit of bunting ...and when I got home all I could think of was the fabulous fabrics stashed away in our little loft. I do love fabric.

Witness the results... mmmmm. it's like a portable, festive patchwork quilt. recycling, up cycling, festivality bunting tastic.







this last pic just cos i like it, when in oxford, one goes punting in the summer time. Here's Malcolm in fine style...

Quilting (of sorts)

Here's the final outworking of a process that took more than six months in the making.

We wanted to give a really unique wedding present to Mrs and Mrs Rutherford

So we decided to make a quilt, based on a photo that Malcolm took, of the side of an old boat, in Brittany, France.






All the fabric was second hand, bought at the glouster green market and at charity shops and at orinoco. we bought a lot of vintage thread too, and a new bamboo and cotton inner.

with no idea how to actually make a quilt, and no prior experience embarking on a creative project together we didn't realise quite what an undertaking it was going to be....





We soon found our we had quite different working styles. I am not a planner, or a measurer. Malcolm is. I have a definate creative vision that I am quite sure about, but also not entirely good at communicating. We eventually figure out it was best to discuss, and then designate, and go away and work on the quilt at seperate times. Malcolm did a lot of sewing while watching the winter olympics. It was even quite fun to see it progress from work that each other had done.





We made the biggest piece of nuno felting I think I'll ever make, using merino and silk.








We wanted it to have the feeling of the sea, of texture and roughness, but beauty at the same time. it had to look rugged like the side of the boat that inspired it. We sewd on glass beads to make it sparkle in places and put hundreds of little stitches on it. We were pretty happy with the end result, and I think Mr and Mrs Rutherford were too :-)

elderflower champagne.

I'm a little bit crazy for elderflowers (Sambuccas Nigra). Their strong, heady perfume is so intense it almost borders on unpleasantness. In fact they are fairly toxic plants (but people have been drinking and cooking with them for years so hopefully we'll be ok). They only flower for a few weeks, late may till late June this year in the UK.

So we went out just before a thunderstorm, and gathered bagfuls of them.

I used this recipe posted on selfsufficientish (great name for a blog)

It's a nice sloppy recipe, I'm not one for precision. I put the flowers and sugar into our 25 litre brewing bucket, and left it to stew, with a bit of citric acid added, for 3 days, stirring it once a day. Then I strained it, and bottled half of it as cordial. I diluted the rest of it a little more,added some cider yeast (tolerates higher alcohol), left it a couple more days, then bottled it. Now we have oodles of fizzy, fragrant, fairly alcoholic 'champagne'. I've kept 4 more litres in demijohns, and once it's stable and has stopped fermenting I will bottle it, keep it for 3 months and voila, wine. Though I hold our less hope for our wine, our elderberry wine is still foul. I'm holding out hope for it to mellow with time. I'm chuffed, cordial, champagne and wine from one picking, and relatively little effort. Yum.

The age of the image

A while back, I made a bit of a comment about how the image is so prevalent in our digitised world. Well, I was pleased to hear one woman's perspective about the impact of exactly this. Professor Jean Seaton, professor of Media History at University of Westminster and author of 'Power without responsibility, came and did a Wednesday seminar for the Reuter's Institute (my work).

According to Prof. Seaton, the trend toward visualisation in the way media covers issues has impacted politics significantly. Not only do we now judge politicians a whole lot more by their looks, their carefully managed 'image', but also there is a breakdown in the private/public divide. Politicians are almost guaranteed to have all aspects of their life and past scrutinised intently, regardless of how it affects their actual ability to lead. Brings to mind Bill Clinton, who smoked but 'did not inhale' a certain substance while at Oxford University. Presumably in the same way he 'did not have sexual relations' with that woman. A vegetarian cookbook I once owned had a few interesting facts in its inside cover - of two real world leaders, one was a teetotaler, a vegetarian and exercised regularly. The other smoked, drank and was blatantly sexist, and rather portly. Who would you rather have as your leader? the first was Hitler, the second Churchill. Martin Luther king apparently cheated on his wife (which the FBI then used to blackmail him). Seemingly upright private lives don't necessarily mean someone will be a good leader. And maybe, vice versa. Its a strange issue, what is private and what is public, and how these interact.

As far as gender goes, the visual trend puts further pressure on women, as we often saw in NZ one of the favourite things to criticise about Helen Clark was her looks, and her 'mannish' voice, in a way that just didn't happen for male prime ministers. In the UK, during the election campaign, brutal emphasis was put on what the candidate's wives wore. As if that was their major role in life. We are what we look like, apparently.

The other thing Prof Seaton talked about was the way in which the media has power to set the agenda - not just in terms of how things are discussed, but what gets discussed in the first place. What is determined as news. In particular, things that have good 'images' to go with them tend to be news. Climate change is a tricky one to report on partly for this reason. One of the other speakers who put on a seminar for my work talked about the increasing number of journalists being killed while reporting. In part, this is due to the demand for close up, dramatic, centre of action images, which places the journalists and cameramen in much more risky situations.

On a lighter note, Malcolm often look out for good headlines, particularly small NZ newspapers come up with some stunners. "elderly woman found in home" "swimmer gets stung by bee" are two particularly ridiculous ones. In the UK, there was one about a horse listening to a radio show. Yep. One of these days I'll get around to reading Chomsky, I have a feeling he'd have a thing to say about the trivialisation of news. infotainment again.

In other news, Malcolm has started a new blog that's gorgeous. take a peek.

new and exciting discoveries

I love finding new bands. I think 'discovering' an artist whose music you connect to and enjoy is a bit of a giant cosmic hug of niceness.

here's some huggly goodness that has come my way in the last 18 or so months (cos if i'm still listening to and loving a 'new' artist I've heard in 18th months it's pretty sure they're around to stay)

Alela Diane

Andrew Bird

The Unthanks

Micah P Hinson

Fever Ray

Mumford and Sons

Kings of Convenience

Feist

Daniel Knox


and recently, some oxford goodness, Stornaway.

aaaah. music.

We just recently got to go the 'wood' festival, a little baby eco-fest, and it was fantastic. and soon, we're going to go to Truck, the bigger more indy rock version of wood.

Here's some pics of wood, including the unthanks, and trevor moss & hannah lou.