It was strawberry.

Having labelled up all the wine bottles, LSF came to visit, sniffed the wine before sampling and declared it strawberry.  It is strawberry wine.  I am a doofus with no sense of smell.

All things plum

With regards to the Summer of Good Intentions this definitely counts as Making & Doing and Liking.  All Things Plum.

 Scrumping is one of my favourite pastimes from July to October with a 'bit of a wander' armed with a few carrier bags generally resulting in returning home with some sort of bounty.  This week I have been mainly picking wild plums of the variety that grow in parks, along canal sides, and in other random places.  They look like soft jewels hanging from the trees and at their most ripe fall to the ground in large amounts filling many bags.  But what to do with them?  I love plums but you can have too much of a good thing.  My Mum's answer is always jam; mine, wine but also chutney and pickle too.  So this week I embarked on a making spree involving bottling last years plum wine and making a few chutneys.

Wine from last year has been bubbling and gently popping away in my spare room.  Yellow plum, red cherry plum and a lovely mixed plum  looked lovely and bright in their demijons.  This week the mixed plum amber-rose was ready for bottling and a small amount of sampling.  I can report that it is nice although I think I should probably invest in a hydrometer as it is pretty potent.  The image below really doesn't do the colour justice.  There are 6 bottles, with another 12 to come which should be ready in time for Christmas.

Next is chutney.  So far, I have made two: a sweet and sour mixed plum and a spiced red plum.  I never stick to, write down or remember any recipe so it's different each time.  The spiced red plum below has raisins, dates, apples, all spice, ginger, mace, chilli and pepper, amongst other things.  One of the most satisfying and easy things to make.

            The mixture above becomes the very rich chutney on the right below.
Absolutely lovely with plum wine and salad from the garden.

I have managed to label these ones whilst still being able to remember what they are.  There are many jars and bottles in my cupboard with slightly ambiguous labeling, most notable being 'Spiced Apple Chutney with or without walnuts as I can't remember whether I put them in' and ' Red fruit wine 2008'.  You are more than welcome to come round for literally a random sampling.

The summer of good intentions: part 1

As a teacher and craftsperson the Summer holidays seem like a glorious expanse of time in which to just make and do.  Last year my garden looked lovely, I sat in it and drank tea, made bits and pieces, and generally felt quite content.  The problem is that I haven't been feeling so glorious recently and contentment has been seeping away gradually over the year. What's more Miss Bertie will be leaving her Little Worcester House in November which is a long way off but so close too.  Many things have changed and decisions have to be made; lots of thinking, talking and consuming of tea has taken place, and so the summer of good intentions has begun.

Making and doing: Losing one's making and doing mojo is not a nice thing, especially as your abilities can diminish making a return to it quite demoralising.  So, the most important part of the summer is to ensure I make something every day even if it doesn't come out well.  Finishing some of the things I've started would also help but let's not dwell on that.  One step at a time.

Deciding what I like: Classic, high brow film 'Runaway Bride' has Julia Roberts trying different ways of cooking eggs to decide which she likes as she has spent so long eating them the way her boyfriend at the time has them.  I'm ashamed to say that I am like that and as a result I don't actually know what I like. Seriously, I really don't and as a result I have books, cds, films and clothes that are like elephants in my wardrobes, shelves and often boxes under the bed.  This leads onto...

The Big Sort Out: The steady stream of random boxes of stuff being returned to me from my various previous abodes and phases has subsided.  I have a huge amount of stuff.  The idea of moving all of this anywhere is daunting and if it wasn't illegal (and a very bad idea really) I would be tempted to set fire to the house and my belongings, and begin again as an unencumbered free spirit.  However, this is my mess and I should tidy it up.
Another aspect of this is that I'm naturally a little shy and to overcome this have become chameleon like in order to fit in.   I have looked through some of the boxes and wondered in dismay at what possessed me to want to acquire such things.  The task is huge but luckily Little Sister Fanny has offered her ruthless sorting services for a few days and we're going to go through it all, getting rid of the old, to make way for the new.

So, that's it.  The summer of good intentions.  Let it begin.

Alfresco sophistication and simple picnic pleasures

Once a year my family go on an outting, a big family picnic to which all my paternal relatives are invited.  We meet for coffee and a chat, wander round some stately pile, a zoo, museum or some such place, and then have a picnic followed by some games and afternoon tea.  This has occured every year for far longer than I have been alive and is always a pleasure.  As you can imagine, over such a long time picnic sets have come and gone, and plastic has taken over.  The smell of a plastic lunch box is disappointing; it doesn't matter what you put in it, the smell is always the same.  So imagine my delight when I came upon this beauty. 

Floating on a cloud of exhaustion, relief and pay day confidence I had spied this in a charity shop and applied the rule 'If x is still there when I go back then it's meant to be."  It was still there.  It was meant to be.  I handed over my hard earned food shopping money and bought it. 

 Complete, beautiful and just in time for the Family Picnic I made up the thermos flasks with tea to drink out of the china cups & saucers, and ensured that my picnic fayre required the use of plates, cutlery and a little light seasoning.  The pleasure to be had from such alfresco sophistication should not be underestimated and plans have already been made for further use.

Strawberries Galore

A true sign that summer is here is when strawberries begin to appear in my garden.  They remind me of the huge bowls of them my grandmother, Nana Doc, would prepare  for family picnics and get togethers, pick-your-own where we'd sneak more into our mouths than the cardboard baskets, Little Sister Fanny with blond ringlets innocently denying eating them whilst having the red juice smeared all round her mouth, and Tess Durbeyfield being seduced by strawberries offered by Angel Clare.
I love strawberries.
They're simple yet sophisticated, seductive in their shiny red plumpness either perfectly shaped or almost indecently nobbly, and simply the most decadent food ever when sun warmed and plucked straight off the plant into my mouth.   The indulgent pleasure of sitting in my garden eating them is only matched by sharing this simple delight...but not with slugs or woodlice. I'm getting pretty fed up of wandering into the garden each morning to find that the luscious looking nearly ripe strawberry I'd had my eye on the night before has been devoured.  So last Thursday, having had a couple of pints of pop, I returned home to enjoy another strawberry related activity: late night slug hunting.  Slightly inebriated I rifle through my camping equipment to find my head torch and then I'm ready and armed.  Should any neighbours look over they must think I've cracked as I make my way around the garden in an unladylike squatted position picking over leaves and hurling slugs over the fence. Yet this isn't the worst of my crimes.  I am normally a fairly compassionate person who follows a vegan diet and hates the idea of killing another living thing.  Slugs are my exception.  Over the fence is the Worcester branch of the St. John's Ambulance and onto their car park land my flying slugs.  It's survival of the fittest; part of me hopes they squelch their slimy way somewhere else knowing they are not welcome in my garden, the other part quite enjoys the irony of slugs being run over by ambulances.  So there's the truth. I would say I'm sorry, but I'm not.

Will hotwater bottles make me a millionaire?

I have been hoarding materials, scraps of fabric, buttons, beads and other such haberdashery delights for many years.  I'm like a magpie and can't bear to throw anything away, but even I have realised that unless I either stop collecting stuff or do something with it I'm going to hoard myself into a corner, be found smothered to death by a toppled tower of beautiful fabrics; or turn into a dusty, vintage clad Miss Haversham-type character wandering amongst islands of unfinished creativity, blindly touching the precious things and muttering memories of my unrealised intentions, whilst living in abject poverty and squalor.
Being slightly low on funds at important times such as Christmas and birthdays I've always made things and part of my defence for continuing to hoard is that anything can be created in an emergency.  This Christmas I bought two half-size hotwater bottles from Poundland and made covers for them from some beautiful, accidentally felted cashmere jumpers that had been given to me (do donations count as part of my hoard?)

I was so pleased with these that I immediately went out and bought 15 more hotwater bottles, and more whenever I saw them, with great plans to become a hotwater bottle millionaire by Christmas 2011.  They have resided in a cardboard box underneath a pile of fabric for the past 4 months.  However, the New Plan involves making things to make me happy, which will hopefully also make some money, and these are my first step.  I'll keep you posted.

The wedding outfit.

Wedding invitations are beginning to arrive more regularly.  It's that time of life when my peers are making big commitments.  Having a sedate social life which requires disappointingly few opportunities to dress up makes these events all the more exciting.  You'd think with months to prepare I would have planned, bought or made everything well in advance.  This is never the case.  I am the Queen of the last minute; if buttons were sewn on and hems in place before leaving I would be certain that something was wrong.  As far as I'm concerned the lighting for putting on make up is best in a taxi, bus, passenger seat, reflection of a shop or car window near to the venue; mascara and eyeliner should be applied at traffic lights, and nail varnish goes on quite well over speed bumps.
So, to the outfit. Not content with my already heavy workload or stress levels I decided to make a jumpsuit without a pattern and combining 2 parts of different outfits from patterns in 2 sizes.  Why make things easy when you can over complicate to the max?

Flaired palazzo pants with the top half of a dress.

Cutting it short, it all worked out.

The jumpsuit complete, I bought  hideously naff jacket from  charity shop, shortened it, made some matching buttons, and sewed in some of the jumpsuit fabric inside the cuff to tie it all together.  

As I've said, time management is not my strong point.  The jacket was altered and buttons made on the train from Worcester to Dorset on the morning of the wedding, the button corsage broach was made in my tent 20 minutes before we left for the church, and hair and make up was done in the back of the car.  No obliging shop windows meant I didn't actually see the outfit on in it's entirety until I got home.  Lucky, very lucky.

The 5 year coat.

Right, I started this coat a while ago and then somehow it got left, life moved on and it got forgotten.  Well, I've had a sort out and got it finished a couple of weeks ago.  I avoided buttonholes as they are not my forte, so it has giant poppers instead with lovely vintage buttons on the front.
The coat is a classic princess cut with tabs at each side on a high waist.  The fabric is a a beautiful loose plaid.  It was 50p/m in the John Lewis sale so,  getting very carried away I bought 15 metres.  The coat has take 3.5m.  I have a lot left.  Perhaps it should form the basis of a collection?  It could become my 'signature' fabric. Anyway, here is a completed coat.  Only 11.5 metres to go.  Any suggestions?

Hiatus

Well, as you can the blog didn't launch with much energy.  Many things have changed so hopefully I can keep this up to date regularly.