Happy Mother's Day!

Sadly, (well, not for her!) my mum lives in France, so we've had to make do with a 'phone call. I don't see as much of her as I'd like.

I have spent the day with my lovely 10 year old daughter, who has been very sweet. I was presented with a home made card and some daffs from the garden. Perfect, and I'm liking the gingham ribbon that she pinched out of one of my jars of goodies, nice touch!

In between listening to" the official chart" (her, not me, I'm unable to listen to radio 1 these days) and packing her up to go on a 3 day residential tomorrow, we have sat and crocheted together. I taught her a few basics (well, that's all I can do, really) last year and she took to it much quicker than I did. I feel really proud of her about lots of things and it's a particular joy to share an enjoyment of this craft with her.

My sweet, clever girl.

Happy mothers day!

Awesome sunset and other pretty things

Yesterday evening my neighbour came a knocking to let me know that "officially, there is an awesome sunset". She wasn't wrong, these pics don't really do it justice, but what colours. We live on a hill, sheletered by trees (thankfully, because it can get very windy), but beyond the trees have amazing panoramic views.

Finally (some) of the daffs are fully in bloom. These ones are by the pond, which is magical at the moment, full of very noisy toads, it's a lovely time of year when the weather is as good as it's been this week. We moved here a year ago and this time last year the weather couldn't have been worse. Snow, rain, and mud, mud, mud.

I am rubbish and remembering to take "before" pictures. In front of our barn has been looking decidedly shanty town for far too long, (probably just as well I don't have a before picture). It has been undergoing a bit of a tidy up. My right arm is a bit worse for wear from exposing some pretty slate cobbles from underneath mud and weeds, but it's starting to look prettier. In a rustic way.

Slacker blogger

Gosh, doesn't time whizz by? I want to get into this blogging malarky, but find that I need to use my spare time doing stuff and that doesn't leave so much time to blog about it. Then, people are kind enough to read it and leave comments and I want to reply, but can't always make the time. Have taken some pics that I would like to share over the last few weeks but have not managed to resize them to fit the blog.

Also, have gone back to work after a long time off sick, had a job interview and an offer (but not very local), so lots going on. And then, spent some time making the front "garden" of the shonkywonky one look better, and hand weeded a raised bed, but in the process have injured my right arm/ wrist in a way that is making it difficult to do stuff. Peeling spuds is torture and worst of all, crochet is not fun at the moment. Frustrating.

Anyway, I don't want to be a moaner - I have friends who are dealing with stuff that makes this all seem trivial - losing sight, cancer - it puts things into perspective, as do all of the horrible things going on in the wider world. I will try to aim for a positive and pretty post really soon.

Thank you to the visitors and people who have bothered to comment. I'll try to be less of a slacker over the next week!

Jen

Time for some colour and crochet

Everything looks better when the sky is blue and there is some sunshine. A £2 bargain found in a charity shop on my way to an interview last week.

Crocheted coathangers.

I have been making these with a view to selling them once I get an etsy shop up and running, along with bunting and other bits and bobs. I looked around for a while for a simple design that I could adapt. Each coathanger will be slightly different. The pattern I've used was inspired by this one on Fiona's lovely blog. 

http://marmaladerose.blogspot.com/2010/04/crochet-hanger.html 

So the first one I did was very similar to hers, except my flowers were lazier and didn't have leaves.

 

 

She uses double crochet, which makes a neat, dense fabric, but continuing the lazy theme, I find double crochet slow and more fiddly that crocheting trebles, so after completing the one above, I redesigned the pattern to suit me, using treble crochet (UK terms here). So the coathangers in the outside pictures at the top of the post were adapted from her pattern, but she has to take all credit. These hangers are all child-size, but I'm about to start on some adult-sized hangers, having just had a big batch arrive in the post.

The First Weekend of March. Pretty views, minging eggs and jobs being done.

It was cold in town this weekend, really cold. We went down for the local seed swap. (Thank you to Andy and Leanne http://www.theloopproject.co.uk/ for quietly organising this great community event). Unusually it was milder up our hill than in town. The weather had my family and the neighbours all outside for much of it, getting some jobs done in the sunshine. Some of us even getting down to one layer of clothing for a short while.

Sunset behind the shonky wonky barn on Friday evening, looking forward to many more of those.

Forgot to take a proper "before" picture, so this is a "part way there" picture. Rediscovering a raised bed. There are a couple of these, but last year they hardly got any light. My man has been getting trees and hedges under control and we are hoping for some better growing this year. There is asparagus in the front of the bed, poor crop last year but I don't think the bed has had much love in recent years. Cathie has been doing the heavy work - digging up huge nettle roots. I've been sedately hand hoeing whilst sitting on a caravan step at the side of the bed. Frustrating, but slow progress is being made. As well as nettles the beds are plagued with creeping buttercup which formes a carpet of weed last year. Perhaps we might be more on top of it this year. We are trying for the little and often approach. We will be avoiding planting much out until June this year - we learned the hard way by loosing most of our beans to frost when we put them out at the end of last May. The upside of this is that we have plenty of time to prepare the beds!

The chickens (thickens) continue to amuse, while pruning some rosemary in front of her house, Cathie discovered this.....................................

Omlette anyone? We'll be passing, we reckon these must have been laid, unnoticed, last summer when the chickens had the run of the place for a few days, we need to pluck up the courage to carefully move them somewhere. Where? A bit scared of breaking one!

From possible evil smells to amazing aromas. The wild garlic (ramsons) starting to appear. You smell it as soon as see it. There is loads in the garden, looking forward to using it.

There is also life in the blackcurrants. We've done some hopeful pruning and transplanting, fingers crossed we will improve on last year's harvest with minimal effort. From a few wild looking bushes, we now have a dedicated part of the garden with several rows of them.

Lovely to be seeing be skies and brightness in our amazing landscape.

I must take some crochet pictures to add some colour. Thanks for looking.

Colour

Just a bit of yellow. But a lovely bit of yellow. We had wonderful blue skies here today, which makes for a cold evening. I attempted some weeding, but even though i sat down and did it sedate- like, I am hurting badly this evening. What's a girl to do? I want to grow veg and i want to earn a crust and put food on the table and both of these are challenging me at the moment.

Anyway, stop moaning. Colourful (well as much as you get up here just now).

It's such a tiny token of colour, but up here it's still winter and it's lovely.

Mundane Pleasures

Blue skies and the first time I've hung washing outside this year.

The ex-battery girls scratching around in their "summer home" - away from the food growing areas, but still very much free range. 

The daily eggs they provide us - they are amazing laying machines and have been laying all through the harsh winter we've had here. Daffodils from the garden, nearly in flower.

A view across one of our fields.

A finished crochet project. (Well, apart from the darning in, I hate that bit, but my daughter has just learned how to do it, so maybe I can use some child labour).

Looking forward to my daughter getting home from school. Because I am unable to work at the moment I am a stay at home mum for the first time since I went back to work after having her - when she was about 14 months old. I need to work, but I can't deny that it's been lovely to be here being a mum and a housewife - a breadmaker rather than a breadwinner.

Visitors, volunteers and possible ventures.

On Saturday, we were visited by a friend who we met when we were living in an intentional community in Cornwall, prior to our move here (with the neighbours). She has also moved on and is embarking on self-build in a recently formed eco-village. They are using volunteers to help and she brought four of them up with her because they were interested in visiting The Centre for Alternative Technology http://www.cat.org.uk/ and having a look around Mid-Wales, including a visit to where our landlords live, which is quite an amazing place http://oldchapelfarm.org/
The neighbours came around and ten of us had dinner in the barn on Saturday, which was great, the four volunteers were in their mid-twenties (so made me feel quite old and mumsy), really switched on and interesting. They have gained a fair bit of knowledge and skills whilst travelling and volunteering, including some straw bale building. This really got me thinking..........

We talked about the possibility of having our own volunteers when we arrived here last year, but didn't get any further. We could certainly do with some help in the garden, the menfolk both work full time, Cathie and I have part time jobs (although I am currently not working, thanks to a back injury, but should be working again soon) and children, the garden is huge and the weeds got the better of us last year. We feel like we are more on top of it this year, but I am frustrated with my inability to physically do what I want to do. A bit of help would be great. Having some young people about would be fun, cooking for a few extra mouths is no problem. These particular volunteers have their own accomadation in the form of caravans. These particular volunteers were also lovely, so ever the opportunist, I suggested that they might consider coming here later in the year. I don't know what will happen, but it's planted a seed. What we could really do with in the first instance is people with straw bale building experience, because within the land we have this little gem......................

An even shonkier, wonkier little straw bale house. It has been used for volunteers and as a retreat in the past and it would be a real shame if it fell apart. It needs some TLC. I know nothing about these things, but apparently the timber frame is supporting the roof, which is keeping the weather out, but the walls need taking out and re-building. If we could get some help with this, we may be able to use it as a retreat or volunteer accomadation again. A quick call to our landlords to confirm that they are OK in principle for us to maybe do this gets the thumbs up. They built it years ago when they lived here and have built and restored other interesting structures so should be able to advise.

One of the good things (or maybe not) about blogging about this means, to me that it is slightly more than just an idea. Now I've written about it and it's "out there" I feel slightly obligated to follow through.

Spring is in the air

It's been a beautiful day, unfortunately my painful back meant that I couldn't do the stuff I really wanted to be doing in the garden. Never mind, I've had a pleasant potter in the kitchen , we have guests later and I'm feeding ten.

I did get out to take some pictures.Whilst putting them on the laptap I was reminded that my photography skills are not the best - in fact I get plenty of micky taking about it in this house. Perhaps this blogging malarky will help me improve.

One of the wonderful things about our set up here is that the children (my one and my neighbour's three) have such an amazing environment to play in together. They (mostly) get on really well and have spent most of the day outside. All very wholesome and lovely. They are experiencing what I feel a lot of children now don't have a chance to. They have quite a lot of freedom which is great.

Something had them engrossed.

The pond is teeming with frogs and spawn, they are surprisingly noisy.

A recurring theme in this blog is likely to be our late, short growing season, I'm sure that many people are enjoying their daffodils, ours are still a little way off. I've picked some in the hope that they may warm up and open up indoors.

The snowdrops are at their best now.

And there is a little bit of colour to be found. I have no idea what this is, but it's pretty. (See what I mean about my photographs? The blue pipe doesn't really enhance it).

I also took a picture of the first shoots of wild garlic (ramsons) which we had a lovely crop of last year, but I'd managed to capture a rusty old lighter, so that one is not going to be included. We need to move the chickens, they've been very free range all winter, but we don't want them plopping on the ramsons and they are actually really irritating if you are trying to do anything in the garden, they lack any sense of danger which is not good combined with a garden fork. They will still be free range, just not where we are growing stuff.

First Post

It's taken several months of thinking about doing this to finally take the plunge and just do it.
I have followed a number of lovely blogs over the past few years, some of which have inspired me and motivated me to do things I wouldn't have contemplated before. A lot that I look at, I look at simply because they are colourful, beautiful and brighten up my day. Others have been informative, interesting or amusing.

What will mine be? Well, the first reason for doing this, if I am honest is because I am working towards peddling some of my crocheted creations and setting up an etsy shop. From a bit of research it looks like having an etsy shop and a blog go hand in hand.

It's not just about that, though, I like the idea of having a record of things with pictures, but I'm terrible at keeping a diary, doing this might discipline me to regularly write something (it might not).
Other people's blogs have encouraged me to revisit creativity, something I left behind me many years ago. Lucy's blog http://attic24.typepad.com/ a few years ago had me rushing urgently to the local yarn shop to buy a stash of yarn and a crochet hook then teaching myself how to crochet. I had a deadline to meet at the time, so really needed another distraction. Since then I have become slightly addicted and have an expensive yarn habit. I don't expect that selling my stuff will mean I can give up my day job, but if it helps pay for the habit that would be a start.

My lovely neighbour has a blog that I contributed to for a very short while, http://becomingdomestic.co.uk/ in fact we initially made contact through her blog a few years ago before we ended up being neighbours in Cornwall and then moved here together where our families rent next door homes and share some land and gardens. I have "met" some lovely people online through blogs, including the lovely Sue http://thequincetree65.blogspot.com/ who I used to correspond with via another website, lost touch with and then discovered her blog and an uncannily similar taste for things lovely and crocheted.
I have also met (in the conventional way) some people over the past few years via the internet who have become real friends.

At the same time I have mixed feelings about blogging, I'm quite private, why would I want everyone to be able to read my ramblings, more to the point, why would anyone want to read my ramblings? I don't know. There is another blog post in this for another time.

I don't know what direction this will take, I want to blog about crochet, simple, mundane domestic stuff, being frugal  and anything else that pops up, this will probably change and evolve.

You are welcome to join me on my adventures.