Sunshine Quilt

It's kinda blurry, but you get the idea! Still some cutting to do :-) And look! That's real sunlight on the floor!!!

Well another quilt is underway... I couldn't resist my colourful cotton scraps any longer! I have been saving these for some years now, all of them are old clothes or scraps I've been given or bought at car boots or charity shops. I finally tipped the whole stack out and started cutting up all the clothes that until now I'd still been dithering about whether to keep intact or not. Frankly the chances of re-making them into something wearable or trying to squeeze into them when the weather warms up are slim to say the least, as I no longer am ;-)

At first I thought I wanted to have little four-patches inbetween the larger squares, but (and this is the great thing about being able to lay the whole scheme out) once I could see the big picture it just looked way too much, even for me! And I would love to have stuck to my original idea of it being completely rainbow coloured, but that would have meant going out and buying fabric specifically for it, which goes against my ethos of just using scrap. Mind you, I had to go to Tavistock the other day and have to admit that the lovely Spring green was a skirt I bought just for this project! I couldn't resist the colour, and actually I think the whole thing would have had a completely different feel without it. I seem to buy an awful lot of pink and purple....

I'm still undecided as to how to actually put the whole thing together. I was very inspired by a raggy quilt I saw recently which had each square hand-quilted with a simple cross before being sewn together. I am going to have to bite the bullet at some point though and learn how to machine-quilt OUT of the ditch which, with such square pieces inevitably means curves (which I naturally do when I'm trying to make straight lines, but have a morbid fear of trying to do deliberately!!)

Along with the newly blooming snowdrops, we found a little feathered friend wandering on our track who we've persuaded to come and stay with us... I'm guessing some hard-hearted person decided they no longer wanted to keep a chicken and decided to release her into the wild. Luckily we have plenty of space for another hen in our mis-matched flock. Poor thing was starving. I think she might be called Lottie. She's very beautiful. 

I am very pleased that Spring has finally started to visit us at last in rain-soaked Cornwall even if it means I have to abandon my indoor pursuits for some long-awaited hard digging and weeding in the allotment! 

Happy Imbolc to you all (read more about this lovely pagan festival here)

Here's to Spring and sunshine in February :-)

A little a-lotting Part 1

Reckon this is a fab look for me

Bit clunky I know, but it's the best I can do today... I've been doing a little on the allotment which means I usually have just about enough time to get covered in mud before being summoned back home to feed baby lula. Hence the quick-change overalls. Sexy, I know.

Last year Jude and I dug over this whole patch, cleared it of weeds and then covered it up for 6 months or so. This year I uncovered, dug it over again (and abandoned it again so that more weeds have snuck back in - doh!) and then broadcast wildflower seed in the section behind me, just beyond the little clump of forget-me-nots. Now the idea is to transplant as many seedlings as possible from there into the remaining ground so that the smaller ones have a chance to grow before becoming swamped by the more vigorous.

More wildflowers waiting 

Pretty little things, but I don't know what they are!

How I wish the allotment looked (complete with help)*

How it actually looks. Wild, basically.

Bronze fennel, sweet william and crazy brassicas gone to seed

More wasteland wild meadow

As you can see the chicken wire isn't deterring the chickens much!

All I am managing to do in the rest of the allotment is get some long-suffering seedlings into the ground and yank out the odd weed here and there. The three main villains in our ground are docks, creeping buttercup and an as-yet unidentified thistle which gows from the titchiest scraps and then spreads underground in lines. There are also plenty of nettles which I'm not quite so irritated by, being fairly easy to pull up as they're so shallow-rooting. As well as providing a highly nutritious liquid feed when rotted in water, they're also very important to a large number of insects and butterflies so I'm happy to leave a few big clumps of it as long as I have the space. The young leaves can also be steamed and eaten like spinach, and the roots can be used to make a yellow dye.


The others are devils though! Creeping buttercup looks completely wonderful for about a month in early spring when it becomes a carpet of yellow blooms, so it's just a case of preventing it from taking over the whole space as it can very quickly smother huge areas of ground. Once it's got a hold it's a nightmare to pull up.


Meanwhile, in the greenhouse,

My dream greenhouse (complete with help - or hubs, as he prefers to be known as)*

No, dammit, that's not mine!

Here's what's on my bench, quietly waiting for me to do more than just chuck some water on here and then:

I had intended to not do anything this year, what with baby an' all, but sowing seeds is so damn addictive it's really hard to stop... it's always such a thrill to see those first little tender shoots poking up, knowing they have the potential to become a plant that could be taller than me! Sometimes it's not such a thrill as quite often the odd weed comes up instead (one of the downsides of using home-made compost and not sterilising it!)

Time to go make some omelettes!

Have a cracking weekend!

(*pictures of allotmenting on a grand scale were taken at Buckfast Abbey a couple of months ago)

My first home-made marmalade!

So here is the result of several hours of peeling, slicing, boiling.... six and a half jars of wonderful Green Tomato Marmalade! Yum. I added a little crystallised ginger to it which gives a lovely bite to the sweetness of the tomatoes.  I'm still not entirely confident about getting the setting point right with jam-making, but it'll still taste good even if it is a bit runny. In fact, one of my favourite creations this summer was Apple and Blackberry Jellyish which, whilst not having the ideal jelly texture I had intended, is absolutely fab dribbled over Greek yoghurt.

And more good news - our newly acquired hens have finally started laying!! Hooray! Nearly a month ago we took two ex-battery hens and a little bantam from a couple who didn't want to keep them any more and we've been waiting ever since for them to lay. The ex-batteries were in quite a state still, with missing feathers, and as they were totally unused to being completely free-range it took them a long time to adjust to having a quarter of an acre to roam about in: they didn't seem to know what to do with themselves and spent most of their day hiding under the whitecurrant bushes. We treated them with some red mite powder last week even though we couldn't really see any evidence of infestation (apart from the feathers dropping out & lack of eggs), and it seems to have made a big difference, as they look much healthier. The little pointy ones at the top are from the bantam and the enormous pale ones are from the batteries. None of them have names yet, unlike our original girls, Nellie & Gertie. Suggestions welcome!

Well, hello is a good a place as any to start. There are many weird and wonderful blogs out there, and it seems to be the right time to join in the blogosphere. Primarily I want to record all the various projects I'm working on and at the same time have a place to record daily life with two pre-schoolers, dog, cat & chickens, with a healthy scattering of observations and internet scavengings... hope you enjoy the ride, welcome along.