Anti-spider 'buttons'

Having spent my life up until January living in a city I have been extremely surprised by the number of spiders that exist in the countryside - or is it just a particularly 'good' year for spiders. Fortunately, they don't scare me but their cobwebs are driving me mad. The bedroom windowsill had got to the stage where it looked like part of a Halloween display where someone had gone a bit overboard with a can of fake web spray.

After spending last Sunday morning vacuuming up webs and dead spiders we decided to blow the actual cobwebs away by going on a walk with the dog. It wasn't long before our foraging obsession kicked in and we were filling every pocket we had with the goodies we encountered. The result was fairly impressive, if a little random!

The berries are sloes which have been washed and put in the freezer before being made into Sloe Gin, the sweetcorn was enjoyed for dinner and the golf ball is for my Dad. As for the conkers, I've heard from several sources that they are good at repelling spiders (and read several more that there is no scientific proof for this). After my morning of cleaning I was keen to attempt a 'prevention is better than cure' approach and I was willing to try anything.

What I hadn't heard previously is that you are supposed to drill a hole in the conkers. I suppose this helps release something odorous to spiders - or not, depending on who you believe. Although S had offered to drill the holes, the conkers were still quite soft, so I decided it couldn't be too difficult to poke a hole in each one. I cast around the kitchen looking for something suitable but nervous that a slip of a conker could result in the hole being drilled in my hand.

In the end I remembered the little devices we have for holding and eating sweetcorn. These have two extremely sharp prongs, making them just perfect as I felt that the twin prong would also make it less likely to slip and cause collateral damage.

In no time at all I had pierced all the conkers with perfect little twin holes, making them look a bit like buttons and - in my opinion - quite charming.

Now I just have to spread them around the house and see if they have any effect. Apparently, Great Auntie Jean used to swear by them so who am I to argue?

We're jammin'

I have an ear-worm. You know, a song that you just can't get out of your head. It's Bob Marley's Jammin' and it's all thanks to last week's foraging session. I guess not many people would associate picking fruit in English hedgerows with a classic Reggae track but, to be fair, the music didn't permeate my brain until quite a few days later.

After the apple and damson 'tip offs' we set out with great enthusiasm armed with far too many tubs and pots in search of our hedgerow goodies.

At least, I thought I was probably being over-optimistic about the amount of fruit we'd find but the last thing I wanted was to be out and about and run out of containers. But as luck would have it, we hit gold! Or should that be purple, red and green?

If truth be told, I had to call a halt to the picking, particularly when it came to the apples. Outside in the big open countryside the containers looked fairly small, but in the confines of the kitchen, the prospect of having to do something with all that fruit suddenly hit me. It was quite a daunting prospect.

However, I was undeterred, and last Sunday morning rolled up my sleeves, gathered every single empty jam jar I could lay my hands on, plus a few that were swiftly emptied thanks to a rather random breakfast, and set to work.

Eight hours later I had 24 jars of apple chutney in three different variations: classic apple chutney, tamarind and apple chutney, and spiced apple chutney. The jars are all now squirrelled away busy maturing, ready for Christmas.

We also had 1.8kgs of blackberries macerating in 1.5kgs of jam sugar and 2.2kgs of stoned damsons. (Top tip: use a cherry stoner to get the stones out of damsons - it still took the best part of 3 hours but it was better than cutting them out with a knife, sieving them out of the finished jam, or - horror of horrors - making jam with stones in which you have to pick out of every mouthful!)

So, where does Bob Marley fit in? Well, that would have been after work on Monday when we made blackberry jam and some plum and apple jam, on Tuesday when we made some damson jam, and on Wednesday evening when we had to reboil the blackberry jam because it hadn't set. After a 2 hour commute and 8 hours in the office each day, things tended to get a bit silly as we heated, boiled and 'wrinkle tested' until I could barely keep my eyes open. At some point, Bob Marley popped into my head, shortly afterwards to be blared out of the iPod, to add to the general silliness!

So, we now have 30 pots of jam to go with the 24 jars of chutney. And it probably wouldn't surprise you to know that, at some point on Monday, a plum tree was found across the road and there is still a large bowl of beautiful plums awaiting further attention! Well, we seem to have mastered the setting point of jam so it would be a bit rude not to continue our jammin'.

Country pursuits

Having exchanged my very urban lifestyle to one much more rural, I have spent the last couple of weekends engaged in very country pursuits. And by that I mean foraging.

I have to say I've never seen so many beautifully fat and ripe blackberries in my life as there are within a stones throw of the house (and I'm not skilled at throwing stones a very great distance!) So far we have picked around 3 kilos and there are still many more for the picking.

To say that there are a few jars of blackberry gin on the go would be an understatement. We are even experimenting with blackberry and vanilla vodka.

And when we ran out of gin jars and room in the freezer, I progressed onto jam.

A huge crop of sloes has been spied but they are not quite ready yet, however the elderberries were at their best last weekend. I had no idea what to make with them but just couldn't leave them on the tree. In the end, the simplest thing to turn them into seemed to be cordial - great diluted with sparkling or still water or even, dare I say, sparkling wine!

We're now just off to pick apples as we've had a call from a friend who has more than he knows what to do with. Another friend has also alerted us to the location of a crop of damsons. To say I'm excited at the prospect of wondering down a green lane on a sunny, late summer afternoon, armed with some empty plastic containers would be a complete understatement. Sometimes it's the simplest of things that can make us happy!

Bringing joy, simply

Back in April I was busy making new bedroom curtains complete with black-out linings so that I could sleep even when the sun was rising. Admittedly, this does make finding your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night rather tricky but the sleep is golden!

What I failed to mention was the choice of the fabric. I had originally fallen in love with a beautiful biscuit-coloured linen, embroidered with birds. However, at £70 per metre and a whopping 6 metres needed, this was way beyond the budget, not least because we are only likely to be living in the house for another 2 years.

Not that I'd given up entirely on the bird fabric as the curtain fabric we chose picked out exactly the shades of blue and green that was featured in the embroidered birds. My mission was then to find a metre of the fabric being sold off at a discounted price. After a few weeks of searching, the internet came up trumps and a metre's worth of embroidered birds was being delivered through the letterbox.

The idea was to make some lampshades. One for the ceiling light and the other for the bedside light. The ceiling light was an awkward size. Or should I say that the size and spacing of the embroidered birds proved challenging. However, I just about managed to get the birds lined up. I'm not entirely happy with the final result, but I am particularly picky!

The bedside lampshade was much easier, even if it did mean sacrificing a lot of the remaining fabric to get the birds lined up so beautifully. (Can you tell I'm happier with this one? And who doesn't love a Kingfisher?)

With fabric left over I just couldn't resist having a few more birds perched around the bedroom. A trip to the local craft store resulted in three tapestry hoops of just the right diameter to be able to frame up one of each of the birds to hang on the wall.

This is such a simple thing to do and, I think, looks particularly effective when the bird designs are so obviously embroidered.

I placed the hoop over each bird and centred them up. I then cut out the fabric leaving enough of a border to be able to fold the fabric around the underside of the inner hoop.

I then took a roll of narrow double-sided sticky tape - as luck would have it, the one that came with the lampshade kit was exactly the same width as the inner tapestry hoop - and applied it to the inner edge of the ring.

I then carefully folded over the fabric and stuck it down.

In just a few minutes I had a fabric picture, ready to hang on the wall.

They have been on the wall at the foot of the bed for at least a month now and I don't think I'll ever tire of looking at them. Or is it just that I'm sometimes just too lazy to get out of bed and admiring my handiwork is just a feeble excuse?!

Well, either way, they bring me much joy, so what's not to love?

Making scents

Work in the garden has continued although, sadly, without me for the past week after I managed to aggravate an old shoulder injury. However frustrating this was, I had no option but to turn my attention to less physically demanding pursuits.

On my wish-list for some time has been to create my own reed diffuser room scents. A nice-smelling room is lovely but I often wonder what you are breathing in when you buy a bottle from a shop. I know there is a list of ingredients on the packet but most of what is listed is completely incomprehensible, to me at least.

Anyway, I did some research on what the most basic ingredients to go in a reed diffuser could be and decided to have a go at making some myself. All you need is a light-weight base oil, preferably unscented or at least pleasantly scented, some essential oils for the scent and some 90% alcohol to help the two mix.

I decided to use almond oil for the base. It's light (so should travel up the reeds easily) relatively unscented, and was half price in my local health food store. I also stocked up on essential oils in the same shop as they were also half price - an important consideration when you consider that you need quite a bit of scent for each diffuser.

As for the alcohol, some sources suggested using 'rubbing alcohol' but anything that resembled such a thing smelled very strongly medicinal and that wasn't quite the aroma I was after for the house - 'eau de locker room' anyone?! Other sources suggested using vodka but I'm yet to find 90% proof vodka that is affordable and won't make the house smell like a distillery - also not the scent I'm after. In the end I found a source of perfumer's alcohol which is 95% alcohol and completely unscented.

The next bit was exceptionally easy as I just mixed 230ml of almond oil with 20ml essential oil (I used 10ml grapefruit oil, about 7ml orange oil, and about 3ml of bergamot oil) and 2 tablespoons of the alcohol. After mixing well I poured it into two narrow-necked glass bottles (saved from shop bought reed diffusers) and popped in some fresh reeds.

The grapefruit oil was a very dark orange so that has made the mixture a strong golden yellow but that's in keeping with the colour scheme of the room that they are in so not an issue.

I'm rather chuffed with the results although yet to work out quite how effective they are going to be. They are in the kitchen and I went on to make three batches of curry paste and the kitchen definitely smelled more like the ingredients for curry than 'uplifting citrus'!

Wild Creations

The last week has seen a wild theme to my creative projects. The first was a result of a mammoth gardening session last Sunday when we tackled a very large cherry tree in the garden which, by the look of it, hadn't been pruned in at least ten, perhaps twenty years. It had a number of large, crossing branches which were rubbing against each other leaving wounds which could easily let infection in. These we removed, along with other low hanging branches. The result was a more healthy looking tree and an enormous space in the corner of the garden. The latter, we quickly realised, was the part of the garden that gets the afternoon and evening sun - perfect for the table and chairs. However, before we could enjoy our new sunny spot, we had rather a lot of tree to dispose of.

The smaller branches went into the garden waste bin and the two largest branches have been saved for a couple of future creative projects (watch this space!). Everything that was too large to be chopped up with secateurs was chopped into 30-40cm lengths and stacked in a gap in the hedge. A simple task that has left me very happy since I now have a wildlife wood pile.

A few days after its creation we spotted the first hedgehog in the garden so I'm hopeful there will be a lot of wildlife that will soon make the most of this new habitat.

Meanwhile, wild garlic is in season and I've been lucky enough to have received deliveries of it in my veg box for the past couple of weeks. My favourite two recipes are very simple. The first is to ferment it as you perhaps would to turn cabbage into sauerkraut. I chopped 100g of wild garlic and 'massaged' in 1g of sea salt (table salt should be avoided as it contains iodine and will kill of any of the good bacteria you need to ferment the leaves). This began the process of drawing water out of the leaves but not to a large extent. I therefore transferred the chopped leaves and salt into a jar and then topped up with bottled spring water (tap water contains chlorine which also kills off the good bacteria and so this too should be avoided). After a week, the smell of garlic had begun to mellow as the leaves gradually fermented. I use a spoonful here and there to add a kick of flavour towards the end of cooking or mixing into mashed potatoes. This will keep for weeks, if not months.

The second recipe is for wild garlic pesto. For this place 100g wild garlic, 50g grated Parmesan or similar salty, hard cheese and 50g pecans, hazelnuts or other nuts of your choice. Blitz in a food processor and then add lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste and enough olive oil until you have your desired consistency.

This makes a fairly large quantity, especially since it is potent stuff! I therefore opted to freeze it in small quantities. I normally use an ice cube tray for this sort of thing (grated ginger, curry paste etc.) but we still haven't managed to locate them following the house move. However, I did find a stack of disposable shot glasses.

Once frozen the blocks of pesto are popped out of the glasses and into a zip-lock bag to be dipped into whenever desired. Both recipes are a great way to extend the rather short period of time when wild garlic can be used in the kitchen. All in all, a few little jobs that will bring pleasure for months to come (hopefully longer for the log pile!)

Achieving darkness

It has been a frenzy of activity at Chez ElleAyJay since the unplanned house move in February. I'm pleased to report that all the rooms now have lined curtains, meaning that sleep past dawn is now possible. Clearly this wasn't a problem in February and March, or at least not during the week when the alarm clock goes off way before sunrise. However, since we moved to British Summer Time at the end of March, the alarm call and sun rise have been having a bit of a race.

All the rooms except for one had re-purposed curtains, which was a huge cost saving even if it did mean altering some hems. However, the last room to get sorted was the main bedroom and the combination of how light sensitive I am and the fact that the inherited curtains were of the palest colour and totally unlined, was becoming a challenge. I think a couple of sheets of tissue paper would have blocked as much light as the curtains and so this became a bit of a mission for me.

A dark fabric was chosen and ordered along with some blackout lining, which is very densely woven and highly effective. With five to six metres of each fabric, the first challenge was to clear enough floor space to measure out each curtain. This achieved, I spent much of last weekend crawling around the floor cutting, pinning, sewing and ironing. The final steps took place yesterday whilst I sat and hand sewed the hems whilst catching up on the week's radio dramas - one of the joys of the home made is the moments of calm like this, followed by the sense of achievement when all is done.

In this case the sense of achievement was doubled when the bedroom remained dark in spite of the beautiful sunshine this morning... sleep undisturbed until the allotted time!

The next task is to make some lampshades but not before we've taken advantage of the beautiful weather today to make a start on taming the garden. The house was empty for eight months before we moved in so we have our work cut out for us. Wish us luck!