Thursday, August 23, 2012 at 2:45PM
Buy a bag of broad beans.
Remove them from their snug little places, having admired and photographed this beautiful packaging first.
Wonder how there can be so few when you had such a huge pile of beans.
Look at the pile of empty pods and understand why.
Take off the indigestible outer shell of each bean
leaving about a tablespoonful for lunch.
Saturday, August 18, 2012 at 3:16PM
Towards the end of the week before last, with a lovely succession of visiting friends on the horizon, I was shopping for some flowers for the dining table. One guest in particular is particularly sensitive to such things, so rather than buy a bunch, I drew inspiration from an article in a recent Martha Stewart magazine and hot footed it to a local garden centre.
There wasn’t a great deal of choice where floating plants were concerned and one plant in particular looked familiar. I wasn’t sure of the botanical name but I thought I recognised this particular specimen from holidays in Asia, where the invasive water hyacinth has become a problem, to say the least.
I remembered sailing through rivers such as this one in Cambodia, where the floating green mass was almost an island in places. But I was merely going to put a single plant in a glass vase, so I didn’t think I need worry unduly about having to deal with a triffid situation for now.
I placed one of the plants in a free standing glass planter and took a photograph, using it for my photo of the day.
Just one week later, can you see the difference? (Yes, the sun is shining!)
In just a few days, the plant has already sprouted three “outriders”; small plantlets are growing independently of the main group and the slightest disturbance causes them to break off and float away.
I can see that, in no time at all, the bowl will be full of these floating pods and it becomes very clear indeed that such rampant growth could easily become a problem, had I put the thing in our pond rather than in a self contained glass bowl. When I’m ready to throw them out, I promise to dispose of them responsibly!
In the meantime, they have become quite the talking point.
Monday, August 13, 2012 at 10:55AM
It’s good to simply sit and relax with a dear friend on a summer afternoon and catch up over a cup of tea in the garden.
Gather a few more friends for one of the highlights of the season.
Follow it up with a few hours around the table and savour the joys of their company.
What better way to spend a long weekend?
Gloucestershire, friends, fun, home, life Tuesday, August 7, 2012 at 11:35AM
I met a friend in Cheltenham last Friday and arriving a little early, I couldn’t resist popping into Just Fabrics who often have a great selection of the fabrics I make my useful bags in.
Did I need to make more bags? Not really. But it’s always good to have a few on hand and these seaside prints were so fresh and clean, I couldn’t resist. Yesterday afternoon, whilst the rain was pouring down outside, I cut the fabric and was pleased to get three large and three medium sized bags from two metres of fabric. (For my record, I bought one metre of the spot and half a metre of each of the co-ordinating seashell colourways). I had very little fabric left over, but put it to one side, because “you never know”.
I usually make these bags in a batch, finding it easier to complete the same stage on all six bags one after the other. I completed three yesterday afternoon and ran out of time, so put the finishing touches to the other three this morning. Before I did, I read a few emails and a couple of favourite blogs. One of these blogs, Bemused, had a great tutorial for making napkins from fun cotton prints. I read it through, bookmarked it for future use and considered the many possibilities.
Then I looked across at the left over pieces of fabric.
In no time at all, I’d made a couple of smallish (9” square) mats from the leftover pieces of seaside prints. How clever is that method! Just like the construction of my bags, all edges are neatly encased, there’s no obvious joins and without that clear tutorial, I’d never have worked out how to do it!
Most satisfying of all was the small pile of leftover fabric. I’d used nearly all of it up and there were only a few bits left.
But hang on a minute. (I’ll bet you’re one step ahead of me here, aren’t you?)
Ta dah! Two smaller mats, coasters perhaps, from those bits that were leftover from the project that was made from the leftovers of the previous one.
Not a bad result, eh? Six bags, two 9” mats and two smaller 5” mats from a couple of metres of fabric. (Bag instructions here, by the way)
Most satisfying of all, just look at the tiny heap of leftovers.
No, I’m not going to make any three inch mats from them ;-)
Saturday, August 4, 2012 at 4:50PM
Saturday morning. What shall we do? We’ve had a few days at home this week and both of us feel ready for some fresh air and fun. We don’t need to go shopping and though the weather looks iffy, we mull over some of those places we’ve intended to visit for a while.
Just after 8am, we jump in the car and we’re off down the M5, before the holiday traffic gets too much. Shortly after 9 we’re parked and ready to go exploring.
We’re at the seaside. Well…sort of. Far over there in the distance is Cardiff and the water here isn’t so much sea but more estuary.
There’s a fine Victorian pier here, currently undergoing some restoration. We’ve seen pictures and I’ve read about it on a dear friend’s blog too (though said dear friend happens to be sunning herself in Greece right now!) but this is the first time we’ve been here ourselves.
The tide is in and there’s not much of a beach to walk along, so we stay on the promenade and spot a pair of shoes. Where is the owner?
There he is – the dot in the water, swimming back to shore. Brave chap, I say – it’s not that warm!
If you haven’t worked out where we are yet, here’s a clue.
The sandbanks and the tides here are treacherous and there are warnings galore. If you’re wondering whether or not to do anything, the answer is probably “don’t”.
We spent the morning in Clevedon, a pretty Victorian town on the Bristol Channel and what a fun time we had there.
The sea air gave us an appetite, so we headed to Tiffin for some breakfast. Very good it was, too. Whilst sitting there, we spotted a signpost to “bookshop” – I guess we didn’t need much more of a nudge to work out what to do next.
The women in the bookshop were happy to direct us further, to a comfortable collection of local shops with interesting browsing potential. We loved the shape of the old Market House, now a health centre – doesn’t it echo the design of the pier well?
Just when we were thinking we’d done, we peered in the window of Spinning Weal – like the morning couldn’t get much better? Inside was the holy grail as far as I was concerned – regular readers of this blog might recall the search for coloured darning wool in Tokyo? Well, who knew I need look no further than Clevedon?!
Not only that, but the quilting department up the stairs towards the back of the shop had something else of interest.
A basket of the fabrics for the WI Makower Quilt Challenge 2012, together with the competition schedule. A remarkably well-stocked shop and somewhere to bear in mind, I think.
By the time we returned to the car, the sun was out and the tide had gone out a little as well. Were we really ready for home? Perhaps not quite.
A little further south, there was a bit of activity around the Marine Lake. A group of kayakers were practising and it was interesting to walk along the sea wall and see what was going on. As we did, we looked over towards Wales and decided we were on the drier side of the estuary.
As the skies darkened and the light became “interesting”, we jumped back in the car and headed home. Thankfully, we were not driving in the same direction as the fifteen miles or so of barely moving traffic heading for the South West on this summer Saturday.
What a great idea it was to go to Clevedon, though!
