Christmas party

The Christmas party was lots of raucous fun. The Mansergh organic mutton was divine, cooked low and slow according to the River Cottage Meat book, and was melt in the mouth delicious, well done Luke. After dinner there was musical entertainment, and even a live skype link up with absent friends in London having their Christmas party simultaneously.

Pointy Kitty

Here's my pointy kitty made using the Wee Wonderfuls pattern. I felted an old holey wooly stripey scarf and cut it up to make this kitty. His head is a bit big and his ears are lopsided, but I'm ridiculously proud of my first attempt at a stuffed toy!

Homemade Christmas Crackers

We spent a lovely long weekend at Luke's parent's. The hampers went down very well, the biscuits were munched on all weekend, and we got a foodie Christmas present in return, a meal out at a nearby gastro pub The Crooked Billet, which was yummy. Luke made us all watch the BBC sports personality of the year, and what a great year it was for cycling, which made him very happy. I only watched with half an eye as I was knitting up 16 wooly bracelets from a tutorial over at the lovely resurection fern. These are for our friend's Christmas meal party at the weekend. Usually I'd have been cooking a dish for it, but when everyone made it clear they couldn't have a Christmas meal without crackers I volunteered to make them to avoid the eco-abomination of bought crackers. Hats made from last year's Cristmas wrapping paper, jokes found on the internet, and cracker snaps purchased from eBay, were the easy part. Then I got really stuck trying to think of what else to put in the crackers that wasn't plastic tat, and didn't cost anything, so we could spend more money on bubbly! Hmmm... many ideas were rejected as I worried my friends would think they were too lame. Then I spotted a list of handmade present tutorials, by one of my favourite bloggers, which included these sweet wooly bracelets. I nervously fished them out of the washing machine to find they'd felted perfectly and shrunk by just the right amount, whew! Thankfully I had lots of wool so they didn't cost a penny, so I could spend some of the budget on fairtrade Divine chocolate money instead.
Luke volunteered to go get the food shopping for the party by bike trailer, and to cook the meat. That way we can get the veggies from our lovely local greengrocer and organic meat from Mansergh, I can't wait!

Christmas hampers

For Luke's family we put together some yummy food hampers for his parents, granny, brother and sister in law. We included strawberry jam, allotment blackcurrant jam, backyard mint jelly, chilli jelly, spicy apple chutney and hot pear chutney. Also some vanille kipfl Austrian Christmas biscuits, and a bottle of sloe vodka. Yum!

Christmas Ham

We thought we'd start a new Christmas tradition in our house. Since we're not fans of turkey, and neither of us will actually be at home for Christmas day, we decided to have a ham made from scratch to enjoy over the holiday period. Here's the 5kg leg of pork we picked up from Foragers at Lancaster wednesday market. It's got to sit outside in a bucket covered in brine for about 2 weeks before the next stage of the process.

Hugh's West Country Cider Brine
2kg Salt
1litre Strong dry cider
4 litres Apple Juice
1kg Demerara Sugar
1kg Treacle
30g crushed black peppercorns
10 crushed bay leaves
30 juniper berries
10 cloves

First Stencil

This was another present for Flinn Brazier. I got a onesie from a charity shop and threw it in with some other stuff I was dying, because white is sooo boring. Then I've been really wanting to have a go at freezer paper stenciling, so I used a free stencil from BriarPress. All done the night before I left for the visit, couldn't be easier and fab looking!

First DIY tools

It's never to early to get into DIY, so I sewed up a couple of toy hammers. Presents for new-ish babies I'm off to visit soon. I wanted to add rattles to them, but was struggling to come up with an eco-friendly way of making one. I didn't want to buy anything either, especially more plastic crap. Eventually I found a very small bottle lid, filled it with lentils and taped it shut with electrical tape. It just fits in the hammerhead, padded with lots of wadding.

Spong!

Awhile back I scored a Spong mincer from the charity shop for 99p. We tried it out for the first time turning lamb chunks into mince to make lamb burgers for dinner.

Felt Flower

I made a flower brooch out of a felted recycled sweater from this tutorial. It's attached to the front of a birthday card for my sister, and is now flying airmail to California. I'm not a big fan of birthday cards as they're such a huge waste of paper, so really liked the idea of a birthday card plus. It's kind of like a mini-birthday present, which can be reused rather than a card which would just get ditched after a couple of weeks. Excuse the awful photo, which was taken late at night. It makes it look crappy, but believe me the brooch looks much better in reality. I couldn't wait till the next day to take a better photo cause as usual I was finishing this last minute and wanted to get it into the postbox down the street to be there for the first pickup in the morning. Luckily I also discovered that you can now pay for and print stamps online which is awesome. So instead of having to rush up to the post office first thing I was able to print off my stamp, post the parcel, and go relax for the rest of the evening.

Fruity

Finished knitting a teacosy. This one's for Rebecca as I'm going to visit her and her not so new baby in a couple of weeks, just before her birthday. Luckily they use a teapot, and are lacking in knitted goods to keep their tea warm with. I just love this cute pattern but it's a bit too wide especially for my teapot. I think I'll have to adapt a pattern to fit my teapot, but I might wait till I get a bit more knitting practise before I attempt that.

Thieves soil allotment paradise

Last night our shed at the allotment was broken into and our mower and strimmer stolen. We were alerted by an early morning phonecall from our friend James who walks his dog past our allotment every morning before work and noticed our shed door swinging open in the breeze. The police arrived to take a look, and found that 5 other sheds on neighbouring allotments and 15 on another allotment site nearby had also been raided. Luckily it turned out that the culprits were far from criminal masterminds and were arrested just a few streets away later in the day, and all the loot was found stashed in an empty house next to our allotment. After they'd been dusted for prints we brought the mower and strimmer home for the moment, while we consider how to make our shed even more secure. We'd already relocated the door hinges so they couldn't be unscrewed from outside and covered the window with mesh and wooden battens, so I'm not really sure what else we can do to deter thieves. Perhaps some extra reinforcement where the hasp attaches to the shed would be a good idea, we're also mulling over what would best sort of booby trap to install.

Bike trailer at work

A trip to the local diy warehouse by bike. This time just the bobyak and panniers, but even though it was only a small load it cost a scary amount of money as we were buying new powertools.

More allium love

Planted 4 bulbs of garlic today, 2 rows of early purple wight and 2 rows of mediterranean wight. Another 6 bulbs are ordered and should be here soon, but best to get these 2 autumn planting varieties in now. The leeks have been weeded and earthed up. Hopefully that'll help them withstand the fierce winds that whip across our plot all winter. Picked a few for tonight's dinner, along with parsnips, carrots and celeriac from the plot. This will be combined with our own rosemary, garlic and mint jelly and a organic leg of lamb from Mansergh Hall who have a stall on Wednesdays in Lancaster. Perfect Sunday roast dinner.

Glorious autumn sunshine

The autumn planted onion sets are on their way. Onions were a major sucess on the allotment for us this summer, so we're hoping the good luck with alliums will continue. These were planted in on 1st October and weeded today.

We also harvested the rest of our potatoes. This bed had bigger potatoes and higher yield than the others, a fact we attributed to our unscienfitic mini experiment of lining the trenches of this last bed with comfrey before planting the seed potatoes in April. We'll have to expand the already massive comfrey patch if we want enough to line ALL the potatoes trenches next year.

2nd hand finds

I broke another bowl recently, and decided that for practical reasons I need more pyrex unbreakable stuff for the kitchen. A quick look on eBay and I realised that pyrex doesn't just have to be functional, there's loads of great funky patterned pyrex out there. I bookmarked a few but never actually bid as the prices went too high for my frugal tastes. Imagine my joy on finding a perfect example of retro patterned pyrex in my local charity shop for only 75p I grabbed it along with a few parfait type clip shut preserving jars that we can never have enough of.

Bike trailer at work

Here's our fancy heavy duty bike trailer in action. Since we went car-free we realised we'd need another bike trailer. We already had a bob yak trailer which is fine for loads up to 30kg but that wasn't really enough. With an allotment and lots of diy still left to do on the house we were having to borrow a car to transport heavy stuff like bags of compost and long bits of wood. A bit of internet research and we found BikesAtWork. We went for the longest version which is 2.4m and can carry upto 136kg. It's kind of like a big ladder on wheels, but we added a marine-plywood base to it. "How can Luke's legs pedal such extreme loads, is he super-human?" I hear you ask. Fear not, he fitted some ultra-low gears (the Schlumpf Mountain Drive) which make it absurdly easy to ride. We had the roof replaced this summer, so there's alot of scrap lead salvaged off the old roof. Here's Luke setting off from our back alley to take 110kg of lead to the scrap merchant in Morecambe. They only pay 30p per kg, but at least it'll go towards the bottles of wine and new skirting boards that will fill the trailer for the return journey!