Christmas Roses

We are getting quite a collection now.

Something nice to eat. Warning - contains uncooked eggs.

Christmas Icecream

1 packet Annas Ginger Thins (Pepparkakor)
2 Eggs
6.5 oz low fat cream cheese
4.5 oz caster sugar
6.5 fluid oz whipping cream
zest of 1 lemon, finely grated
quarter teaspoon vanilla extract

Line a 2lb loaf tin with cling film
Crush the biscuits to fine crumbs and pat half of them into the bottom of the tin.
Separate the eggs. 
Whisk the yolks with the cheese, cream, sugar and flavours until thick and leaving a trail.
Beat the egg whites in a separate bowl until stiff and dry.
Stir a spoonful of the egg white into the yolk mix, and then gently fold the rest in, using a metal spoon. Pour the mixture into the tin and top it by sprinkling on the rest of the biscuit crumbs. Wrap and freeze overnight. To serve, turn it out and cut slices, and decorate with fresh (or thawed from frozen) berries.

For the reassurance of anyone who followed the link in the comments, I suspect the nest in my case is "long ago and far away" since there has been a distinct lack of wasps this year. So the marks have been there for some time.

Meanwhile, I have been sewing.

The fussy, fiddly bit of a well loved pattern that I have been making since the early nineties - we are talking of the days when it was all big shirts with roomy armholes and dropped shoulders. Back then I came upon a little catalogue of traditional working clothing from around the world, and daughter and I were much taken with the Hungarian horseman's shirt. Because this one (from Burda Moden magazine) was pretty much the same cut, it became known as the Hungarian Shirt, which was not to be confused with the Wromantic Shirt, which was very much like the ones they used in costumes for the film Braveheart. What made that one Wromantic was that it had cartridge pleating at the sleeve heads and centre back. I do like my baggy clothing! The braid is from the haberdashery man in Redhill street market circa 1996 - the joys of a well stuffed stash.

At last I feel I am making some progress with the major knitting. Back and front are finished and joined, and the neckband added, so I can see how well it settles in. I have not made things easy with this one. The pattern was written for knitting in the round, with steeks. This is not really a suitable yarn for steeks, and I HATE knitting two colour in the round - I find the knit rows tiring, and need the purl rows to rest my wrist. I can't really see why the way I work should make this so, but at this advanced age, I don't want to wreck the system by trying to change things. I had enough trouble when I did the traditional Guernsey cast on - I use the thumb method normally, and don't have to think about it, but that cast-on requires you to pick up two loops with the thumb, but in the other direction. After doing that, I was then stuck trying to cast on the usual way and getting no stitches at all because my thumb just could not find the wool. This learning new tricks can be a mixed blessing!

Having done the body of the garment, I now have to manouevre the sleeve instructions since the pattern wants them knitted in the round, and top down - which I do not like with a colour pattern. Much playing with graph paper and calculator awaits me.

OK, so where's the nest?

 I have known for what seems like ever that wasps make nests of 'paper' from chewed up wood.  Doesn't mean that much until you see it happening. Back in Surrey, one very quiet sunny afternoon, I saw a wasp on a plank of wood, and heard a miniscule scratchy sound. Looking at the wood, I saw stripy patches. Then I figured out what I had seen. The wasp was chewing the plank to make paper. Observe the stripy bits on our front garden gate. I know what did that!

  

Close up.

 So now you have a rough idea of how wide a wasp's jaw is. I am assuming that the little beasties don't take harm from whatever chemical content there is in the paint they are stripping off with the wood.

The Gladioli have been nice, but not very prolific. They are pretty much over now, but we have started getting flowers on some that we thought were not going to. Gardener thinks they are Afghan Gladis. I don't know but I like them.
 

Why I don't wear yellow.

 Apart from the fact that the colour reflects on my skin and makes me look jaundiced, there is the little matter of pollen beetles, which flock to it.
Many years ago, as a summer holiday amusement, I bought some very cheap T-shirts, and some dyes for the children to have fun. I let them choose their colours, and didn't realise what I was letting the one who chose yellow in for! I don't think he ever wore it out of doors - the pollen beetles just piled in until it looked like it had a printed design!

 We have a greenhouse staging tray set up as a bird-bath/watering hole, and I found a small dragonfly lying upside down in the water.I picked it out and put it on the stone perch, and saw that it was trying to wipe its eyes. Then it fell back in the water, so this time I picked it up and gently separated its wings, since the surface tension of the water was sticking them together.

This time I settled it onto a sprig of mint, and it was there for quite a while, and when it was gone from the perch, I looked below, and found no sign of it - so maybe it lived.  I hope so.

The following day, I was out on the other side of the house, talking to our neighbour, and a dragonfly of the same species came flying at me and settled on my blouse - the same one I had been wearing when I did the rescue bit. I very much doubt that it would have been the same one, but the soppy/anthropomorphic bit of me thinks "Maybe"

 I love Scabious seed heads even better than the flowers; they are so perfectly formed.

The last bit of nature news has no photo - OH found an Elephant Hawk Moth caterpillar today. This was the green form, which took us a bit of a while to sort out, since our book doesn't picture it, but only mentions it in passing.

This morning, as I went out for the papers, there was something odd lying on the road. Turned out to be a mole, dead but unmarked. So being me, I had to take a picture, before I consigned it to the bin.

 It's grubby little digging paws.

 And it's grubbly whiskery little nose.

I always liked to have a good look at anything like that. As a child, I liked to examine any mice that the cat brought in, and I did quite a lot of looking at dead birds - in the hard winter of 1963, birds fled further and further west, until, when they got to the toe of Cornwall, there was nowhere else to go. They were easy to find, where they had starved and were visible on the snow. Of course we kept the bird table well stocked, and I know a lot of farmers did quite a lot of spilling of grain, but there was nothing we could do about so many species of waders. My Father was appalled at what I did - he was remarkably squeamish, but Mum was as interested as I was, though she was a stickler for washing hands!

Some immigrants.

 This is Tradescantia - and it has an unusual growth habit. It also has three petals, and I have seen it named as Ohio Spiderwort, so it would appear to be American.
So is this.

Milkweed. We grew this in Surrey, and it was one of the very few plants we brought with us. Something has been making its leaves curly this year, but it doesn't seem to put it off flowering. I love the colour. It is so over the top vivid.

This evening, the BBC's Countryfile is promising to show the removal of the sails from the windmill. I shall be interested to see that.

Nice things continue to flourish. Yellow Loosestrife. My Mother had a clump in her little back yard garden, and it pleased her as it did me. It  is a very accomodating plant - it just comes up every year and flowers, needing no real attention.  I was delighted, in our first season in this house, that there was a well established dollop of colour in that fairly shady corner. Smells nice too.

There was no way I could have shown the breadth of the smile OH was wearing when he came home from walking the dog this morning. He had heard, and seen, a pair of Turtle Doves!!!! So we may have a huge number of Eastern Europeans living and working here, but it would appear that we don't have any Maltese.

Our local windmill has eight sails and is said to be the only one surviving in the world with that many sails. At the moment it has precisely none - they have been removed awaiting the arrival of new ones. The mill has not been able to work since before we moved to the area, but will soon be back to grinding corn when the new sails are fitted. It does look a bit odd with its naked top - it took me a while to work out what was wrong since it is a landmark visible from miles away, and it nagged at me to "spot the difference"!

 

We had two visitors yesterday - two Swifts, either a mated pair or two youngsters, who were swooping low and going right up to the House Martin nests under the eaves. We watched for quite a while, until they seemed to lose interest, but are none the wiser as to what they were up to. We half wondered if they might be trying to usurp the nests, but don't know if that is a likely explanation. Maybe it was just juvenile curiosity.

Good things are going on in the garden. The Astilbes are looking luscious

 and even more so close up.

 We have got a very nicely veined Mallow, and the Hydrangeas always make me nostalgic. Where I grew up, in West Cornwall, they grow like weeds, and when it was time for the Carnival, the float that the Carnival Queen rode on was wrapped with wire netting, and that had Hydrangea heads pushed in so that they formed a complete mass of flowers.

And I do do some handwork still! I found some lovely drapey viscose and made a blouse. I found the perfect buttons in the button tin, and the ties at the neck are a good excuse to get out some of the various brooches I have acquired/inherited.

Seventy years ago

When D-Day came, my Father was training flight mechanics in the RAF, and was stationed at RAF Locking, in north Somerset. My Mother was with him, and working as a dispenser in Boots, the chemists. Some years ago, he wrote an account of what he did, for his grandchildren.

"We were able to find furnished accommodation in Weston-Super-Mare, and I was at home each night, except for the times I had to do guard duty or orderly corporal, etc. This was a very pleasant existence and lasted till after D-Day.

The night of the invasion of Europe Mary and I could hardly sleep because of the noise of aircraft flying overhead and we were aware that something out of the ordinary was happening as, when we looked out to see the planes, they all had lights on; a thing unheard of during the war.

The flight engineers we had been training were very much involved in the invasion of the continent and on the day of the invasion I had a class of Free French Volunteeers, and they were so excited at the news, which was being relayed over the public address system, that it was impossible to get them to concentrate on their work, and who could blame them?"

Had to do it

There is a new series of Wallander being shown. The Proper Swedish make, with Krister Henriksson, not the Swedish chappie who is nothing like my idea of Wallander. This means subtitles, which means that my present knitting project, with two colours, and my patchwork, which demands that I look what I am doing, are both no good when I have to focus on the screen.

There is something about watching a drama with subtitles that makes for a much more intense experience. So I had to do the right thing - I cast on a pair of socks, as if I hadn't got plenty already. I know I have got plenty, since I put them all in their m*th proof bags for the summer, just last week.

Anyway, here are the new ones showing just how much one episode of 100 minutes can provide.

 

Further to the subject of my previous post:

the swifts are back!

Spring is here

 For those who have heard of a Foreman, here is a variant - this is what a Foredog looks like. She is just keeping tabs on whether he is getting the weeding right.

 She is also doing a bit of work on her suntan - nice to air those bits that are usually pointing downward.

 And what IS that woman doing with the little metal box? Is it edible?

I got the Head Gardener to chop a rather thuggish Hellebore down, and now we can see that the Tiarella has been flourishing in the shade.

A little dress and a new venture

 A new dress for a little girl. This was a Swedish print that I ordered a couple of years ago, and it turned out to be much larger than I thought from the picture in the catalogue. So, now that she has grown some, I have been able to use it.

 The print was just perfect for self-covered buttons!

And here we have some pictures of my new quilt, just beginning. I am using plain fabric to join up the hexagon flowers, so they will show up well in all their differences. I am wondering just how many variations I will be able to get out of this print.

Footnote. When I stitched the previous piece onto it's cotton duvet backing, I trimmed off the binding of the duvet before putting my patchwork edging on. Somebody made off with the trimmings, and I notice that they have a new life now, tying in the branches of the apple trees that he is training in the fruit cage. Waste not, want not - it's the Keeper training.

Still here

It has been a hard winter, and I have not been the happiest person I have ever been, but some good has come of it. and one of the goods is that I have finished a patchwork quilt. Perhaps I shouldn't call it a quilt, since there is no real quilting involved - it has been laid over and stitched down onto a cotton-filled summer weight duvet, which will mean it can be easily washed.  I didn't go in for much in the way of pattern, just making up six-patch circles and surrounding them with random patches - sort-of find-the-pattern-if-you-can.

 One of the things that fascinated me was the way some of the prints formed new patterns, when carefully cut and placed: example here of two versions made from Liberty Ianthe.

 And then two from a print of wedding ring patchwork.

It is fascinating how much variation can be produced working this way. So much so that I have found another piece of Liberty print, Copen Flower,from here, and have embarked on a new project.  This one will feature the hexagon circles on a background of plain fabrics. No photos of this one yet, but I am surprising myself since I don't reckon to be a designer - not very good at it - but this is turning out to be very satisfactory. I did hope to find a picture of the print, but it would appear that the firm has sold out of that one. I can recommend them since they send out promptly and their prices are good.
I must dig my camera out!