Day 27: Make a rosemary wreath

Day 27 and time for something creative. While gardening yesterday, I'd pruned the rosemary bush and it seemed a shame to waste all the sprigs even though there are still plenty more.

I found this watering can in the garage when we moved in and it seemed the perfect place to store the sprigs while I decided what to do.

After a bit of deliberation I decided to make a wreath so, as soon as I arrived home this evening, I set to work. The hoop is an old metal coat hanger.

I used some garden wire to attach the rosemary sprigs around the hoop and used whatever else I could find to decorate it: alchemilla mollis, penstemon, lemon balm and clematis.

Ta-dah! I'm really pleased with it and, of course, my hands smelled amazing afterwards :)

I've also tried this idea which I saw in a magazine. The idea is that the heat from the candle releases the fragrance of the leaves. The jury is still out on this one: it looks pretty but, as I sit here sniffing the air, there's no hint of rosemary.

Last but not least, an update on the baby grebes. As you can see, they're still doing well and sticking close to mum :)

Tea cup posy

Something different to share with you today as a change from our staycation travels, though I'm glad you've been enjoying our adventures so much :)

It was Mum's birthday on Tuesday and I decided to make her present myself this year. I'd seen some tea cup posies on our travels a while back and have been gathering together bits and pieces to use. The cups came from second hand stalls on the market and cost about £1 each. The one on the right was originally destined to be a tea cup candle and still might, but I decided to make two posies and see which turned out the best.

First the oasis. A necessary evil but I hate touching this stuff. It feels so horrible, crumbles all over the place and sticks to your hands and everything else! Clearly I'm never going to be a florist.

Anyway, that part over with, the fun part can begin of sticking in carefully arranging flowers and foliage.

Posy number 1. I liked the combination of colours and flowers but wasn't sure about the height of the design.

Posy number 2: I tried to keep this one much more compact and thought the size and shape worked better. So much so that I decided to scrap Posy 1 and start again.

Posy number 3: Much better. Same flowers but a more compact design.

Seeing them both together, I think Posy 2 needs filling out with more foliage/flowers now.

So, Mum received the posy on the left for her birthday and seemed thrilled with it. She apparently took it to the next door neighbour to show it off which is always a good sign!

Next time, some real flowers and some vegetables too in an update on our garden. Hope you have plans for a lovely weekend. We're going on a haunted underworld tour of Manchester tomorrow - wish us luck! x

Flower Friday

I've really enjoyed having the welly of flowers. The gorgeous, vibrant colours combined with the quirky craziness of a welly vase has made me smile every time I've looked at it.

Gerberas are lovely but they don't last long and, before the week was out, they'd started to droop and curl. It seemed such a shame and I wanted to extract every last moment of pleasure from them. Time to dig out my trusty trifle bowl and create a new display.

Success! Within an hour, the flowers looked fresh again and were so gorgeous floating in the water with the glass pebbles sparkling underneath.

It looks so pretty in the evening too lit up with a floating candle. Almost a week later and they're still going strong.

I couldn't let the welly go to waste though. The foliage was still looking fresh so, a bunch of cheap carnations later and a new display was born.

A more subtle and tasteful colour combination this time but just as effective. This welly is going to run and run ;-)

Welly Wednesday

I recently attended an event with a festival theme and was much taken by the table decorations. They were so bright and colourful.

The paint-spattered foliage was unusual.

The best part though was the vase.

It's a welly!

Even more amazing was that I won one to take home! It caused a few second glances on the train :)

A trifling display

Well, it's almost a month since Christmas and here I am still mentioning it. I have this one last thing to share and then it's time to move on, honest!

Having made a table centrepiece for Christmas last year, I really wanted to make something again. I'd already decided on a design, which I'd seen on Pinterest, and planned to use my cylinder vase. But then, I spotted a trifle bowl in the special buys at Aldi.

It's a really simple idea but so effective. Natural and glass pebbles in the bottom. Tendrils of ivy leaves winding up the sides. Fill with water and float cranberries and candles on the top.

So pretty when the candles are lit.

I loved how they glowed from underneath too.

One thing I would say about floating candles though, is that there's an awful lot of waste, so I now have a bag full of white wax to melt down to make more teacup candles.

It stayed looking lovely the whole of Christmas until New Year's Eve, when I dismantled it and made a smaller version in the cylinder vase. I needed the trifle bowl for my New Year's Day dinner.

As the now proud owner of a trifle bowl, it seemed a good idea to try it out with the dessert for which it was made. I grew up with the kind of trifle which has a layer of jelly at the bottom. Sometimes the jelly would include tinned fruit (peaches or fruit cocktail - very '70s) but never, ever, ever with sponge. Ughh! Jelly, yes. Sponge, yes. But the two together - no, no, no! *

In any case, for only my second ever trip into trifle-making, I wanted to make one of those posh, chef-y trifles which doesn't include jelly at all. **

As you'll know, trifles are made up of layers. The bottom layer was slices of raspberry swiss roll sprinkled with homemade blackberry liqueur. Next came a layer of raspberries and blueberries, cooked and strained to remove excess liquid. Then custard (supermarket to save time). Finally, a row of raspberries and blueberries around the edges before adding whipped double cream.

Ta-dah! I made up the decoration as I went along and wish I'd planned it a bit more. However, it tasted great and that's the main thing. One of my guests asked for a small piece as he isn't much of a dessert person and ended up having thirds! I call that a success.

So, having found two uses for my trifle bowl, I'm wondering what else? We're hosting another Burns Night supper on Saturday and I could use it for punch (non-alcoholic, unfortunately, with under-10s present). Any other ideas? Like courgettes, is there potential for a book, '101 ways with a trifle bowl'? An intriguing thought, I'm off to Pinterest to investigate :)


*I feel the same way about jam and butter.

**'Posh' is generally applied to anything which my family didn't do while I was growing up, as posh we most definitely are not. Another example would be cutting toast into triangles rather than squares.

Paper white

I've been playing with my glass vase and pebbles again to create a flower display. And pretending that spring is here by bringing flowers and bulbs into the house. The idea isn't mine though - I saw it in issue 3 of The Simple Things - but as soon as I saw it I wanted to have a go.

It couldn't be simpler. Buy a pot of bulbs and grow on until they're well established: I chose Narcissus 'Paper White'. Rinse off the compost and put the bulbs into the bottom of a plain glass vase. I added glass pebbles in the bottom for extra interest and to stop the bulbs sitting in the water. There were enough bulbs for two vases though I think the straight-sided one worked best by keeping the leaves more upright.

I wondered how the bulbs would react to being out of compost but it didn't seem to have affected them as, before long, the flowers started to emerge.

Is there anything more exciting than watching flowers slowly emerge from their bud cocoon and slowly unfurl? The anticipation of wondering what the blooms will look like?

And the pleasure when they're revealed in all their glory. And the perfume that meets you when you walk into the room.

This one sat in the window in the stairwell where I've loved looking through the glass at the tangle of roots. I think the bulbs got enough light, though they do seem rather leggy. Maybe they're this tall naturally? As soon as they've finished flowering I'll put them in the garden to gather strength for next year.

And these beauties were in the bargain bin at the supermarket:  a snip at £1.89. Who could resist? Definitely not me!

Cyclamen, clementines & cake

This Christmas I wanted something different to the usual vase of flowers for my table. I've always thought that piles of clementines with their leaves looked very Christmassy but the problem is that we don't actually like them that much.

Then Gillian posted about the orange cake her husband had made and I realised I could still have my clementines and eat them!

I already had the gold platter and the fairy lights from the Woodland Vase. The cyclamen was from Asda and came with the gold star pot. Grapes were added to fill out the display but also to tempt Chickpea to eat fruit instead of all the chocolate she was likely to receive! I added a few baubles for some extra colour.

I was really pleased with the way it turned out and it looked lovely on my table and lit up at night, though I think I ended up eating more of the grapes than Chickpea!

And so to the cake. Originally I planned to make Nigella's delicious Clementine Cake from her book How to Eat, which I've made a couple of times. But, while I was browsing through my file of recipes looking for a special dessert for New Year's Day, I came across a Fruity Ricotta Cake from the Morrisons magazine which used slices of the clementines to decorate the top and sides. It looked so pretty I couldn't resist.

I used a reusable cake tin liner for the first time and was very impressed. The cake came out of the tin beautifully - just slid out without sticking at all. In fact the liner stayed 'stuck' to the tin. I'll definitely be using it again.

This was the finished cake. I thought it would be more like a cheesecake but it was actually more like the clementine cake with a moist almondy taste and texture.

(Hmm, I'm now wishing I'd taken more time to get a better photo and that doily was definitely a mistake. But the hungry hoards were waiting!)

Whilst on the subject of cakes, when I went back to work on Thursday, I was finally able to open my Secret Santa present after missing out before Christmas with my back. Well, it was worth the wait - look what Santa brought me! He clearly knows me very well :-)

We've just finished taking down all the decorations and clearing Christmas away for another year. There's a couple more mentions of it to come on here though as I've got a recipe to share with you and and another gift I made for friends. Back in a day or two.

Woodland vase

Last weekend we visited our friends, Sue and Gordon, and I was very taken with a vase display that Sue had created. So taken in fact, that I decided to have a go at making one myself and spent a very happy hour on Sunday putting it together.

For the display, you will need a large plain glass vase. It can be round, square, rectangular - whatever you have.

Next, you'll need something to fill the vase with. I used a selection of glass pebbles, pine cones, moss and lichen-covered twigs. Sue gathered her moss in the beautiful Scottish location of Loch Ness. Mine was gathered in the rather less glamorous surroundings of Hobbycraft.

And, of course, the all important element of lights. These are battery-powered micro LED lights on a silver wire and were £3.50 from Wilkinsons. Don't they give off an amazing amount of light for such tiny bulbs?

In this version, I layered up the different ingredients, winding the lights in as I went, trying to get them as evenly distributed as possible.

The second version is more like the one Sue had made, though she had far better twigs than me - long and elegant whereas mine are short and stubby! The vase is only half-filled and the lights are strung around the twigs as well as in the vase. I added a few festive baubles for extra shine and colour.

Not a new idea, I know, but so effective and easy to put together. Can you imagine it in the summer with pebbles, shells and driftwood?

We've had a decorator in this week painting the stairwell and landing, so the house smells of paint. I hate when the house doesn't smell 'normal' and find it somehow unsettling.

And today we put up our Christmas tree! The paint smell must have unsettled me more than I thought because I managed to slip on the stairs carrying the boxes of decorations down. No harm done except for a grazed elbow: I was more worried about damaging the new paintwork! Tomorrow I need to write letters to go in some cards so not much time for blogging. I'll be back later in the week though with pictures of the tree. See you then. x

Foraged flowers

After our quilt show, I was able to take home one of the table displays that Barbara made to decorate our refreshment area. Two weeks later, the flowers have died off but the foliage still has some life left in it. It seemed a waste to throw it away so yesterday I set myself the challenge of creating a new display using only foraged items. I have to admit thinking I'd probably have to supplement my finds with some bought flowers: I ended up being pleasantly surprised.

My favourite find was this chocolate cosmos. I was loath to cut off the flowers as they had taken so long to emerge this summer. However, the seed heads were just as lovely and interesting.

Eventually, from a forage around mine and my parent's gardens I gathered: rudbeckia, lavender, rosemary, aster, aubretia, berberis, hypericum and skimmia. One of these (I think it was the hypericum) gave off a lovely orangey scent as I was trimming.

 

And here's the finished display on my fireplace. I'm no florist but I think this is pretty good! But then I couldn't really go wrong with such lovely materials to work with.