Back in the tree

We spotted our fledgling wood pigeon back up in the tree today - apparently none the worse for his trip down to the ground and encounters with our window!

Leaving the nest

There has been a wood pigeon nest in our neighbour's small hawthorn tree just the other side of the fence. A very small tree for such large birds! About 2 weeks ago the tree, and presumably the nest, were no longer big enough for the baby wood pigeon, so since then he has been sitting on top of our fence amidst the honeysuckle. Our neighbour has a lot of cats so it is quite surprising that he has survived, but he has.

We have been lucky enough to see him being fed a couple of times - although it's not a pretty sight!

Yesterday he decided to take his first flight, sadly straight into our window. Here he is, having made it back up onto the bench, and not quite sure where to go next.

He had another couple of goes at flying yesterday evening, but sadly the window kept getting in the way.  His flying was pretty good but his sense of direction was appalling!

This morning he has gone - hopefully he worked out which way was house and which way was sky.  There are no feathers, so at any rate that's a good sign!

Busy busy busy

I am very conscious that I have been neglecting my blog of late... my excuse is that I have been gadding around all over the place. First we went off to see my Mum at the seaside and of course I managed to fit in a bit of beachcombing...

As usual Mum was in the midst of a clear out - I have no idea why she was the owner of a polystyrene display head but I was quite pleased to take it off her hands!  Meet Florence - as you can see I have already started to give her a makeover...

Then back home to mountains of washing...  On Friday I managed to sneak off to Rugby for the day to visit the CULTEX exhibition.  This inspiring exhibition was the result of a collaboration between 3 Japanese and 3 Norwegian textile artists.  Sadly it has closed now and is off to Norway but the CULTEX website is well worth a look.  I can't show you any pictures from the exhibition but I did take a nice one of Rugby school - Rugby itself is very pretty, I have only ever been to the station before which doesn't give the best impression...

I had a little time to spend browsing the shops in Rugby town centre before my train home and couldn't resist this find in the fair trade shop...

I'm sure it's going to be very useful for something!

And in between all of this gadding about I have been working on  a couple of lovely wedding flower orders, including some flowers in lovely new shades of blue - the new colours will be arriving in my shop shortly!

Back in the swing of things...

The blog has been rather quiet lately because I have been on holiday - yes, thank you, I had a lovely time and I'm nearly brown - at least, the gaps between the freckles are smaller!

I'm not really one for taking conventional holiday snaps, but I did love these palm trees - I'm not sure if these are flowers or seed pods but they looked like birds heads in the trees - I love the shape, a bit like a Bird of Paradise flower.

Of course I couldn't resist collecting some shells...

...and the fruit and vegetables came in these lovely peppermint green bags - well, I couldn't just throw them away, could I?

Sky

I was playing with my new camera the other evening... one of the reasons I like living here is that there is so much sky...

Making 'Paper' from Vegetables

As promised – but rather overdue, sorry! – an explanation of my paper-from-vegetables process. These instructions are for flat paper - and are not terribly precise since this is definitely an experimental, make-it-up-as-you-go-along type of process... Sometimes it works fine, sometimes you do exactly the same thing and it all goes horribly wrong… but then that's what compost heaps are for!

Equipment : You will need some pressing boards (old shelves work well ), lots and lots of newspaper, and some cloths – I used the cheapest of cheap J-cloths.

Next, choose your vegetables. I have been most successful with courgette, carrot (sliced or grated), onions and red cabbage (good but smelly!). Leeks and celery can work but are a bit temperamental. I tried a yellow pepper which didn’t work at all, although I think it might if I skinned it first… or sliced it into strips… Anything too watery probably won’t work and shiny skins like that on the pepper are a problem.  But there are lots of veggies I haven’t tried yet which will probably work really well – so experiment!

Step 1 : Slice your chosen vegetable whichever way you want. The slices do not need to be particularly thin or even – in fact, slices which are too thin will make your resulting paper terribly fragile. Boil the slices until they are just soft but not disintegrating – how long depends on the vegetable and the thickness of the slices – 3-5mins is about right for most things. Drain.

Step 2 : Lay a cloth on top of a pad of newspaper, on top of a board. Arrange your drained vegetable slices on the cloth, overlapping the slices by about 5mm. You can see from the photograph that the courgette slices were really quite thick.  I was making lots of little separate pieces here so I haven't overlapped them much.

Lay another cloth on top and another pad of newspaper on top of that. If you have more vegetable slices you can lay another cloth on top and repeat, topping off with a last layer of newspaper and another pressing board. Weight it all down with a stack of books or whatever else you have to hand.

Step 3 : The vegetables are very wet at this stage, so after an hour or so you will need to replace all the newspaper with dry newspaper. This is important because if you don’t get rid of the moisture your veg will go mouldy before it dries. You can now leave your vegetables pressing for a few hours or overnight.

Step 4 : Your vegetables should be paper thin by now, sticking together and beginning to dry out. Renew the cloths by carefully peeling the top cloth off and replacing with a clean one. Flip the cloth-veg-cloth sandwich over and carefully peel off and replace the other cloth. If you don’t replace the cloths at this stage you may find your veg paper gets irretrievably stuck to them. Restack with fresh newspaper between the pressing boards.

Repeat step 4 a couple of times a day until your vegetable paper is dry. This can take up to 3 or 4 days depending on the moisture content and thickness of the vegetables, how heavy the weights are, and so on.

And then you’re done! The vegetable paper can be left as it is, or coated with a sealant such as shellac or acrylic wax. I found the acrylic wax made the otherwise quite brittle paper really flexible, but also very shiny, which I didn’t like so much. Shellac is less shiny and worked really well on the red cabbage but would discolour a paler vegetable.  I have no idea how long the paper will last or how long it will keep its colour - I will keep you updated.

So, have fun experimenting, and if you make some vegetable paper, send me a picture, I'd love to see!

Labelling part 3

Did I mention how much I love the stamp I got from Clare of LittleGreyClouds?  (Find her here on etsy and here on folksy.)  I'm sure I did!  Anyway, after all the recent excitement I was feeling a bit worn out and not really up to making new stock so I played around with my stamp, some nice sheets of recycled card and some left over scraps of ribbon and yarn.  And these are what I made...