Winter Whites

Down came the snow and poof went the computer, up in smoke never to work again, thus any hopes of trying to create a blog went out the window for quite sometime. But now we are back in operation and its incredibly cold outside, with everyone talking of Winter Blues.

I decided that instead we should really be thinking of Winter whites! This year of course we had the snow which blanketed everything and made the countryside look so magical. Igloos and igloo envy became the name of the game in our area, our neighbours son had a camping stove in his and was making hot chocolate and building his door ready to sleep in it for the night. My gang thought the hot chocolate idea was great and so we emulated this in our own creation but the drop in temperature by 4pm in the evening meant they all came in with frozen noses and toeses!

In order to look great and keep warm on these bitter cold days my essential items of kit were, of course, my welligogs,

they worked amazingly in the deep snow with the fleece liners and in addition a charming wooly hat. Which of course at TreeHouseBlue we now have in stock and are a definite must, everyone will be wanting one once you do the school pick up in one of these.

I have now realised that there may be a new contender for the role as best ever footwear (sorry welligogs) the new in 'wedge wellies', they are fab! I know they are going to go down a storm during the festival season but I think they really should be purchased now to wear in!!! Dog walking will never be the same again.

There is not much to remark on during my dog walks at the moment, I had a job finding enough greenery to take to my flower club class this week.

The theme was Chinese New year and we were going to do a modern arrangement. Whilst out shopping with my sister I told her this and she had me looking for little Chinese themed things to use, as well as saying it should be in reds and golds.
I then explained that the brief is only a guide and that I would adapt it to suit the type of arrangement I would like in my home, which in this case was an arrangement with white amaryllis! She concluded that in the end the brief was irrelevant and you just did what you wanted. I am not sure she gets the idea but hopefully my arrangement had a bit of a Chinese feel to it without requiring dangly fish and gold tassels to portray this.

I have definitely got a thing about' white' at the moment, which must be why I am currently writing about it, I think it should be the official colour of Winter. My favourite nature table scene is the one of King Winter, I need to find my snowdrops now to add to this scene.
I was totally amazed that the large crop of snowdrops that grow in the children's school woods just appeared out of the blue on the 1st of February. They look so dainty and beautiful.

TreeHouseBlue have encouraged my white obsession by stocking the most charming little white dishes for valentines day or any other occasion you might want to display these very original pieces.

The heart mug

is a definite hot choccie must, I think, that wouldn't be used outside in the igloo, that is for sure . Talking of original pieces, I went to visit my brother at the weekend and his flat is very modern and newly decorated in white with a very cool fire that fixes to the wall showing a film of a real fire with sound effects and heat. The room looked so much cosier with it, unfortunately the new white shelf unit they bought for the enormous flatscreen tv they now own looks rather empty and sad. They haven't found any appropriate ornaments to display on the shelves. Whilst writing this I have realised I will need to give him a call to suggest he buys his fiance the recycled metal roses because they would look absolutely fantastic on the empty shelf unit and what better than a valentines gift that will last for ages not just a week.

Despite now having a new computer I have not worked out how to put photos on and so will have to wait until my husband comes back from skiing with the girls to help me out.
Yes I am now all alone for 10 days with my little Toby to keep me company or drive me mad depending what mood he is in because Andy and the girls have gone off on a school ski trip to Switzerland. The traumas beforehand about how high the cable cars were going to be and how awful the vegetarian food might be, have all been forgotten now they are there having an amazing time. I on the other hand am left behind feeling totally emotionally drained from keeping every body's spirits up until the departure date. Never mind, I am going to a Valentines Ball on Saturday, I volunteered to do the table arrangements so I think my next theme will have to be reds and hearts and hopefully Andy will be back by then and I can show off some photos of the event.

Father time has been busy!

I wonder daily what father time does to the clocks in our house, he seems to be pushing them on whenever I look! Autumn is now well and truly here and I have not even been able to write a single post until now. This time of year is always a busy one for me because it is Toby's birthday as well as all my nieces and nephews on my husbands side!
It is also a very busy time at Tree House Blue as we go on the search for great new products and excitedly open the parcels when they arrive. If you have not clicked on the "new in" icon recently, then you really should, there are some great new 'must' have gifts. We even featured in the Daily Telegraphs top ten oilcloths feature with our red floral oilcloth.
One of my reasons for not blogging might also be because I have been making some new products for the shop. The storage boxes I made with the oilcloth featured in the Telegraph, for the shop have been received well, the larger boxes I made for storing bathroom items such as toilet rolls etc., we discovered fit our welligogs beautifully and so save the shoe cupboard or car boot from becoming covered in mud!

I have also made some reversible fabric children's headbands which feature a school uniform gingham on one side and another more funky fabric on the other, thus it can be turned round the minute the girls come out of school but whilst at school they look incredibly smart.

It has been a bit of a 'make it' week or so because I also customised two organic cotton t shirts for my goddaughter to send to Australia, I usually send a gift from Tree House Blue but this year I had not been to the shop in time and so had to resort to a homemade item.

I did attempt one year to send The Princess and the Pea to her, I took ages painstakingly wrapping it so that it would not get damaged but then nearly fainted when I got to the post office and it would have cost almost as much to send it, as it was to buy it.

So now I am always very conscious of what I choose her. I think this Christmas it will be something from our soft fabric pretend play range, our vicar bought the tee pee and Indians one year to send to Canada for her grandson so I know these would be ideal to send.

My friend has a beautiful little girl called Freya whom my daughters adore and love to go round to bath her and give her, her bottle. Every time she comes to our house she loves to play with my maileg pixie so I have made a note to buy her one for her birthday next week.

This is even more poignant now because my own pixie who sits by my fireplace all year round very happily is also very well loved by our dog shadow, unfortunately too well loved!!

I will be on the lookout for a new one this year when they come in for Christmas!
Shadow arrived at our house last year for Toby's birthday and is now firmly part of the family he even featured on Toby's birthday cake. Unfortunately for some reason I did not take a photo of the cake that featured shadow, but I did take one of his other cake which depicted Toby's new hobby instead! He led a very persuasive argument for the reason why he needed two cakes for his birthday and being a glutton for punishment I crumbled when his bottom lip started to drop!!!

At Tree House Blue we love our pets almost as much as our children!, which is probably why we have a whole section dedicated to them. The woof lead holder is such a brilliant idea, in our house we would also need a neigh and a quack, though on second thoughts we don't actually take the ducks for a walk. Toby was over the moon when he came in with the most enormous egg we have ever seen produced by Poppy, I told him it must have been his birthday present and he was so pleased. I used it to make his other birthday cake( yes that would now be number 3) that he takes into school and it was double yolked as we suspected.

It is getting harder to find a time when it is light enough in the mornings to walk the dog, but I did take this photo the other day because the mist and the sunlight looked so magical. Winter is just round the corner and with it we have Halloween, bonfire night and of course Christmas to look forward to. This year I will be taking Tree House Blue to a new 3 day Christmas Fair at the mansion house(Trunkwell House) in our village, they are having an ice rink and funfair as well as lots of stalls, it will be over the Halloween weekend whilst the children are on half term, so that should be something to look forward to for everyone.

Susie also has other events planned so if you would like to see where we are, leading up to Christmas just send us a message via info@treehouseblue.co.uk and we can let you know what other events we will be attending.

Homegrown and hot!

How lucky we feel, not only did we enjoy a wonderful holiday again in Bulgaria with plenty of sunshine, we were also able to embark on a slice of Bulgarian village life by harvesting our gardens treasures.

Trees are made to be climbed by all little boys and our trees in Bulgaria just seem to be the best for this and even better when plums can be picked at the same time! Molly and I then chopped and stoned these tasty items and made jam with them, we finally could return something to our neighbour to thank him for all his work, even if it was just a jar of jam. What else do you give a man who is totally self sufficient and has absolutely no need for anything. Though the girls did suggest we give him a leather tankard for his rakia, but even for him I think a pint of this very strong plum brandy might be a little too much. The plums that littered the ground were then collected on his instruction and placed in a bucket where we were taken to his cellar to empty the contents into a huge drum in which the lethal brew of his next batch of homemade rakia was fermenting!




Unfortunately the very same trees we delighted in by day, the local wildlife played in by night. Our first experience of this, left my mum terrified that all night, all she could here was a bear walking around on our roof! We reasoned with her that it was very probably a cat that had jumped onto the roof from the over hanging pear tree.
Whatever it is visits us every year and each year keeps us awake with its scampering around, but hey presto! this year we found out it is called a belka and is larger than a squirrel and is harmless, they just get into the roof space in order to find bird eggs in the nests. It is all very well knowing what it is but it still keeps you awake half the night! so following a particularly disturbed night, the evening we started to hear them again we took the matter into our own hands and started to bash the ceiling with a broom very loudly. The noise stopped and the children shouted "mum we've seen them" and sure enough in the trees were three sets of eyes looking at us, the children went out to chase them out of the trees and they turned out to be something similar to a polecat.
So our belkas had harvested their eggs from our roof space and thankfully moved onto another house in the village using the trees as their exit route as well as the path between the tomato vines, what a relief.

That left us to complete our harvest with the tomatoes and peppers our neighbour had kindly planted for us. The only problem was what to do with the huge and abundant amount of tomato's we had now picked. Molly's answer was to make bruschetta for breakfast every morning for whom ever fancied it. The beautifully tactile wooden chopping boards that we sell at THB would do a fantastic job with this delicious snack. In honour of Molly's taciturn efforts to eat as many tomatoes as she possibly can during the holiday I will write out her very own bruschetta recipe.










One loaf of uncut bread
tomatoes
garlic
olive oil
salt

Slice the bread and toast.
Chop the tomatoes into small pieces
Rub a clove of garlic over each slice.
Drizzle some oil over the top.
Place the tomatoes on top with another small drizzle of oil.
Eat straight away or place under the grill briefly.

A truly delicious holiday breakfast experience!

Molly's dad came up with another idea," how about some tomato soup"?,It was the best tomato soup we had ever tasted. The village children who joined us for lunch that day, thought we had gone completely crazy drinking hot soup for lunch when it was 35degrees outside, nonetheless all bowls were empty.

I just stoically made tons of the local 'shopska' salad and we ate it with every meal. This involves mixing chopped tomatoes, cucumber,onion and peppers in a bowl topped with grated serena cheese, which is a white cheese similar to feta that can only be found in Bulgaria. Pasta sauce was another meal we made up with our produce though this was not quite as exotic as the gourmet sauces that we now stock. If you haven't been lucky enough to go away this year these sauces would certainly help to take you to some exotic place during your mealtime.

It wasn't until I started to write this post that I realised how important the trees in our garden have become to us during our holiday. The pear tree holds the hammock, the swing and the rope ladder every year and all the local children come around to play. Nature and natural products play such an important part in our children's lives and it is experience with these that makes the biggest impressions on our memories. How many young people reminisce about a particular play station game they played when they were young, I am sure their most strong memory would be one of climbing trees or baking cakes even if these were done far less often than playing on the wii!

Holiday time

Well, it finally arrived the end of term and the start of the Summer holidays. We go away soon to our second home in Bulgaria where we exchange our English village for a traditional Bulgarian one, and we are all very excited. I think Toby has caught the bug first by finding the hundreds of paper airplanes he made after Christmas, and with his friend Jo took them out onto the front lawn and proceeded to launch every single one of them. The girls looked out the window horrified calling " mum look at the mess Toby has made!" I looked out the window and it was such a lovely sight seeing the boys playing with their planes surrounded by all the ones they had launched so far, I had to run and get my camera in order to capture the image.

Paper airplanes are such a lovely nostalgic item, at the shop we now have a twist on this with postcards made from balsa wood which when written can be made into airplanes and posted! I am sure Toby would love to receive one of these. We also have a whole new range of paper airplane goodies just in time for my holiday. There's a purse and travel wallet designed as though it is an airmail letter, as well as a large bag which would be a perfect hand luggage bag and then a photo album to put all the photos of your holiday in. They are all just so quirky and different, a definite pre holiday treat for yourself or a gift for someone about to go travelling.

If the airmail range doesn't tempt you then the travel map range which not only includes the travel wallet and passport cover but also a luggage tag might. This range definitely has an air of sophistication about it I think.

Not everyone in the household is as excited about going away for 3 weeks though, Ellen is very concerned about the animals and is going to miss them all dreadfully. I can understand why she feels this way, only today the ducks had us giggling and running for the camera when we found them hiding in my sage bush, all we could see was a rustling in the bush and then suddenly these two cheeky little ducks would pop up. Great entertainment!Luckily for them we have 3 sets of friends who are coming to stay in our house each week and look after them for us. I just need to convince Ellen that they are going to enjoy their little holiday just as much as us. Its not as if she wont have any contact with animals on holiday, we usually have a gaggle of ducks and geese waiting at our front gate in the morning ready for their breakfast. and the donkeys wake us with their braying each day. We usually play the game of who can guess the correct number of donkey and carts we will see on our way to the beach each day, some how dad always wins, I think it must have something to do with the many alternative routes he takes each time! cheeky!!

We have a wonderful farmer who lives opposite us who looks after our house and plants our garden with tomatoes and chillies so that they are ready just in time for our arrival. I have plans to make lots of pasta sauce this year because I couldn't bear to see the wastage when we left last year, we were literally drowning in tomatoes. My own tomatoes instead will be enjoyed by my wonderful house sitters I am sure, I think also they will get some broccoli and lettuce and no end supply of potatoes.

Luckily my dahlia bloomed just in time for me to enjoy it before we go away. I have never grown dahlias before but my 2 neighbours have a bit of a rivalry thing going on' who can grow the prettiest biggest dahlias'. I would like to say it is friendly rivalry but I don't think it is! Anyway I have been drawn into the contest by one neighbour who presented me with a bulb and said " Here you go Sam see if you can grow that". Help!! So I planted my bulb and watched it grow into what was starting to look a bit like a triffid before I took the courage to plant it outside and hopefully avoid any late frost. It was looking a bit iffy for a while, I was beginning to think I had grown a stalk but no flower, but then it started to appear and now I have an enormous yellow bloom! No comparison I know to the many many enormous blooms grown in my neighbours gardens but myself and the children are just as pleased with ours. I was also able to cheer Ellen up a little by being able to pick our first handful of sweet peas, she particularly loves the smell of them and immediately found one of my jugs to display them in. The trouble is the flowers look lovely in jugs but I also like to use the jugs, and I do have trouble using something for food that has had flowers in. Then I realised that what we need is a new vase to put our sweet peas in, but one that looked vintage, utilitarian and practical and as luck would have it TreeHouseBlue have just got in the vintage American milk bottle vases which I know would look so great with the sweet peas in.

Happy Campers

My two wonderful daughters successfully (despite alot of heartache beforehand) carried out a 30 mile hike over 3 days with their school this week. The trouble with this was that this then obviously led to the camping bug for no.1 daughter! I said they could have a treat as my way of saying well done, Ellen chose to hit the shops and bought herself a dress, Molly on the other hand decided she wanted the whole family to camp out in the garden!!! ( why did I offer such an open ended treat- lesson learnt!)

Toby having also just returned from a camping trip with his dad and the beavers thought this was a fantastic idea, a chance to reconstruct the full English breakfast that was the highlight of his trip as well as the abseiling of course! We actually don't own a tent but this was no problem because their Uncle had loaned them a 4 man tent which according to him would easily fit 6 in. Why do little things like my brother being prone to exaggeration not dawn on me until the deed is done. The tent was in fact a 3 man and would have been hard pushed to fit much more than that in, but a promise is a promise so we proceed to squeeze into the tent. The girls thought the tent looked very cosy I thought a night light would have been good but the battery on Molly's sun jar was not charged, how lovely it might have looked if we had the new pink sun jar!! I haven't let on to the girls yet that we now have pink ones!! They both have the Bill Brown cotton sleeping bags in pink stripe which was met with a look of disbelief from the boys at their school whilst camping, even their teacher (whom is male!) was unsure they would be warm enough, but we proved them wrong, maybe next year girls we will add the sun jar and see what the boys think about that!!

I myself have definitely got my eye on the new Bill Brown sleeping bags that have just come in , they look like vintage eiderdowns but zip up into sleeping bags very, very stylish.

We had a yummy BBQ for dinner and then settled down to a board game in our new home. The problem arose when it came to bed time, what do we do with Shadow the dog?, If we left him out he would bark at anything that went past all night and he certainly was not going to fit in with us, so I attempted to put him in the house. After a loud barking session I conceded to go inside to settle him, after a few minutes I attempted to fool shadow into thinking I was going to bed and sneaked out to regain my place in the tent!! Oh dear everyone was fast asleep, spread eagle across the tent with not the tiniest of space for me to attempt to lie in, so there was nothing for it , I went back inside and had a lovely nights sleep in my bed!!!

As we sat outside our tent in the morning eating our full English breakfast cooked by Molly and Andy on the BBQ, it occurred to me we were not the only ones doing this because Glastonbury was about to start in full swing. Apparently we had a customer buy a shewee for that very event! Another vital piece of festival kit has to be the Eco friendly disposable picnic sets, they are fully biodegradable but can be washed up a few times before the need to dispose of them, the cup is even large enough to hold half a lager or a large coffee depending on how you are feeling at the time.

On Sunday we were invited to a village BBQ, in which we were asked to bring a pudding, so I whizzed over to the next village to pick up some strawberries and cream to make a pavlova, whilst in the shop we bumped into 6 other people from the village all of whom had popped in to pick up ingredients for their pudding, it was quite comical. Whilst there the strawberries were on offer so I decided now was as good a time as any to make some jam. Consequently I chose the hottest day of the year so far to commence my jam making. A friend had made some beautiful strawberry and rose petal jam last year and I really wanted to give it a try this year. The recipe comes from a Country Living magazine from a couple of years ago.

Strawberry and Rose petal Jam

Ingredients

6 unsprayed scented red or pink roses

1.25kg strawberries

800g jam sugar

juice of 1 lemon

2tbsp rose water

Place a saucer in the freezer. Wash and dry jam jars and place on a baking tray in a low oven to sterilise.

Remove the petals from the roses and cut off the bitter white base( I did this with scissors quite easily) rinse in cold water.

Hull and halve the strawberries and place in a preserving pan with the sugar to dissolve slowly, stirring frequently so the sugar does not burn.

Once dissolved, increase heat and bring the jam to the boil. Remove any froth that forms with a large spoon. Boil quite fast over medium heat for about 20 minutes, stirring from time to time.

Place a tsp of jam onto your chilled saucer and leave for 30 seconds. If it wrinkles when pushed with your finger, the jam is ready.If not,continue to cook ad test every 3-4 minutes.

Once jam has reached setting point add the lemon juice,rose water and petals and cook for a further 2-3 minutes.

Pour the jam into jars that have been sterilised and then set them aside to cool before labelling

I had a lovely morning making this recipe, I had saved some jars already but otherwise I could have used the storage jars that we sell at the shop, the lids come in two colours duck egg blue or cream . I have a large one at the moment that I keep my vanilla sugar in. I put the empty vanilla pod that I had used at the weekend to make a vanilla creme for my pavlova into the jar with some caster sugar and already I only have to lift off the lid and the aroma of vanilla is amazing.

As you can see from this photo I will now have plenty of jam to have with my toast and mug of tea drunk from my new ladybird party mug, which of course is pink and makes me smile every time I drink from it!!