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!!

Cordial,cupcakes and Kathryn Jenkins!

This week promised to be the perfect week for me and luckily I was not disappointed. My sister and I bought tickets to see the open air Kathryn Jenkins concert at Wisley Gardens, as a birthday gift to each other. We packed up our fold up chairs and our picnic and joined the queue!

The weather was amazing, the singing fantastic and we topped it all off with a tasty cupcake in the interval!!

We talked ourselves out of buying a hot chocolate to go with it because the one disappointing part of the evening was the usual enormous queue for the loo!! Which led me to explain to my sister the wonders of the new product we have in the shop called the shewee, a product that once you have one in your handbag you would not want to be with out, it enables us less versatile ladies become much better equipped to pee whilst standing without any of those sprinkling accidents! I will say no more but definitely worth investigating if you have a holiday planned to any country that tends to have unsavoury toilet facilities.

I popped into the shop this week also and the oilcloth holdalls were a hit, I was so inspired by the teams response I promptly came home and made two large rectangular toilet roll holders or bathroom tidies. Oh dear! I do seem to have a problem with trying to lead myself away from lavatory talk.

I had a lovely lunch with Susie and Issy and we had a great session of bouncing ideas around that could be taken forward into new products. Whilst at the shop my sister texted me to order 3 kiss letterpress necklaces and a friend one.

She had given a kiss necklace to her daughter Harriet's nursery school teacher because Harriet is now going to 'big school' and she absolutely loved it, as well as all the other mums who saw it and then asked her to place an order for some more. My sister stated" you must tell everyone what a fantastic idea they are as teacher gifts", and so I am doing exactly that.

Another great gift are the momijji products, these dolls all come with a little note in the base that can be used to send a little personal message, they really are very cute. My sister also became very popular when all her friends saw the yummy cupcakes she made for Harriet's birthday using the momijii cupcake set with the little flags in each one. Consequently she was volunteered in her absence to provide all the cupcakes for the children's end of term leaving party, oops maybe she won't thank treehouseblue for that one!

For my sisters birthday, my girls decided they were going to make some elderflower cordial to give to Auntie Nikki. Since we moved to our house we have wanted to have a go at making elderflower cordial but have missed the ideal time in which to pick the elder flowers. This year we managed to pick armfuls on a walk we did after school and with the help of dad who stopped at the chemist on his way home from work to pick up the citric acid, we proceeded to make elderflower cordial.

It was so easy to make and smelt and tasted absolutely divine, I think we might have to make some more before the flowers start to drop, now is definitely the perfect time to do this. If you would like to give it a go yourselves, this is the recipe we used:

ELDERFLOWER CORDIAL

1 lemon, grate the rind and slice the fruit

25g(10z) citric acid

1kg (2lb) sugar

10 elderflower heads

750ml water

Pour boiling water onto sugar in a bowl.

Stir to dissolve, add the lemon rind,slices citric acid and flowerheads (wash through in a colander first)

Leave for 24 hours, stirring occassionally.

Sieve through a muslin pour into clean bottles and seal with screw top caps.

Keeps for 6 months unless you have kids!!!

Dilute with ice cold water or sparkling water for a beautifully refreshing summer drink.

Floral Inspiration

It is amazing how in just a few weeks our gardens and the countryside have blossomed into beautiful palettes of colour. My next door neighbours have the most amazing country borders full of foxgloves,delphiniums, aquilegia and sweet william, my garden is not quite so wonderful but I use theirs to provide me with enthusiasm and inspiration. Taking this inspiration the theme for flower club this week was a summer basket, which Margaret our teacher thinks we should all enter into the local Country Show competition in September. I think we will need another one or two of the white wine spritzers we had last night to convince ourselves we are worthy of entering a competition but once we had all finished our creations and our spritzers! we did feel slightly more confident about the whole concept.

I had a theory that if I tidied and beautified my working space it would help with my creativity and production, so I set to work to do this and was very pleased with my definite floral themed working area.

I have since made some of these oilcloth holdalls, that I discovered whilst trying to come up with a lunch bag design. My initial one had some definite design flaws and so whilst I was waiting to buy the extra bits in order to rectify these flaws I put all my sewing bits and bobs related to the project inside the said failed bag. Hey presto! this has now become an incredibly handy tidyall for my sewing room. Thus I digressed from lunch bags and moved onto reversible oilcloth holdalls and set my imagination going as to what they could be used for around the home, below are some of my ideas. As you can see the little pencil pot looks great with the twig pencils that we sell at TreeHouseBlue, they really jazz up any workspace and are so great to hold. I think I will take these up to the shop next week and see whether Susie and Sam like them.

I have become stuck on my lunch bag design and so am now thinking along the lines of painting overalls! In between though I have had to make a white pair of trousers for Toby , as it will be his first Whitsun festival on Friday. I realised I may have made them a little wide in the leg , when Toby burst into an Elvis impression the minute he tried them on!! He seemed happy enough with them despite this, I now have visions of him at school amidst a very reverent and beautiful assembly becoming the king!

Looking out the window I see that my plan at the start of the Spring to make my veg plot equally inspiring and chintzy is coming together a little slower. The sweetpeas in the flour tin are doing great, I think what would help the effect along even more would be the really gorgeous windbreak and matching deckchair!! as featured in this months Country living. The screening we put up to hide nextdoors rubbish and discourage rabbits from entering my plot has not faired at all well through the Winter, maybe the solution would be to use the windbreak to add colour to the garden through the Summer but it can be safely put away for the Winter months and brought out again the next year. Equally my deckchairs are a disgrace, I have attempted to cover them in a different fabric and for now I think that will have to be my solution but really the whole effect would be completed by some new ones to match. Maybe my husband would like one for Fathers Day, what better way to relax, than in the garden, in a deckchair with a good book!

To bring things back around to flowers and Spring, I have taken a photo of our current nature table, every family who goes to a Steiner Waldorf school will have a nature table somewhere in their house. It helps to demonstrate to the children the Seasons and the rhythm that the year brings as well as allowing them space to put any of the treasures they have found whilst out and about. Some of them can be incredibly beautiful and elaborate with lots of handmade as well as bought items to help set the scene for the time of year. Our table tends to be busy with all 3 children contributing. Soon the whitsun doves will appear and some of the other items will go.

Sending the children to The Steiner school means that they are aware of events in the calendar such as Whitsun but at the same time are aware of the slightly more commercial events such as fathers day also which are just as important in a child's life.

Jam and Jerusalem!

Every time I attend one of our village hall committee meetings, I have to giggle to myself. The whole scenario is like something from an episode of Jam and Jerusalem. I live in a lovely village with a pond, pub, village green and beautiful church. Additionally we have a Village Memorial Hall which from the outside appears to be an old scout hut, but once inside you realise it really is a quaint old village hall with ancient china kept in an antique wall cupboard in a kitchen shared with mice and ivy that has grown through the wall into the kitchen!

We are trying desperately hard to raise £100,000 in order to rebuild the Hall in the same position and also enlarge it. Thus every other month or so we meet to discuss how we are going to do this, where we can go to get grants and at what stage the planning permission and build are at. The committee consists of the 'ladies', of which I am one, whom bake the cakes and organise social events to help raise money, and then there are the big guys who ask for considerably larger amounts of money from various organisations and draw up plans etc. for the build. The captain at the helm is the owner of the villages' beautiful mansion house, who seems to have contacts all over the place and tries his darnedest to keep everyone happy but in the process upsets many!!

Invariably the meetings start off following a true agenda but soon somewhere along the line comments about various inhabitants of the village are made and so a true picture of life at Beech Hill starts to unfold. I joined the committee when we first moved to the village to meet local people and become part of the village and this portal has proved the best way to do this and more! I would thoroughly recommend anyone wishing to embark in village life to attend a meeting of their local village hall or parish councillors. Beware though because once you are drawn in, your life will never be the same, needless to say you will almost certainly need to acquire a mothers manager. The beautiful chintzy diary we stock that not only gives you room to write in all these new meetings and events, it also has a brilliant pocket in which to store all the necessary bits of paper that come along with it.

I will endeavour to keep you updated of the events that occur in the meetings and impart any juicy gossip I am privy to hearing!

The farrier visited us this week, which I know Moon and Sunbeam appreciated because their hooves were looking a little long in the tooth. They have now had their french manicure and look so much better for it. Next month we have a visit from the equine dentist booked in, which I am not looking forward to, Moon does not do dentists, much like Molly and so sedation is a necessary element of this process. Hmm maybe this should be the approach to use for Molly!!

I myself visited the dentist today and managed to get away with a quick check up and no work required. Two hours later I receive a call from the school to say can I come and collect Toby he is unwell and has a toothache!! Once I had collected Toby I realised he really was not at all well, he was feverish and in alot of pain, so off we go back to the dentist!!!! It transpires that our poor little man has in fact got an abscess on his tooth and will require antibiotic treatment, apparently the next line of treatment is tooth extraction but our wonderful dentist does not believe in children undergoing this procedure for baby teeth and instead made a deal with Toby saying that if it became infected again we would have to take it out but in the meantime he can do the best he can to wobble it and lose the tooth by himself. Thank goodness!

Toby thinks the problem started at the weekend when he had a toffee bon bon as a treat, my new tactic will be to buy goodies that are not only soft but also organic, such as the moreish motezumas chocolate bars we sell at the shop and then we can indulge in a little bit of pleasure for alot less pain!

Moving on from chocolate to chocolate puddles! we took shadow for a walk at the weekend to the Englefield Estates woods, it was lovely and as you can see from the pictures the chosen activity for the walk was' who could find the deepest chocolatey puddle'. I wonder!!!!