The second brood of swallows in the end of the barn fledged today. Their flight was a short hop across to one of the beams. Later in the day they started exploring a kept coming in to the new part of the barn to see what I was doing…then couldn’t find their way out again.
I go away for a few days and I find the courgettes have been taking over
There are more on the way and I’ve left one to grow into a marrow.
We’ve also got one squash large enough to eat…well football sized. We think its a spaghetti squash – now I just have to fight my way to the label at the base of the plant to confirm it!
We’ve got a new door where we knocked through to get into the barn. Hopefully it will keep Cecilia happy by keeping most of the dust out of the house. You can also see a bit of my plumbing – new pipes to join the existing central heating up with the new boiler in the barn.
I put my new found weaving skills to good use and made my mother-in-law a scarf for her birthday. Cecilia spun the weft from some of Daniela‘s fibre. It came out with a rather subtle shine due to the angelina.
We got given a whole load of gooseberries, so as an experiment I tried half apples/half gooseberries in my spiced apple cake.
I’ve got a bit of a cold so things don’t taste of much, but Cecilia informs me that it tastes delicious. I think it would work with 100% gooseberries but you might want to add a bit more sugar depending on the ripeness of the gooseberries.
I’ve updated the recipe with some variations on the apple cake – rhubarb, carrots etc. Has anyone else tried any variations? I’ve tried banana but that was very disappointing – very solid and bread like, it tasted ok when toasted and spread with butter.
The builders have knocked through from upstairs in the house into the upstairs of the barn. This revealed some interesting stone work – see the corner stones at the edge of the hole. This is the corner of our bedroom which is the part that sticks out on the west side of the house,. The fact that this corner was in the wall implies that it was older than the rest of the wall. Our house is thought to be a long house – barn / house all joined together in one line. So if the sticky out bit is older that the straight bit then is it still a long house? However we know it how a lot of work done in 1914ish (from some newspaper fragments) where we think they redid the front of the house, and there was some evidence that the barn had been one story earlier in its life. Perhaps the sticky out bit was the first part to get a second story?
I’ve also been doing a bit of joinery work, building the partition for the bathroom wall, and making a duct for the flues to go up.
We still haven’t found a proper name for him…
Anyway here is a video of him bouncing round the yard. He’s looking a bit pink today – he’s be rolling in the johnby mud.
I love my knitters loom: delivered by Richard to Ursula, who let me have it on Thursday. I managed to read the instructions and warp it up that night, ready for the spin-in at woolfest. It goes really fast and got over half way through my scarf at the spin-in. The next day I was showing it to everyone who stopped long enough for me to get it out of its bag, even Elizabeth Ashford got a look. I finished it off the next day and Cecilia showed by how to wash and dry it.
I think I was a little tense right after woolfest – you can see the very dark blue stripes where I was overzealously beating the weft. The wool is a lichen dyed warp from Cecilia, and the weft is BFL from The Natural Dye Studio
I’m already onto my next project, using some left over Noro that Cecilia had lying about. The only problem is its very clingy and I keep making little errors where the warp doesn’t move up or down properly.
I thought I would bake some mini spiced apple cakes to hand out at woolfest
The only problem is people keep quality testing them, so who knows how many I’ll have left by woolfest! Haven’t they heard of non destructive testing???