Thinking outside of the box . . .

Lidl had one of their periodic weekend sales of leftovers from the special offers they have each week. Whilst we didn't need cycling equipment, bike racks (yeesh, those bargers got in the way of searching), childrens' shoes/clothes, underwater cameras, pond set up equipment, we did snaffle up some bargains. The price range was 50p/£1/£3/£5/£10.

I was delighted to pick up two pairs of long (I can shorten 'em) white tab top curtains for £1 a pair yesterday - just what I needed for mum's flat. OH also bought a 3 LED light fitting to go over my counter for £1. Only today did we notice he had bought one that had a light bulb and cover missing. But hey, today they were 50p each and we bought two more to make up a complete one with spares! We also thought outside of the box a bit and bought 5 more lots of curtains (now 50p a pair) to use as curtain backings/linings or to back cushions etc. I have to go all the way to Swanea (a 50 mile round trip) if I want curtain fabric/linings etc now, so this was £2.50 well spent. We got two big chunks of good quality pond liner at 50p a time too, which my husband assures me he can find a use for - covering up his piles of maturing tree trunks I suspect! A box of wine glasses for our daughter in Swansea was the only indulgence, as they cost £3, but she asked us to look out for some and she will be happy that they are new (she struggles with the concept of 2nd hand, but she is young yet . . .)

This morning we had a wander round the car boot sale, which was just an echo of the size it was last week, when I had NEVER seen so many stalls or buyers on that site. Today I really struck lucky and my cosmic ordering machine delivered me a brand spanking new British-made (what a rarity in this day and age) old-fashioned design alarm clock for just 50p! I nearly bit the guy's hand off . . . It's a sort of clotted cream colour on the body, and is made in Towcester, which is where my mum's rellies came from, the lace-making ones.




Then we bought a cheap teapot, a solid brass big escutcheon thingey (OH will have a use for it I'm sure, he bought it), a beautiful little green glass dish for 50p that reminded me of a cobweb (photo to follow), and a solid oak (red-stained, ugh) candelabra for 50p which OH thinks he "may be able to do something with". My immediate thought was burn it, but what do I know? Oh, and for another 50p a book on Versailles. OH again. He only bought a book on Versailles a couple of weeks back, but this one is apparently "better" . . . I can see us having a good car boot sale next spring . . .



Anyway, housework calls, and so do the New Forest crab apples. I have some becoming wine, but need to do jelly with the red stripey ones. Right, up and at 'em . . .


I wish this was a computer which could waft you the exquisite smell of these wild apples cooking.


Now in the jelly bag overnight, and will be cooked up and potted tomorrow. The jelly bag, incidentally, IS scalded each time I use it, and sterilized with lemon juice too, but that does little to remove the blackberry and elderberry and damson stains . . .

More green glass and a clever husband

I shall return to my travels on Monday, as weekends seem to be quiet in blog-land. Meanwhile, here are some pieces of green glass (which I collect) that I found at the car boot sale last weekend and which for just a pound or two apiece, came home with me.




Below is a beautiful Victorian mirror which we found a reasonable middle for. It had been lacking a mirror and gathering dust in one of the stables for several years whilst we mirror-hunted. Finally we found one that would do. It is actually oval (the angle of the photo makes it look far more circular than it is). Whilst the base is solid mahogany, the mirror is Walnut, but I am happy with it.


Below is the base my husband has been working on for weeks now. We bought the top half of this cupboard on stand many years ago at auction and just had it sat on the bottom half of an old wardrobe. Then my husband finally sorted out some bits of wood for this from his "collection" and so part of a desk, part of an old (burned) staircase, and parts from two old wardrobes (all solid oak) went into making this. Everything beautifully finished with hand-cut dovetail joints and perfectly fitted drawers. This flash photo doesn't do it justice as it makes the colour look totally different.

The photo below gives a better idea. My husband copied the design along the bottom from a piece of Carmarthen-made furniture we had already. The base cost him nothing but time.

On my mind . . .

Today I'm joining in with Rhonda Jean's Friday theme over on Down to Earth blog.

When we were in the New Forest recently, I made sure that I brought home several bags of wildings apples (these are apples which have grown from a pip from a discarded core, and some will later cross-pollinate with the natural crab apples). Apples from pips don't grow true - some trees which I grew from one of my apple trees here at home show two distinct fruits - one small and stripey and the other a large bland cooker which makes wonderful apple fluff. So it is with the trees on the Forest. This bright red apple looks sweet, but believe me, it wasn't as sweet as it looked like it should be! Such fruits make wonderful apple jelly though, and the wild crab apples make the best jelly (and wine) of all. I am making Wildings Apple Jelly this weekend.

I would like to preserve a lot more things by bottling, but there's the rub. It's the cost of acquiring all the preserving jars in the first place. I have basically priced the cost of a dozen 1000 ml glass preserving jars at £15 per 12 (that's a special price, they are normally offered at £20 per 12). That's a fairly big investment if you want to bottle up enough fruits to see you through the winter months and although they turn up at car boot sales, they don't turn up frequently enough! In America, some folk would have huge canning stores of anything up to 1,000 jars.

Which has made me think, we keep a reasonable store cupboard of tins and dried supplies, and do this by buying various things on offer or when we can afford it. We grow various fruit and vegetables in the garden and freeze/preserve them. We do what we can afford to do. And there's the rub - does that mean that being really self-reliant, that looking ahead to times of possible emergency when things fall apart for one reason or another, is purely the preserve of the better-heeled members of society, ones who already buy into this mindset and have stocked up? We as a family have already discovered that you need to fall back on such provisions when your personal economics make this necessary. Then the problem is to re-stock, when financially things are already tight. We have started small and gradually added to our stocks (and the glass jars!) but for some folk, even this is beyond them if they live very hand to mouth.

I could provide enough jam and chutney for ballast for the Titanic, but man does not live by jam alone! What do you do when you have a rotten summer and crop failures, or Blight on your spuds and Tomatoes, or the slugs get your beans time and time again and you have less home-grown produce than you need? On a tight budget, how do you cope with making up the shortfall of what you NEED?

Athelhampton House

Before we left to head westwards for our outing on the Monday, we let the cats and dogs out for some fresh air. Stripey-cat soon manhandled a small rodent to the ground, but then it escaped, cunningly disguised as a leaf . . .

Then began the stake-out. First Big Ginger and then old Mrs Furry wanted a piece of the action.


Stripey told the others in no uncertain terms, "Nope, you CAN'T have it! 'smine." And indeed they'd have had trouble getting it, as I had noticed it creeping beneath her undercarriage . . .

Forest Cat was too dignified for all this and said that He didn't want it anyway . . . He thought hunting with packs was CRUEL . . .

We told them what would happen if they were BAD cats . . . These Scottish pussums at Athelhampton must have been Very Bad Indeed . . .

We peeped through the gates at this beautiful house. My OH has always wanted to visit here and finally got his wish.

One of the fountains surrounded by carefully clipped Irish Yew trees.

A throne fit for a King graced the corner of the Great Chamber. Supposedly the ghost of a pet ape who was unfortunately shut up in the secret passage leading from this room (and who presumably expired there) can sometimes be heard scratching on the linen-fold panelling . . .

This old chest speaks volumes about how such things were made in the past. You can just see the master craftsman measuring up the designs with his compasses. If you do quilting, you will know that similar designs got transferred onto fabrics too . . . If you look very closely at the left hand panel, you may notice that the right hand edge of it isn't 100% straight - it broadens just a tiny bit towards the bottom, a little mistake which must have happened when they were measuring up where the patterns were going to go.

The fire was lit in the hearth and threw out a very welcoming heat.

This is looking across at the far wall. Where we entered the room, this would have been to our right.

OH and I loved the beautiful carvings on this chair.

So grand . . .

This was the jail. No, wait a minute, it was the wine cellar. What makes you think they didn't trust the servants? I think this is supposedly haunted too. Probably a previous butler feverishly counting the bottles. . .

One of the absolutely stunning ceilings in the house.

The wallpaper in this doorway was carefully hand-painted. It must have taken weeks to execute.

This stunning piece of craftsmansip graced the door into the Green Parlour below.

This had to be my favourite room. It had a wonderful atmosphere and the dark green didn't matter as it was always going to be a dark room, even if you had painted it white.

How wonderful to have your ancestors' clothes squirrelled away so you could use them in displays in later centuries . . . I think my ag. lab. ancestors were lucky if they had a set of tidy clothes for church.

I wish we had more rooms to "dress" where I volunteer. The former bedrooms are for displays and exhibitions. I thought this wedding dress added a whole new dimension to this bedroom at Athelhampton.

Isn't this just SUMPTIOUS?! I adore the wallpaper, and the huge mirror, and the beautiful copper bath. I wonder who gets to polish that?!

Another gorgeous room. Not sure if I wouldn't get the heeby-jeebies in there in the middle of the night though . . .

Off of the bedroom was a small chapel for prayer and meditation.

A pretty bridge spanned the River Piddle. We noted a few small fish darting about in the clear water.

A corner of part of the gardens, with a beautiful Hamstone garden room.

Arrival . . .

One of our regular customers for water outside the gate . . .


Well, our holiday seems just a pleasant memory already. OH and I are laid low with germs caught in Foreign Parts . . . I have to say, as one who NEVER has a headache, the one which accompanies this current Bug is a blighter and even Ibuprofen struggles to cosh it.

The rain it is falling, the wind is picking up and the big old pine tree across the lane is starting to thresh its branches and leaves are fluttering along the lanes and fields. The plans I made yesterday to carry on tidying up the garden, have now been abandoned in favour of drier indoor pursuits. I have washed, measured and cut up a gallon of crab apples for wine, and these are now releasing their juices into a gallon of cold water in my brewing bin. Now I have to save up for 3 1/2 lbs of Demerara sugar . . .

I have plans to start a Christmas present for one of my daughters today, so I will go and look for the x-stitch design I know I still have (being a hoarder).

As for the photos, I have SO many I had better try and post twice a day or it will be next month before I share them all with you. We stopped just outside Wimborne for some fresh air, at Badbury Rings, a favourite place of ours when we lived in Dorset. The National Trust have made it a bit more "orderly" since we still lived in the county, fencing things off and putting out picnic tables . . . We preferred it wild and woolly. The drive up beneath the double row of 365 massive beech trees takes some beating, although there are quite a few gaps which were the result of the hurricane back in 1987, as well as deliberate fellings of diseased trees since then. HERE is a link to photos of the wonderful avenue.



On our first full day in the Forest, we had a gentle amble along a route well-known to us.

And also drove to the nearest town for a newspaper and some food for the week.On the way home we found ourselves involved in a little vintage car rally.




It was a couple of days before the sunshine caught up with us, so these photos look a bit moody and monotone.


Some of the wildings apples and crab apple trees which we harvested to bring home with us for wine and jelly making.

Catching up with friends . . .

On the cusp of the Dorset border, we stopped again, to meet up with a dear friend. We wandered across a meadow, so peaceful, and on the other side was a lake . . .

a peaceful one, a magical hidden spot.

Two little girls played in their den . . .

and my husband was pleased to relax in the sunshine . . .

And somewhere, a friend was fishing . . .

And another good friend was such good company. It was good to meet up again. Cheers Danette!