Steel Kitten

The Christmas mantlepiece

Going along with the theme of a homemade Christmas, I decorated the mantlepiece a couple of nights ago using greenery taken from some conifers in my garden. It will only last a couple of weeks before it dries out a bit too much and starts shedding. Then we'll use it as fire lighters. The fir cones and sweet chestnut casings have been collected over the years. The terranium was a gift from a glass artist on Martin's delivery a few years ago - although there's a candle in it we don't ever light it in case we crack the glass.

And just to make it extra Christmassy, last night it snowed. My favourite weather :-))

The reindeer are finished, but unfortunately there were at least four sets whose plating was so badly damaged I couldn't sell them so I had to revise the listing and at one point refund somebody. I know they were disappointed not to receive them, but they would have been even more disappointed had they turned up damaged.

So that's over and done with - now back to the crafting! I'll post a few more crafty projects I've been doing for Christmas next week.

Not the best idea I've ever had

I was on course for a leisurely Christmas. Everything was ticking along nicely until I decided to out some stuff around Steel Towers to clear the place a bit and pay for our Christmas.

In our attic was a set of reindeer placecard holders left over from our wedding planing. We were originally going to have a Christmas wedding and bought these little guys from ebay. Then we switched the date to the summer of the following year to give ourselves more time so they went into the attic. And there they stayed until I dragged them out a couple of weeks ago. 21 sets went onto ebay six days ago and then the frenzy began. I sold three within two hours, which should have given me an indication of what was to come.

To make sure they were ok after being in the attic for three years, I unwrapped some of the sets only to find the lazy sod that sold us them had only polished up the top two sets. So I started polishing. And polishing. And polishing. 

I've managed to polish 30 so far and have another 90 odd to go. However, it seems the population was shopping on ebay on Sunday and all but six of the sets went during the day. The last six sets are about to go today after I gave two people combined shipping costs for three sets each this morning. 

So here I sit polishing at 6am with copious amounts of tea and not a little irritation at my stupidity for not checking the box sooner or at least starting earlier. I've blew up Martin's Dremel mini sander/polisher yesterday and he's managed to rig me a Heath Robinson affair involving a drill, a lot of mini washers and a buffing attachment. It sort of works but is hellishly noisy so at the this time of the morning I have to resort to finger power on the end of a rag-covered screwdriver. If I work solidly on these throughout today this lot should be polished and bundled off to buyers by tomorrow morning.

What a twit I am. But these combined with the other bits that have sold will pay for Christmas so it's head down and power through with the prize in mind!

They're forced to hand over their Christmas wishlists

My mother sighed when she looked over my Christmas wishlist a couple of weeks ago. "Why can't you have something normal on there for once?" I think she'd spotted the book "Keeping rabbits and poultry on scraps". Or maybe it was the subscription to Home Farmer magazine. Then she saw Martin's wishlist. Cue second big sigh. "Can't he just have something normal like socks or a sweater?" Might have been the American import DVD on the Kokoda Trail that rang her alarm bells. Or the spirit level. Or half inch drive ratchet.

My fears that my mother thinks I'm abnormal were confirmed later when she was consulting Martin about my present. "Isn't there ANYTHING girly she wants like perfume or knickers?" Ermmm....no. Sorry mum. You just don't have a "perfume-and-knickers" kind of daughter.

You have a "men's-cardigan-wearing, chicken-poo-raking, growing-her-own, so-what-if-there's-cat-fur-on-the-sofa, muddy-boots in the house, everything-made-from-scratch-and-recycled, preferably-through-the-chickens" kind of daughter. And your son-in-law's the same. Minus the "men's-cardigan-wearing" because obviously I wear his cardigans and he doesn't get a look in.

We've tried to get away with not doing lists, but so many of my friends and family ring us up and ask us what we want because our eclectic tastes and non-consumable lifestyle scare the bejesus out of them. Their demands for a list grow very loud by the first week of December so we put them out of their misery. 

But secretly, I'd love someone to really *get* me and just buy/make/recycle something without guidance or lists - is that wrong to wish that? It's not that I'm not grateful for what I receive - I really am, but I know that there are gifts that I simply won't ever use and have been bought out of a sense of HAVING to get me something. Anything. But then maybe I'm guilty of doing it to. When I hand over something homemade, maybe the other person smiles sweetly and secretly thinks "Oh for heaven sake. Why couldn't she just get me body lotion or something? I hate homemade stuff." I know someone who sees a pot of homemade jam and shudders at the thought of all the bacteria swimming around on the top from someone's fingers. 

Food for thought. 

What if instead of buying stuff we exchange time vouchers? I could offer a full car wash, t-cut, wax and valet. What about a day's house cleaning? Or ironing absolutely every item in your ironing basket? I could catalogue your DVDs and CDs. Or polish your silver/furniture. I can paint and decorate. I could go through your digital photo collection and delete every bad, out-of-focus  and too-dark shot (that alone could take someone all day if they came here - we are so lazy in that regard). I could clean out your chicken shed or muck out your guinea pigs or something. 

Just for laughs, here's my real Christmas wish-list: 

My kitchen, conservatory and laundry floor to be tiled

An explanation of why I burn custard. Every time.

Everyone in the UK to sponsor a child in the third world

Help tearing out my front garden beds and digging a new one under our bay window.

Oxo to tell me why she's not laying anymore and if she's really turning into a boy. I heard her yodeling this morning and it sounded distinctly full-throated and boy-like. 

Someone to build my new raised vegetable beds on the lawn

More patience with people who judge me because they don't understand me

Someone to get my knitting machine ribber working

Charlaine Harris to hurry up and bring out the 10th Sookie Stackhouse novel

An answer from the cats about why there was an apparently fat, once-healthy and now half-decomposed mouse in my hallway IN FULL VIEW. The rug is not THAT patterned I could have missed it for weeks, but deep down I know I smelled THAT smell a few days ago and didn't know what it was

Martin's teeth to be good again and for them not to hurt him any more

Anyone help me out here ;-))

Mistletoe and chickens

You know when you see big globs of mistletoe in the trees that Christmas is just round the corner. Martin and I went to Bath last weekend to visit an old friend that lives just a few fields away from where they hold the Glastonbury festival, and all around their cottage are trees full of mistletoe.

Until I visited them, I'd never actually seen mistletoe growing wild so this was a lovely first. Very romantic!

And then when we got back, we realised the chickens needed some love. I keep my chickens in the run for a few hours after I open them up to ensure they're getting their proper ration of layers pellets to lay good eggs, otherwise they have a tendency to ignore the pellets and eat supplementary stuff only which unbalances their nutrition and affects their laying. With the recent bad weather though they're spending the morning standing on wet grass and scratching in mud. It's not good for their little feet to be wet and muddy all the time (think trench foot!) so they needed to be moved to drier ground.

I took away the whirlygig clothes dryer and placed the run and coop over the paved ground underneath. Then it got a good stuffing full of straw.

The lavender bush will keep them partly sheltered from the bad winds and I can scoop up the straw and srucb down the paving when needed. The straw often contains leftover heads of grain so they love having a good rootle through for tasty bits, and I get the manured straw afterwards to go on the compost heap!

So, every living being is happy at Steel Towers!

Especially Fleagle who has discovered a new interesting place to sleep: inside a sack of logs in the log basket!

Patchwork baubles

I've been at the crafting table again, this time having a crack at making some of the patchwork baubles I saw in an issue of Country Living.

I keep just about every scrap of fabric I produce, regardless of how small. Sometimes it comes in useful for stuffing something, but more often than not it's because of an absolute refusal to accept I can't recycle EVERYTHING somehow ;-) If I can't think of something to do with an item, it gets put away in my hobby room or in a bag in the attic until I do. 

I knew when I saw the patchwork baubles in the magazine I had finally found a use for the scraps. I had a search around the attic for the Christmas decorations and found an old bag of gold baubles that had seen better days.

 Then over the course of two evenings in front of the fire I snipped and glued the scraps onto the baubles. 

I only had Copydex glue, which proved to be HORRIBLE to use and I'd never use it again for anything to do with fabric. If you put on a layer of glue that is slightly too thick it can seep through the fabric (TIP: if it does never wipe it off with your finger! You end up with nasty rolls of sticky glue adhering to the fabric). It took me right back to school days and that massive stinky pot of white glue on the middle of the crafting table. It always had a huge stiff brush ruined by hundreds of layers of dried-on copydex mingled with old sequins and glitter from previous projects. I hated that brush and the fishy smell of the glue. 

Anyhow, the baubles are one more step towards a homemade Christmas!