Evolution of a basket

A couple of weeks back, the girls and I made a pilgrimage of sorts to a willow growing farm just over the border into Bedfordshire. Wasseldine is a farm set on a gentle hillside, populated by glorious red poll cattle and with a wonderful view. And a big shed full of freshly harvested willow in astonishing colours. Those of you who follow me on Facebook or Twitter (I'd love to see you!) will have already seen this, one of my favourite photos. Yum.

So even though it's still a bit green, I have been weaving with some of this. Willow shrinks as it dries, so basketmakers often work with dried and soaked material that has already done all of its shrinking. If you've ever had a basket that ended up a bit rattly and loose after a year or two, that's because it's dried out a bit since weaving.

Anyway, I had no soaked willow to hand, so green willow it was. I started as I usually do, with a straightforward round split spoke base, and I put a dome on it - this is an important part of making the basket sit flat on its rim later - wobbly baskets, unless designed that way, are generally not a good thing!

At this point I thought the basket was going to be shallow and a bit like a tray. I trimmed the base and put in the side spokes and then did the fabulously named process of upsetting - bending up the side spokes without breaking them (always a tense moment) and locking them in place with a row or two of very firm four rod coil.

I had planned to try a method where you add one weaver per spoke and the basket builds quickly, but it got very, very out of hand so I changed plan and went with a more regular chasing weave. The basket started to flare nicely. "I know," I thought, "I'll make a plant holder."

Pretty soon the basket was getting too big for a plant pot and really started to look like a bucket. At one point Mr DC came and asked whether it was supposed to be octagonal. What a nerve!

After a while I decided to put a border on and call it done. This went in smoothly and after a bit of a trim looked as neat as I could have hoped for.

 And then I realised that what I had actually made was a lovely round stripy wastepaper basket. And jolly useful it is too! The two willows I used are called Black Maul and Dicky Meadows - for me the names are almost as gorgeous as the colours.

Boing

That's the sound of spring having sprung - well, it seem to have finally arrived here - and not a minute too soon. I was beginning to think we had entered another Ice Age.

The weather forecasters promised that Sunday was going to be warm and sunny, so we decided to believe them and head off to a (new to us) English Heritage property *without coats*. Daring. I know, but there it is.

Wrest Park is about 45 minutes drive from us and is so impressive and beautiful I am slightly baffled as to why we haven't been before. The house is gorgeous, and the grounds are vast - so much so it took us well over an hour to wander around them. There are statues and follies hidden all over the place and our girls had a lot of fun map reading and directing us the the next point of interest. The house and gardens  are being extensively restored and the facilities for visitors are excellent. Sometimes I think English Heritage try a little bit harder than the National Trust - at least around these parts.

In the grounds stands the ultimate party house  - a stunning round pavilion complete with guest rooms, tiny servants bedrooms and a vast cellar kitchen. There are tiny narrow staircases and astonishingly paintings on the walls. Talk about glamping!

Filling our days - and our tummies

School holidays can be a juggling act. A balance between encouraging the Smalls to entertain themselves and wanting to limit the amount of time they spend staring at screens. Between spending cash on days out and spending time on home based activities. The greyness this week has deterred us from doing very much outside, and so when we saw a couple of glorious baking ideas on ThePinkWhisk (thanks to Gina for testing the recipe first!) and we had my lovely niece around as well, we decided to get stuck in.

First up, blossom biscuits. Lots of fun, very tasty. Though my favourite design was the one Tall Small made when she was fed up with rolling rosebuds. I can see these being made again. Or possibly putting in an appearance as a party activity - the dough is remarkably forgiving, like edible play dough!

Then the best use for Creme Eggs I've seen in ages.

I am never going to be able to bring myself to eat these.
Yes, the ingredients were a bit of an outlay but the hoots of laughter more than made up for that. And we have enough fondant icing and food colouring to last through several more sessions if it keeps on sleeting.

We all watched the Great British Sewing Bee together and now Tiny Small wants to spend next week making herself a dress. Woohoo!

How to weave a wreath

One of the first things I learned to weave was a simple wreath. These cost a lot of money in posh garden centres, but they're really straightforward to make if you have access to a tree which is sprouting suckers, before they burst into leaf. I use the lovely flexible rods from the base of the hazel tree in our garden, and  I have just collected (with permission!) similar cuttings from base of the lime tree in our village church. And if you really can't find any material and you're in the UK, I have a few made from willow for sale in my Etsy shop, or drop me an email and we can sort something out.

Warning - this is long and photo heavy but assumes you have never worked with wood or willow before. It also assumes you are right handed; I think for left handed weavers you could just reverse all the directions.

First cut your rods. They need to be not much thicker than a cm, or they're too hard to work with. The bottom left hand rod is too thick. The bottom right hand rod is fine - but you can always cut the ends off thick rods.

At this stage the rods are quite resistant and you need to soften them - hold a rod in one or both hands and apply a gentle flexing force with your thumbs, all along the length of the rod. Not too hard - they can be broken! You'll need to do this with any rod that seems just a bit reluctant to take shape. I will assume from this point on that you've softened the rods you're about to use.

Take a long rod and form it into a ring, effectively tying it in a knot. If it pings out of shape, you can temporarily tie it in place. The length of this first rod will determine the size of your finished wreath.

Insert a second rod, ideally opposite the knot, through the ring from left to right so that the left end is on top of the ring and the right end is underneath. Hold it firmly in place with your left hand, and begin to wrap the second rod around the ring, letting it more or less follow its natural curve. At this point, don't worry about the ends that are sticking out.

Insert a third rod, starting in a different point on the ring, and wrap it in the same way but this time allow its path to follow the first rod you wrapped - this way you get a neater finish and to my eye a more attractive flow. If you like a more haphazard, higgledy piggledy look then wrap at will!

Continue to add and wrap rods, always staggering the starts, until you have the size you want, or you run out of rods. It may look a little bit shaggy at this point! Keep an eye on the shape - if it goes wonky, you can apply pressure with your hands to fix it but it's always easiest to adjust this as you add each rod rather than trying to fix it at the end.

Now to trim the thick ends. I think they look best cut off flush to the curve of the ring, using secateurs, and before I cut I try to get all the ends to the back face of the wreath where they will be hidden. I leave the wispy thin ends for the moment.

Now I tuck any wavy ends into the wreath, or trim them off if I really can't get them to behave, and remove any string I used at the beginning. Check the shape, add a ribbon or string for hanging and there you go.

I added some crocheted daffodils using Lucy's pattern, and inserted wires into the leaves to stiffen them up. There are very few real daffs out here yet and my springy wreath cheers me up every day.

And there you have it! Once you've mastered this technique there's a very simple follow on project to make a bird feeder that I'll try to write up very soon.

Blog reading shenanigans

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

As many of you already know, Google Reader is going away. Which leaves lots of us with a bit of a dilemma. I am in the middle of looking at Bloglovin and may look at Feedly too, but I am swinging in favour of Bloglovin at the minute simply because they didn't require direct access to my google account before I could log in. Probably I'm just being paranoid, but it felt a bit like being asked to give the keys to my house to a stranger I'd just met on the street. But then I don't use Facebook apps that can access my information, or even download to my phone anything that wants to modify my SD card - no games for me!

Anyway, as part if this endeavour I am "claiming" my blog on Bloglovin and as a result have to put this bit of code on a post. Not the most exciting I've ever written, but there it is. I've got a weaving tutorial nearly ready to go - come back in a day or two!

I can sing a rainbow

Yesterday Tall Small and I had an enforced morning at home waiting to go to an appointment. She was missing science at school, as was I - it's one of the mornings I usually go into school to help. There was no homework to be done, music practice was up to date so we decided to think about what the children might be studying at school and do our own version. With experiments, obviously.

She's been looking at light this half term - a bit about how vision and how we perceive colour, but mostly the properties of light. Reflection and so on. We did a couple of simple activities to investigate Snell's law- remember "the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection"? Mirrors and torches and fizzy water and still water. We found a brilliant website crammed with activities, including instructions to construct a water prism and split white light into its components. This is a real winner.

You need: a glass bowl full of water, a small mirror, a piece of white card or a white wall, and some sunshine. I realise that may be the hardest part.

Set up the bowl by a sunny window and prop the card up in front of it. Partially submerge the mirror in it. Angle it so the sunlight reflects off the mirror and onto the card.

 You will see the light on the card and occasional hints that something interesting could be about to happen ...

Then suddenly, a shimmering, wavering rainbow appears on the card and you shout and squeak and count the colours - until the sun goes behind a cloud.

We talked about eye structure. We talk about how visible light forms just a part of the electromagnetic spectrum. About wavelengths. About colour blindness, which developed into a conversation about inheritance and genetics. And I marvelled about how quickly my girl is growing up and how she seems to have a real feeling for science. She worked out the answer to every question I asked, and asked lots of her own.

Science in school with SmallSmall's class this afternoon. Let's see what they find out!

World Book Day 2013

Today is World Book Day, a day both loved and dreaded - loved for the sheer joy of celebrating books, especially with children; and dreaded because of the need to provide costumes for school.

My girls read voraciously. We can't keep them supplied with enough books and the bookshelves in every room in the house are stacked two deep; that's lovely but I do sometimes feel as if the shelves are closing in on me! They always know who they want to be for the day, and this year we have a clear Harry Potter theme.

I give you:

Luna Lovegood

SmallSmall's long blonde wavy hair is perfect for Luna, and she decided to go as Luna heading off to Hogsmeade ie not school uniform. She already had the cloak (my old Uni gown) and the wand, and she made herself a Quibbler (to be held upside down at school) and some Spectrespecs.

I was left to make a cork necklace to ward off Nargles - which is the best excuse to buy a bottle of red I have ever had - and a pair of dirigible plum earrings. 

These nearly ended me. The leaves fell off the first pair, so I remade them at 7.30 this morning and the second pair have deathcracks. Plus her ears are unpierced so they are threatening to fall off their elastic loops. I'll be stunned if they make it home intact!

Fleur Delacour

My beautiful tall ten year old was enchanted by the elegant Beauxbatons students both in book and the film of the Goblet of Fire, and pleaded for a long sleeved blue dress and a little cape. This is her last year at primary school, and possibly the last dressing up day she'll be doing; how could I say no? The costume was not too hard in principle, but I put the first sleeve in upside down, and then put the popper for the cape on the wrong side. Argh.

I am going in to school to work later. I shall be dressing as Professor Sprout. I may take a plant with me.