Red cabbage & apple soup

This soup is a real hearty, earthy soup which is best eaten with beautiful dunking bread.  

You will need:

• Half a red cabbage
• 2 Eating Apples
• 1 Stick of Celery
• Olive Oil
• Cinnamon
• Caraway Seeds
• Red Wine Vinegar
• Brown Sugar

What you do:

• Chop up the celery and add to a pan (or soup maker) with a little olive oil and half a teaspoon of cinnamon and a teaspoon of caraway seeds.  
• Sauté for a couple of minutes until the oil heats and the celery starts to soften.

• Meanwhile chop the cabbage and peel and chop up the apples discarding the stalk and pips.

• Chuck into the pan (soup maker) along with a tablespoon of Red Wine Vinegar and a tablespoon of brown sugar.

(The vinegar is to help the cabbage keep it's beautiful colour, otherwise it turns a murky dark blue colour, the sugar is to counteract the sharpness of the vinegar)

• Bring to the boil and simmer for 20 mins.  Then BLITZZZZZZ !

• Serve with a sprinkle of mixed seeds.

Just look at that colour!

8 monkeys

Did you take part in my "How many monkeys?" game?  Did you guess correctly?

There are 8 monkeys hidden in the shed  (well, some not so hidden really.)

Let's see who they were....  (1)

(2)

(3)

(4 & 5)

(6)

(7)

And of course GORDON the Orang-utan. (8)

There was a few entries, of which none were correct.  So I took the nearest who guessed 7 monkeys.

The winner therefore is TINA GRAHAM.... which one did you miss Tina?

Well done, email me your address to thebeadshed@gmail.com and I will get a little prize out to you  :)

Babysitting the Axolotls

A little change from the norm, I am babysitting Shona's (and Maries) Axolotls hatchlings.

I bought her a pair of male Axolotls for Christmas 2012 (she got them a couple of months before) and she named them Patrick and Philip.

Philip

Turns out Philip was a girl.  They found this out because Patrick grew two things that boys usually have, and started making out with a plastic tree, leaving deposits of..... well, you know...... everywhere.  Philip just grew bigger all over.

When Philip failed to grow his boy lumps it was decided he must be a she and was renamed Penelope. 

Penelope

An evening a couple of weeks I heard a strange little noise, like a whoop of excitement, and a small child (well, a 20 yr old) squealing that they had eggs in their tank.

Now these creatures eat their young, so we needed to get them out asap.  They are also quite difficult to raise as finding food small enough is very tricky.

I have taken the photos with a pair of tweezers as a scale guide.

A friend gave her a small tank so she could house the youngsters separately, then a lovely guy called Chris up at Maidenhead Aquatics brought her in some micro-worms to try and feed them on.

The food is a culture that grows, the worms are so tiny I cannot see them, it just looks like a smudge to me on the side of the pot.  I have to sweep up the smudge with a tiny paintbrush and wiggle it about in the tank water.

I will let you know if the attempts to raise the young are successful.

Explaining my pricing

This is a rant post, so look away now if you don't want to leave with your ears burning, but you know, sometimes things need to be addressed.

I am quite good at letting things wash over me, but now and again something comes along that just boils my piddle and I have to get my side of the story out there.

Now, what is it that has rattled my cage you will be wondering.  The good old, age old. devil's pit of pricing, that's what.

So, a friend of a friend told me that some people were discussing the prices of craft classes up at Hobbycraft, complaining that they were too expensive.  Those people were unaware that one of them knew someone who knew someone and it got back to me.  Actually they weren't complaining about me personally, but as I tutor a good percentage of the classes I feel I need to speak out on behalf of all of the artisans that hold workshops up there and, of course, in lots of other places too.  Hobbycraft do not set the prices for the craft classes, the tutors do.

Let's get this into prospective.

For example, the price for a 2 hours beginners Crochet class at Hobbycraft is £10.00.  This includes materials for the student to take home with them - approx £2.00 for a hook and two balls of yarn at £1.00 each, totalling £4.00 of materials.  This leaves £6.00.   Presumably everyone thinks that is just pure profit for myself, six shiny pounds to spend on what I wish?  If only.

First of all each artisan that holds a class up at Hobbycraft needs Public Liability Insurance to work.  This can range from £40 to £100+ a year, mine is £100+ as I work with hot glass too.  I also have other business expenses to pay, such as petrol to get to the class and ink and paper for print outs and patterns.  But for this example we will discard this.

So, £6.00.  Out of that £6.00 I put away 25% for my end of the financial year tax bill - yep I pay my taxes, I am properly employed by myself, fill in my self-assessment every year and everything.  Which leaves £4.50.

£4.50 for a two hour class equals £2.25 an hour.  Not taking into account any set up or clear down times.

To earn minimum wage of £6.31 I need three students.  (which will pay me £6.75)

Four students and I earn £9.00 an hour.  The maximum I take is 8 students for any class.

Now for those who have been to my classes you will realise that 4 students doesn't often happen, usually it is two or three.  Occasionally I have a full house, which is great, the times when more people attend makes up for the times that I go in for one single person and earn £2.25 an hour.

I have no issues with running a class for one, if people have been good enough to hand over their hard earned cash, then I am good enough to provide the service they have paid for.  I even quite enjoy the one-to-one experience with a student.

What I don't take into account is the travel time, (ok, it's not much for Hobbycraft as it is close to home, but it can be for other places),  the preparation time, which can run into hours if you need a lesson plan, the hours spent making samples for each class and the purchasing of materials for people that do not bother to turn up.

I hope that the people who had an opinion on my pricing will stumble across my blog and read this, then they can ask themselves that now I have explained the pricing does it sound so bad?  Do they realise that some days I might not get any bookings at all even though I have put aside that time just in case?  No bookings = no wages.

Everyone has a right to earn a living, and I am just trying to earn mine.

How many monkeys?

If you have been following my tidy up blogs about the Big Shed Tidy, you may have spotted a few furry friends hanging around the rafters.

Here is a little challenge for you.  How many monkeys reside in the shed.  They are all viewable in this last blog post....... somewhere, although some might be tricky to spot.

Whoever gets the correct number of monkeys will go into a draw to win a little prize  :)  I will do the draw on Friday.

Start counting.....

The final day in the big wooden shed

After seven whole working days, with three days of help, the Shed tidy is finally done!   Whoop!!

Everything in it's place and floor I can dance round, if the mood so takes me.

All nice and neat and I can find things in a millisecond now as opposed to a week of searching bags and boxes.

Oh, I bought this cute stand from a charity shop when I was taking boxes of stuff in - I know, I know, but it was only a fiver and I thought I could hang scarves off it.

Gordon!

Shall we do some before and after shots?

Before

After

Before

And before again..

After

Before

After

Oh, and to thank you for reading all these tidying up blogs I will pop this into The Birthday Blog Box.

It is a Snowflake Obsidian pendant  :)

and relax....

"Have-A-Go-Hobby" day

You know I've been whittering on about this Have-A-Go-Hobby day at Hobbycraft in Carlisle?  Well, today was the day.

The idea was to buy 5 coins for £10, which gave you five mini workshops of your choice.

It went incredibly well, very busy and lots of people learnt new crafts.  I am worn out now so will leave you with a load of photos  :)

Shona setting up her jewellery table.

Julie from Community Based Art and Helena from Heevis Miniatures, ready for their first crafters.

Nair Morna and Helen Askew, the two artists offering sketching and Zentangle style doodling.

Lauren from Hobbycraft, looking after us all  :)

Marie from Nim & Num, chatting a a lady about patchwork.

Everyone taking their places to make a start.

Some crocheting and patchwork going on.

Lots of concentration - buckets full in fact.

If you were there I really hope you enjoyed the day, it went so quick.  Feel free to comment and let me know what you thought.

"Candy Flutters" Ribbon Scarf

Last year, or it might have been the year before, I made a glut of drop-stitch scarves for gifts.  They work up so quickly and easily, you can bash one out in an evening..... or two.

When I was tidying out the shed I came across a box of yarn including some lovely ribbon yarn. This one is such a lovely colour-way, all pastily and soft - like candy.  Perfect for a scarf.

I added a little fringe for extra flutteryness.

This is going to be one of my new kits, once the packaging and the needles arrive.  If you fancy one, watch this space  :)

The bead story

For those of you who wanted to know, this is the story of the little crystal bead.

Once upon a time there were two bored beaders who were a little mischievous. One was called Tan and the other called Sooz.

Even though these two friends lived 450 miles apart, they found they had a similar sense of humour, which was a bit worrying for everyone else.

One day they hatched a plan, a plan they could barely talk about because they found it so hilariously funny.  

That plan was to swallow a bead and give updates on it's journey through a beader's body.

The idea was put out on a beading forum where the updates would be discussed with other members.  Step-by-step.

It was a decent sized bead  (as you can see in the photo) so it wouldn't get lost, hopefully.

Tan and Sooz planned to PRETEND to swallow the bead, only none of the fellow beaders following the story were to get to know that until much much later, some don't even know to this day.

Tan 'swallowed' hers and gave an account on how difficult it was to get down.  

Sooz went one step further and spent AGES sculpting an ice cube so that from a distance it looked like the bead.  On video she dropped the bead (ice cube) into her mouth and took big glugs of (hot) water to help it down (melt)  GONE!

Fast forward two days - Sooz bead is out, cleaned, polished, looking as good as new, and none the worse for it's journey around a plump birds intestines.

Tan's bead was still to make an appearance.

Fast forward a week and Tan is getting tummy ache, cramps, feeling sick.  

(Please remember that behind the scenes of the forum they were sniggering like naughty schoolgirls, patting themselves on the back at how well their little trick was working.)

Then the emails started, people were REALLY concerned about this stuck bead, friends were begging Tan to go and get an X-ray, of course she was making excuses as the bead wasn't really there in the first place, but the concern was growing.

Tan and Sooz let the ruse rumble on for a couple of more days, then the bead made an appearance.  Phew!  Tan described her crystal studded poop in great detail for the forum to share and all the beading friends were relieved that it was finally out.

The end.

And there you have it, if you followed that story all those years back then we humbly apologise for tricking you, we felt the time had come to confess and own up that we really are a pair of naughty scoundrels who thought it was funny to wind everyone up.