The sun has finally shown itself a couple of days ago – wasn't that
wonderful! To mark this rare occasion, we went with the girls to pick
elderflowers to make elderflower cordial. It is the end of the season, so it
was not easy to find 50 flower clusters that are needed to make 3 litres.
Somehow almost all the trees that still had flowers were surrounded by stinging
nettles – just to make the task a little more challenging! But we persevered
and got all 50. I used the Danish recipe from my husband's family, which has an
additional meaning to me because of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale «The
Little Elder-Tree Mother» («Hyldemoer”), and I loved those stories as a child. Here is the recipe:
3 kg sugar
3-4 lemons
75 g citric acid (from a pharmacy)
3 l water.
First dissolve the sugar and the citric acid in water. I heated up the
water in a pan to speed up the process. Let the syrup cool to room temperature
and add the flowers and chopped lemons. Let the mixture infuse for 48 hours, stirring
it occasionally, filter it through the clean cloth, and pour into bottles. Last
time I’ve made it, I used glass bottles and stored them in a fridge;
unfortunately, in a few months whatever was left became mouldy and had to be
thrown out. This time I bought a pack of eight 500 ml bottles of still water; I
used the water for the syrup, and plan to pour the cordial into the plastic
bottles and freeze them.
I’ve also tried my hand at jewellery making – pictures of the new
creations to follow, as it is too dark to photograph now, but here are some moss agate pins that I’ve made
recently:
Apart from experimenting, the last few days were dedicated to doing
what I actually promised to other people. It’s amazing how the wish not be seen
as unreliable spurs me into action! So here are some little boys’ jeans that a
friend asked me to patch, and a second “Poppy cottage” felt doorstop, which will be
on its way to Denmark on Monday:
Apart from experimenting, the last few days were dedicated to doing
what I actually promised to other people. It’s amazing how the wish not be seen
as unreliable spurs me into action! So here are some little boys’ jeans that a
friend asked me to patch, and a second “Poppy cottage” felt doorstop, which will be
on its way to Denmark on Monday:
Now that my crafting corner is much more pleasant to use,
I finally got to make something here. It's a brooch made of crocheted flower,
an orangy-yellow ball (a circle of felt gathered around the edge and stuffed
with polyester wool) and grey and blue-grey felt. 
The dimensions of the boxes are really convenient, they can be
stacked under the table (which is a former dining table), and there is still a
bit of space to stuff an odd piece of paper of cardboard on top (until it's
time to tidy up again). I've made the labels for the boxes using leftovers of
natural brown hessian and white linen fabric. The hessian part measures 12 x 17
cm, linen part is 8.5 x 12 cm. First the picture is painted/embroidered/glued
onto/attached to the white part of the label, then the white part is
machine-stitched onto the the hessian part. Finally, the labels are glued onto
the boxes, on the same side of each box. 
It contains zip-lock bags, cellophane bags
for finished products, product tags, cut-up threads for the tags, supply of
glue sticks for the glue gun, some patterns for my creations, my business cards
and receipts from the crafts shops. This is after I removed from there chains
from the hanging baskets (I used the chains to make a hanging pouch for our
chinchillas), balls of string and twine and some other stuff I've been
hoarding. The question is: what should the label for this «miscellaneous» box
look like? Will really appreciate suggestions!
