Roued

Another great thing I got from my Gran was a set of cat coasters. I of course have had to do the cross-stitching part myself which was a bit difficult but all in all fun. Now I am nearly done with all six and I have fabric and thread for a couple more. I have bought two more coasters to put the last two into from hobbycraft.

The design is really very small with quite a few half stitches and some backstitches. I gave my sister a set for christmas but have still to hear if she has actually gotten anywere with it yet.

The design comes from a company called Heritage Stitch craft and was made by Margaret Sherry

Lately I have had time during the evenings to work a bit more on The Creation (See previous post on this).

I have gotten quite far but still there is a long way to go. The design consists of 8 A3 pages and I have now completed about 3 or these.

I will continue working faithfully on it when I have time and hopefully it will be finished one day.

This piece was my own idea or design if you will. I am happy with it to some degree.

The design can be seen on the recipe page.

I made this with free-style double-face tablet weaving technique writting Maria for a key chain for a friend.

The letters are inspired by Guntrams program.

More details can be found on the recipe site!

Ingredients

• 6 red onions
• 1 dl sugar
• ½ dl balsamic vinegar
• 2 dl red wine
• a bit of butter

Process

1. Cut the onions into boats
2. Warm some butter and fry the onions till soft
3. Sprincle the sugar on and add the vinegar and wine
4. Simmer till nearly all liquid is gone
5. leave to stand for 15 min and then use og store in fridge for a couple of days

Batch 080331
I made a batch today after I came home from a morning at Winchester Farmers Market. There I bought a bag of rather small red onions which where the last they had since i forgot to get this untill the last minute not long before the market closed. It transpired however that using small red onions is much better that using big ones as they are easier for a non-professional like me to cut up into nice and thin slices.
I fried the onions in South Downs Butter from Bookham Cheese and Pasta at Twineham Grange Farm. The guy selling this at Winchester Farmers Market said it would be the best butter I’d ever tasten and I think so far he is right. I don’t know how big a difference it made to the Red Onion Marmelade (I suspect not a lot) but this batch turned out very nice indeed as always and my neighbours who where invited up to taste it where also very impressed. So here is the recipe for them to try it out at home.

There is not a lot as nice as fruity alcoholic drinks. I used to make them with fruit and vodka alone but then I found the recipe for lemoncello and it turned it all around.
First I tried to mae some lemoncello and it worked OK, then I made a batch of orangecello. This was really nice and then when I found some blackberries in the garden I dicided to try the same procedure and made some blackberry liquor and it was beautiful.

Ingredients

• Depending on the the type or fruit peel either the skin of 3-4 citric fruits (no white stuff) and the juice of one of these or get a bowl full or forest fruit
• 3/4 L of Vodka
• 1 L Water
• 200-250 g sugar

Process

1. Leave the fruit in the vodka for around 3-4 days
2. Boil the sugar and water to mix and let cool
3. Filter the two liquids together and leave around for a month or two before drinking it

Ingredients

• 415g flour
• 3/4 tsp natron or backing soda
• 2 tsp ground ginger
• 2tsp ground cinnamon
• ½ tsp ground cloves
• 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1/4 ground black pepper
• ½ tsp salt
• 170g cream butter
• 100g brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• 100g unsulfured molasses or 100g muscavado sugar and 2 tbsp syrup

Process

1. Sift the flour and the spices
2. Cream the butter till fluffy
3. Add the egg and sugar to the butter
4. Add the flour to the butter mixture gradually
5. Divide the batch into 3 and leave in the fridge over night
6. Roll out the batch 3mm thick and make the cakes
7. Bake the cakes for 8-10 min at 170 degrees (gas 4)

MS4W is a great package for Windows servers containing most importantly Apache, PHP and Mapserver together with several other Mapping tools:

• Apache HTTP Server version 2.2.4
• PHP version 5.2.4
• MapServer CGI 5.0
• MapScript 5.0 (CSharp, Java, PHP, Python)
• Includes support for Oracle 10g, and SDE data (if you have associated client/dlls)
• MrSID support built-in
• GDAL/OGR 1.4.2 and Utilities
• MapServer Utilities
• PROJ Utilities
• Shapelib Utilities
• Shp2tile Utility
• Shpdiff Utility
• AVCE00 Utilities
• OGR/PHP Extension 1.0.0
• OWTChart 1.2.0

The installation of ms4w is so very simple and the package comes with a great read me which explains the whole thing. Here I will go through some of the steps which where relevant to me.

1. Download the package from the Maptools website
2. Unpack the ms4w zip folder to the root of the server. I have basicaly used C:\ but you can really put it anywhere.
3. Now go to the folder ms4w folder and double-click on \ms4w\apache-install.bat to turn on the Apache server. This can also be done by calling the command window (Start>Run>’cmd’), call the right folder (for me that would be: ‘cd c:\ms4w’) and run the server. Input in the commandline: ‘apache-install.bat’. If the Apache server then runs it will output the following in the commandline.

The Apache MS4W Web Server service is starting.

The Apache MS4W Web Server service was started successfully.

4. You can now test if the APache server is running properly by opening your browser of choise and pointing it towards

http://localhost/

or

http://127.0.0.1/

5. If this does not bring up the main ms4w page then you might want to go to /ms4w/Apache/conf/httpd.conf and change line 120 from

line 120: Listen 80
to
line 120:Listen 8080
This will make the server run from the 8080 port instead of the standard 80 port.
To check if this works now you should now point the browser to:

http://localhost:8080/

or

http://127.0.0.1:8080/

6. If the MS4W server is working now the the page will show on one of these sites.

Another new website I have put together. I have again borrowed the design based on what they where looking for. The website is for my uncle and aunts camp site on Djursland, Denmark. It is one of the most beautiful camp sites in Denmark if I may say so and I believe we have made a web site which shows stunning views and nice facilities.
The site is built in PHP and the gallery bit is created with Flickr API and the location bit is created with Google Maps API.