Roued

We have finally done it. A dream has come true. My best friend Helene and myself have launched a new website called Historic Crafts.

Welcome to our parallel universe ‘Historic Crafts’. It’s inhabited by the species Homo craftuensis – so just make yourself at home.

This is the place to learn about the historic background of a wide variety of crafts, get inspired in your own work and connect with other craft enthusiasts.

The above should explain what the site is about. We have already enrolled friends to write for us and we even have fancy banners:

There is just no point so why do you even try.

I have a strictly moderating comment system in place and I do not approve comments that are really just links to commercial website. Now for the people who just write nbdlifkhsekugfyigbdnvkl;orwpji as a comment, why even bother.

Then there is the smarter ones who try to flatter me by writing something generic but nice – I still see right through you. And I am not going to let you advertise your sewing machine oil or Mexican holiday on my blog.

Last but definitely not least there are the people who just hack into the website and put up their ad for a commercial website by force. Now is this really profitable? I mean it is annoying as hell to me but at the end of the day I will fix my website pretty quick and your commercial ad is gone.

All I can say to these people is: “get a life”! I mean honestly, do you not have anything better to do with your time? Go hand in your assignment or spend time with your kids/dog/cat. Why do you have to bother other people this way?

Since I was a child I have had this fabulous advent calendar that my grandmother cross-stitched for me. When I was a child my parents would tie 24 presents to it and I would open one every day up till Christmas. When my two siblings and I got older we would put one of our 3 advent calendars up in the kitchen and divide the presents out (5 people divided by 24 days = 4-5 presents each). We would then each have to buy 4-5 small presents for the calendar and get to open a present from the calendar each 5^th day. Now I do the same with my husband. We each buy 12 presents and get to open a present every second day. This worked really well the first couple of Christmases we were together. But now it’s limited how many new kitchen utensils and small gadgets we really need so I came up with a new idea. Actually, it’s an old idea that my parents did for me and my sister back in 87. You take a lego set (house, pirate ship, or what ever you fancy) and divide it out depending on the instructions – into 24 piles. Then you wrap it up into 24 parcels that you put on an advent calendar or if you don’t have one of those a piece of string will do. You can put labels on from 1-24.

Seeing as everyone in my family love Lego my idea was to sew 24 bags that we can reuse year after year.

1. Cut out 24 rectangles in your favorite fabric (they don’t all have to be the same colour) at a size of between 12-16 inch x 5-7 inch (they don’t have to be the same size either). Either cut them with a zig-zag scissors or zig-zag them on your sewing machine all the way around.

2. Fold the short edges and sew them in to make a nice edge. Then fold the pieces on the middle inside out and sew down the sides.

3. When you are finished sewing them – turn them inside out – fill them with lego or anything else you want to put on your advent calendar – tie some ribbon or jute string around the top and put them on your advent calendar / string.

My previous experience with the Brownie Box Camera taught me that keeping the shutter open for more than a snap shot will inevitably give blurry photos. I decided to try it out in stead with snapshots of landscape images and where better to do this than an archaeological park in Italy. Most of the photos as you can see below turned out fine. I got a bit nervous for them on the way home where the Italian airport advised me not to put film into the checked in luggage. I don’t remember seeing this sort of sign at Gatwick so I thought for a moment that the 3 medium format film I had brought out with me had been ruined even before I used them. However, that was not the case. The only problem with the film itself was the second one which I changed at Forum Romanum and just put back into the box without tape. When I took it out again it was a bit loose resulting in exposure of the last couple of images of Forum Romanum.

Along the way I also lost a  of photo (dark one) where the camera must have rolled on by it’s own in the bag. The is also a couple of overexposed photos (clear ones) where I thought I would be clever and leave the shutter open for a while to take in movement. I have learnt from this experiment that this does not work in daylight. Will try it again sometime at night.  I had a great time taking these photos and even though the brownie is bulky it is very lightweight and thus easy to bring around. I brought out 3 medium format films on which the brownie will allow me to take 8 photos each giving me 24 photos in total. In comparison with the 1000 photos we all took with various digital cameras on this holiday, 24 photos seem so few. However, once you get into the mind frame of wanting the perfect picture for the brownie it turned out to be quite hard to use all 24 photos.

So I fixed the Singer. Or in other words I took it all apart and cleaned it and gave it some proper sewing machine oil. Actually I took everything apart including the motor. Ups! So now I know how an old sewing machine motors looks inside. That was a little bit of a panic. However, it all turned out alright. I somehow managed to put it back together again. Fancy that, me the sewing machine mechanic! It even sounded ok and didn’t blow up or catch fire when I turned it on again. However, it wasn’t strong enough to actually sew. So I thought I had ruined the motor.

I decided to take the machine to the nice guy at the sewing centre to have a look. He said the motor was ok it was just the belt that was tired and wonky. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any new ones he could sell me so he suggested I went home and dipped the belt in boiling water for a couple of seconds to shrink it a bit. It worked. I now have a fully functional Singer sewing machine. While cleaning it up I realised that the horrible red inside of the bottom case was rotten. I took it out and hubby fitted a new bottom (he’s a regular craftsman, my hubby). Then I painted it my favorite colour (teal) of which I of course had a tin standing around (don’t you always). It looks and smells much better now.

Finally, I tested the machine this weekend sewing a roll-up pouch for hubby’s paint brushes (he’s also an artist – so talented this guy I married). It worked perfectly, but as my mother pointed out it can only sew straight stitches. However, she was wrong when she assumed that this meant that I couldn’t use it for anything. Before I was sewing straight stitches by hand so this is a great improvement.

I bought the trunk at the wonderful Winchester car-boot sale. It was just calling out to me and I knew exactly where it could go and what it could be used for.

The only problem with it was that it was that the paper inside, lovely as it was, was dirty and falling of. So I set about to add some new wall paper. The shelf of the trunk also had a very flimsy bottom which I ripped out. Hubby fashioned a new bottom out of ply-wood. It was hard work and took a whole Saturday. I think the finished result is wonderful though.

I just used some standard wall paper from Laura Ashley (cheapest I could find because they had a sale on), a sachet of Wickes wall paper paste that you mix with water and a tube of super glue I had lying around (don’t you always). I used the super glue on the trunk around difficult bits, on nails and along the edge before putting the wall paper on. It was impressive to see how well the wall paper stuck to the wood of the trunk, but the super glue was useful on those difficult spots.

It is now situated where I imagined is would go and I filled it with all my yarn (which is in spite of hubby’s protests not a lot). I use the shelf for the yarn I am working on and other sewing bits and pieces.

After having to throw away my last batch of fruit snaps in December, because it had gone moldy, I was quite distraught. The problem was that I had in my naivety added to much water to the mixture.
Anyway, not one to make the same mistake twice I decided to make some more and only add the minimum of sugar-water. This time I made: strawberry snaps, gooseberry snaps, redcurrant snaps and licorice snaps. The recipe is as follows for the fruit snaps:

1. Clean the fruit .
2. Buy some cheap vodka (yes they will look strangely at you in the off license when you ask for three bottles of their cheapest vodka).
3. Add the fruit to a jar/bottle and cover with vodka.
4. Leave in cool place for about a week or if you forget it just leave it longer.
5. Filter the fruit of with a sieve and then filter the now coloured liquid with a coffee filter (or piece of muslin cloth if you are a professional like me) just to remove bits and pieces.
6. Mix some sugar in boiling water (whatever way suits you). Probably about 200-250g sugar to 1 liter of water like in the original Lemoncello recipe. Add the sugar-water to the vodka at the rate of 2 vodka to 1 sugar-water. Just enough to make the mixture a little sweet and not pure vodka. But not so much that it goes moldy after a couple of months. Of course you can also drink it fast and then you won’t encounter this problem.
7. Leave in the fridge for about a month and drink.

As for the licorice snaps, for this you will need licorice root.
I am sure I have seen licorice root sticks in the UK. You can buy them in most pharmacies in Denmark. This time around I actually bought some licorice powder, which in Denmark is called “English licorice powder”. I have no idea what it has to do with the English but then again Danish pastry doesn’t have much to do with anything Danish.
So basically you need to mix the vodka with licorice root or powder. I tried once chopping the licorice root but it wasn’t worth the effort and nearly broke my mothers blender. Just pop them in whole.
After a week of standing around you can filter it like above and either dissolve some sugar in the vodka or add some of the sugar-water from above if you want it less strong.

Leave to stand for a week or so and drink it as medicine. It’s great!

As I wrote in a previous post I have a No. 2 Brownie.
I got an Ilford HP5 Plus film put in it and tried taking pictures with it this weekend. There where 8 photos on this 120mm medium format film and I used them all on portraits of hubby’s family.
As you can maybe see the camera still works. However, I took the portrait photos outside exposing the film for about 2 seconds each time. This did result in a certain amount of shaking and blurred photos.
I think in the future I will try and use the camera for landscape photos using the snapshot function to avoid blurred photos.

end

I have been wanting an antique singer for years now and while rummaging around at the car-boot sale I found one. The guy only wanted £3 for it so I thought bargain. Even if it doesn’t work I won’t have lost much.
Hubby has given it a good clean and I need to take it apart and give it some sewing machine oil. We checked out the electric cord and the machine seems to work. So I will just have to figure out if it needs any spare parts and then get them.
I can’t wait to give it a try.

As I good digital archaeologist I have already found some history on the singer. The serial number on the machine is F1569002, which means it is a model 99k produced in 1911.

Contact sheet from my first film (A), an Ilford ISO400, HP5 Plus (24 pics)

I have just been to the Media Workshop’s Darkroom course and have developed my first picture in more than 8 years. I went to the course mainly to refresh my memory before I begin going to the workshop on my own. However, I have learnt a lot of new stuff in just two evenings. When I learnt to develop black/white in my teenage years it was mostly a question of developing as many of my own photos as possible. It might be because of the last 8 years of taking digital photos that has made me loose interest in printed pictures so now I can concentrate more on the development process. I learnt tonight how to add a filter to change contrast and how to develop areas of a photo more or less by giving it 5sec more and covering up bits of the image with a waving hand. Very fun!
Can’t wait till tomorrow and being able to develop the medium format film from the no. 2 Brownie.