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?

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.

Screenshot of our wedding website

Recently, I have been working on setting up a wedding website for myself and my fiancee. It has been a great project so far because it has allowed me to use my knowledge of web services and XML to pull in information from other great resources. As an example you can see above a screen shot from our wedding list page. We have registered with Amazon since this is the one place where you seem to be able to get everything we would like. And it is a great resource for all sorts of products which comes with images and descriptions of the products. Best of all it also comes with a web service which allows us to present our wedding list on our own website.
I must admit that I am still a great fan of Wordpress as it allows you to adapt your website in so many different ways. It is also great that you can add all the plugins you like and there is a lot of very nice plugins out there. The only thing annoying about this is that many of the plugins come with very little instruction and it can be very annoying when you find the perfect plugin but it is impossible to get it to work. However, they are free to use so I guess it all adds up in the end.

That’s Danish for “Now it’s Christmas again” and isn’t it just. This is definitely my favorite time of year. Without a doubt. Also since the re-decoration of our flat this summer the Christmas decoration (yes they are already up) look so much more “hyggelig” (Danish for cozy).
We were in London this weekend for the Christmas Bazaar as mentioned earlier and it was great. Stuffed but great. If I must say it myself I though I was really good. We drove up and got there 15 min after they opened. Straight into the shop and got our Christmas bear and food stuff and straight out in the car with it and then we had the rest of the day to browse in peace. This is really the only way to do it if you don’t want to go crazy. And isn’t it just easy to go a bit crazy around Christmas.
On the way in we realized that we had driven straight past the Wembley IKEA and of course we had to visit on the way home. IKEA has a very Skandinavian take on Christmas which I personally just don’t think the UK is ready for yet. Orange, green and black are the Christmas colours of today accourding to IKEA (See below for a taster).
Needless to say my dear fiancee was horrified and swore that no we where not buying extra decorations from IKEA.

Now as a Dane who likes the traditional Christmas colours (i.e. red, green, gold and silver) I am quite happy to decorate my flat in the UK with just those colours. And yesterday I was allowed to since it was the first Sunday in advent. I lit the first candle in my advent reef and we drank some spiced apple drink.
I do love the traditional spiced wine but am not so good with alcohol at the moment and this is where spices apple drink comes in handy. Here is my recipe for doing it. It may not be the official way but it workes pretty nice and is so easy.

Spices Apple drink
Find some real apple juice (non-concentrate preferably) and put in a pan on the stove. Add a selection of the following whole spices depending on your preference:
Cloves
Aniseed
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Cardamom
Heat up but don’t boil. If this is the first time with this batch then leave warm of the heat for half an hour and then re-heat it without boiling. Use a sieve to pour the apple juice into a mug without the spices.
Then what I do is take a jam jar and put the spices in it together with a bit of left over juice and store it in the fridge. Then when I next want some I just pop this into the pan and fill up with juice. This time around it should be enough to just warm it up and put the spices back into the jar since a bit of the juice has already been soaking for a while.
Warning though: do not let the jam jar with spices stay in your fridge till June next year – it is pretty nasty to clean. I talk from experience.
Enjoy!

As you will see if you read any of my other recent post I have become addicted to Winchester Farmers Market. But what a wonderful event it is. The market is open every second and last Sunday of the month but a full list can be found on the website above. Trading starts at 9am and goes on till 2pm. The market begins where Middle Brook Streen meets St Georges Street at the bottom of the above map and continues up to the parking lot across Friarsgate. After having visited a variety of other farmers markets I must admit that Winchester stands shining on top of the list.
The London Borough Market has much to offer in terms of exciting foods, great coffee and plenty of tasters. That is of course if you come just when the market opens. If you come an hour later you will not get any tasters and you will be pushed and shoved through the very narrow market ailes.
In comparison to this I would say that Winchester is about the same size – maybe a bit bigger. The ailes are much wider allowing people to actually walk from stall to stall. The tasters are more plentyfull throughout the day and the prices are also a bit friendlier for your wallet.
Recently, I have also been to a small farmers market and easter fair at Guy’s Thatched Hamlet just outside Preston. The place is nice enough although the fair was a bit too commercial with bouncy castles and loud music. The food at the farmers market was very reasonably priced and the tasters where in abundance. But there didn’t really seem to be very much sold. Seems like people mostly came to eat some tasters while their childen had a go on the bouncy castle and then they where of to Tesco to buy dinner.
In comparison again Winchester seems to attract people who are looking to buy good homemade locally produced foods. There is no need for bouncy castles to attract children and the tasters are there to help you choose what food you want to buy not as an attraction in themselves. And because the food is fairly cheep compared with supermarket prices you actually end up buying it for your dinner instead of filling up on tasters and running to Tesco afterwards.
All in all it is not difficult to see that I am a great fan of Winchester Framers Market in general. In the following I will try to go through some of the stalls from which I have bought food recently and report on how it was.

Lewry’s Traditional Butchers
This stall offers a variety of different sausages in small packs of 3 sausages at £1 each. Their Pork and Cider sausages where a great succes when cooked on the grill. Also last Sunday I decided to treat myself to their Hog Roast in a bun at around £3. They had a hog roast in the back and the good wholemeal bun was filled with some meat, a bit of stuffing some apple sauce and finally some scratchings. It was magnificent. Lewry’s is situated as the first stall to the right as you cross over Friarsgate to the parking lot.

Blackburne and Haynes
Blackburne and Haynes have a Jersey Herd at their farm Meadow Cottage Farm by Bordon which also has a farmshop. I tried a tub of their strawberry Jersey ice cream to celebrate that spring was near and the sum was shinning. It had a distinct flavour of Jersey cream which they also advertise and I liked it in small amounts but think it might be to overpowering in larger quantities. Luckely the ice cream is available in a variety of flavours in 110ml tubs as well as 4, 2 and 1 litre tubs for sharing. I believe that Blackburne and Haynes are only at Winchester Farmers Market the last Sunday of the month and last time they where situated next to the coffee stand just before Middle Brook Street meets Friarsgate.

Pollen Organics
Pollen Organics are situated on the east side of Middle Brook Street and have a product range which includes: pesto, sauces, mayo, dressings, relishes, nuts and olives. So far I have tried their mayo and houmous and both where very nice. All their products are organic and where possible made from local ingredients. The need for organic mayo came about when Jamie Oliver reminded us that even though we are ever so set on only buying free range eggs a whole range of the products in our fridge will still include eggs from regular battery farmed eggs. This promted my partner to swear that he didn’t want buy anymore mayo. However, I felt sorry for hom since I know he likes mayo on his sandwiches and now he can have it and feel good about it too.

Thats it for now! I am sure that next time I go to I will have more to tell.

The Low Sizergh Barn farmshop has a really great setup and I was amazed by the number of cars which had already arrived by 9.30 on a thursday morning. The shop itself had been open since 9.00 and the staff (of which there was quite a few) where already busy with customers.
It was understandable however since the shop was well advertised from the road (A591) and I first spotted it coming north and dicided to visit it on our way home coming south. The shop is big with clothes and childrens toys on the first floor, a gallery in the basement and a big farm shop on the ground floor with a cheese counter, vegetables, processed food and preservatives. I thought there would be more local meet and was disapointed to find that there was not a lot of this.

Because we went there just after easter i bought a couple of bunches of dafodiles which are now standing in my window sill looking lovely. We also got some very nice pies from the Pie Mill in Keswick one of which was called the Grizedale Pie with Rare Breed Pork with apple and cider. Furthermore we tried the cheese and got some stoneground flour for our baking machine.
All in all a great farmshop with a wide variety of food and if you judge by the number of staff at work at 9.30 on a thursday morning also a quite successfull farmshop.
The place also had a tearoom which we unfortunatly did not get a chance to try.

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.

I have just finished the web site for my family’s summer house on the Danish West Coast. Fyrrehuset is the name of the house and the address is www.fyrrehuset.dk. The site used Flickr API connecting to the Flickr account ROUED for the gallery combined with lightbox for the slideshow and some script from Satellite which I have modified for this site. The site also uses Google Calender and presents the calender via an API. This means that the my parents can just keep their calender update via their Google account. It makes life a lot more simple.
Go see it here: www.fyrrehuset.dk