Calendar 2015 in Progress; Upcoming Winter Craft Fairs in November and December 2014

I have been working on the next year's calendar of relief printing.

Choosing 12 plants for all year round is always hard.  I would like to find the most beautiful one for each month.  For the summer months there are so many options, then the spring, the autumn and I have to look around intensively for the winter months.

This time I'm making a little bit bigger relief prints, which means I can give each image with more expression.  Hopefully I will have finished the Calendar 2015 by November.

There are some exciting winter Christmas craft fairs  in November and December.  I will have a stall there.

PADLT Christmas Craft Sale

Saturday 29th November 2014

10am - 12pm

Stanwell Baptist Church Hall, Penarth

(on the left side, next to the Paget Rooms)

PADLT (Penarth and District Lesotho Trust) is a fundraising organisation for children in Lesotho) 

nus nus Winter Fairs Part 1
Sunday 30th November 2014
10am - 5pm
Cardiff Made (on Face Book, or visit Cardiff Made Web)
41 Lochaber Street, Roath, Cardiff CF24 3LS

nus nus Winter Fairs Part 2
Saturday 6th December 2014
St.Catherine's Church Hall
Kings Road, Pontcanna, Cardiff CF11 9DE

nus nus is an artisan market for beautiful craft art.
Cardiff Made provides a platform to showcase the work of Cardiff based artist and craft makers.  They run a cafe too.

Making Berry sirup, or Jelly?!

We were too late.

Birds enjoyed most of the juicy elder berries, while we were doing other than picking the berries up.  But we could still collect a handful berries for the sirup.

Our children love cordials.  My youngest son made aromatic elderflower sirup this early summer.  I made brilliant red strawberry sirup from the excessive not very nice looking strawberries from our garden.  These sirups are nice on warm days in the summer.

Elderberry sirup is nice on cold days in the winter with hot water (though my children drink cold.)

The berries were carefully removed from stems.  This picture below is the berries cooked with water, sugar and citric acid in a deep pan.  Then the berries were strained through a sieve.  The juice was put back into the pan, added more water and sugar, and cooked thoroughly.

This time we produced only a few jars of elderberries......

An idea came in my mind.  Brambles!  It shouldn't be too late.  I took my youngest son to the place where we usually collect the black berries.  There we found plenty of them.  The shiny fat black berries were still waiting for us to be harvested.

My bowl was soon full.

We had around 2 kg berries all together.  Didn't have a recipe for bramble berry sirup, I simply followed the elderberry sirup.  I though it worked quite the same.

Here!  I made 4 bottles and 3 jars of bramble berry cordial!  Hurray!  So did I think, so far in the evening....

Next morning I saw the liquid in the bottles and jars, which should remain liquid, turned into jelly!  I tried to think why the cordial transformed to jelly.  Maybe because I cooked the liquid too long.  I didn't know that bramble berries contained much more pectin than elderberries.  Shocked but we didn't waste the effort and the sirup.  Children scooped the first clod.  Then my eldest son shook the bottle many times.  Eventually the jelly turned back to thick liquid.  I poured a little bit of sirup in a glass and filled with sparkling water, tasted the bramble berry cordial.  Umm,  it was not so bad!