Another new addition

January was a bit of a spending frenzy, first Maud then 'Czarrna Malgorzata' (Black Margaret).



I'd been keeping my eye out on Ravelry for a second hand spinning wheel, and when this lovely lady came up in Leeds I couldn't resist. She's Polish - a Kromski Mazurka - and so she had to be called after the only Polish Goth geologist I know.

It's taken me a while to get the hang of it, and here are my first wobbly attempts. You can see them getting progressively better... I hope.


1. My first attempt - plain orange merino plied with an orange/brown/yellow mix. Looks fine until you take it off the bobbin!




2. Duck egg merino, navajo plied. The plying was hard, but it didn't turn out too bad considering.





3. My latest effort, jacob humbug top plied with pink and brown merino. It's definitely getting a wee bit more even.





Now I just need to spin enough to actually make something!





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Meet Maud

She's pretty, though it's a bit disconcerting having something your exact shape and size loitering around the house.

It's even weirder when she's dressed.

If in doubt, pour some booze on it

I have to admit that I have a default setting when it comes to foodstuffs. If I have no idea what to do with something, I make it into an alcoholic drink.

This year I've done a few (including my ginger beer and and some experimental elderflower champagne), but it all culminated in a Christmas-inspired liqueur frenzy. I get most of my liqueur information from this excellent site but tend to ignore all their advice and just make it up as I go.

The two main recipes I made this year were an odd concoction of elderberry and pomegranate liqueur plus the filthy-sounding milk liqueur.

I picked some elderberries from the tree at the end of my road, and having never actually tasted them I was loathe to commit a whole load of vodka to its cause. To counteract any possible issues I popped to a local greengrocers and noticed they had pomegranates on sale. Bonus! So two pomegranates, 135g of cooked up elderberries in sugar (it's all I could pick) and vodka sat in a bottle for a few months. I fished out the elderberries after a couple of months, leaving the pomegranates for another few weeks. In hindsight I should have separated them in some sort of bagging device, rather than spend hours individually picking them out of the mush. Still, turned out ok in the end.



For the milk liqueur, I found this bizarre-looking recipe on my travels around t'interwebs and thought I absolutely had to try it. It's really not as disgusting as it sounds! I had a few coffee filter-related accidents, so the final result was a triple filtered amber nectar. Sadly, I didn't really get to try it as it went to other people for Christmas presents. I'll have to get reports back. It certainly looked and smelled good, despite how grim it looked before filtering.

Review: National Trust Dark Chocolate Ginger Truffles

We were initially suspicious on first opening the box - the chocolates just looked too shiny, freshly buffed. We put our fears to one side and braved a taste.

The first reaction was one of perplexity. What was that overriding taste sensation? It was narrowed down to a strong taste of Milton sterilizing fluid, with notes of urinal cake. Strangely, the taste improved with chewing, bringing out the supposed ginger flavour. Some of us, having thought to ourselves that they couldn't possibly be as bad as we'd originally thought, gave them a second go. After the same initial flavour, we tried to convince ourselves that they were improving, or maybe our taste buds had been irrevocably bleached into submission?

None went back for a third... until ten minutes later when one valiant soul ventured again, in the hope that the upward trajectory of flavour improvement would continue. Sadly he'd left it too long and the quality had plummeted back to square one.

No one could bring themselves to finish the last three in the box, and we'd thought that was the end of it. How wrong we were. A few moments later and the Milton urinal cake began its repeating hell.

A trip to Pluto and Back

Today I decided to go on a little adventure. I got my kicks on Route 65 of the Trans Pennine Way by cycling to Selby (home of the greatest number of UFO sightings in Britain) and back. 30 miles is rather a lot for little old me and I'm now suffering from jelly legs, despite the flatness of the trail.

Downside was that, despite overshooting by a fair few miles, I failed to actually find Pluto... I'm still not sure how I missed it!

Nerd alert!

I'm used to working in hot, sunny places, and so doing archaeology in the UK is a bit of a shock for me. The problem isn't actually the rain, wind, and general unpleasantness of fieldwork, but the annoying Ordnance Survey Grid system. What's with all these letters? GISs don't like letters, they need an actual XY coordinate.

So, I did some detective work and have now created the magical OS Grid Reference conversion spreadsheet.* Just enter your OS grid reference (no matter how long) into the pretty pink box and - Bob's your uncle - it'll convert it into a usable 6 figure number. Don't say I never do anything for you!


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* The only way I could host it was on Google Docs, and it's therefore editable by enyone. If you find it doesn't work, drop me a line.

Lashings and lashings of ginger beer

I recently ventured once more into the home production of alcoholic beverages. This time it was ginger beer. I looked around and there are lots of recipes, so I adapted a few. I sampled my first bottle this weekend and it was rather delicious!

Highly explosive, but delicious ginger beer and the jar of sediment

To start off the plant:

In a jar, mix together

4g active dried yeast (or 14g/0.5oz fresh)
3/4 pint of water
2tsp ginger 2tsp sugar Leave for 24 hours, then feed the plant with 1tsp root ginger and 1tsp sugar daily. After a week, mix thoroughly and strain into a jug.


To make one bottle (approx 2 1/2 pints):

Dissolve 170g sugar into half a pint of hot water.
Add the juice of half a lemon and a quarter of the strained mixture.
Add 1.25 pints of lukewarm water and stir well.
Decant into a bottle and mature for another week. The bottle may need burping as a lot of gas will build up.


(This next part is speculative as I've not bottled up my second batch yet)
Put the remainder of the strained liquid back into the jar and top up with warm water to replace what you've taken out, and start feeding again with 1tsp sugar daily. The ginger may not need topping up.

A week later repeat the bottling process.

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I've already got my next drink experiment planned. I've just been out harvesting elderberries!

Your mother was a hamster...