Gardens and gift tags

It's been cold and foggy here for a couple of days, so we've been keeping warm inside planning what to plant in the garden this spring, and ordering some seeds. At the moment we've got spring greens and chard on the go, with purple sprouting broccoli to look forward to in a few weeks.

But the bulbs are coming up and the lilac is covered in buds so our thoughts are turning towards the spring and summer... This year we're going to branch out with some more interesting varieties that we haven't tried before, such as munchkin squashes, trombomcino courgettes, and golden beetroot. If only we had room for more!

Apart from planning the vegetable garden, we've been busy stamping out sweet little gift tags from some of the pile of printed bits of paper and card in our stash.


I think they look rather fetching with some natural raffia tied onto a present, but I think we'll use them as price labels too.

There's a pack of 10 in our Folksy shop.

A very therapeutic activity for a wintry afternoon!

Brrrr!

It's cold! Really cold!

But we're keeping warm inside with a plentiful supply of tea (and hearty home-made soup for dinner)...

And some cheerful daffodils to keep our spirits up!

We've also been enjoying some lovely sunsets from the study window during this cold snap .

The car has broken down so Jon can't get to work for a couple of days, so we are spending far too much time on the internet looking for a new car. I'd rather spend the money on the orange sofa we saw in Habitat, but needs must I suppose...

Happy New Year!

We are starting 2009 with lots of ideas about using our Adana prompted by the arrival of these little beauties from Father Christmas....

Rollers!! No more careful hand inking for us! The Adana needs a bit of TLC - the springs for the rollers are a bit stiff from lack of use but hopefully we shall soon be printing with proper rollers and using the ink disc for the very first time. Hurrah!

We are also looking forward to the eventual arrival of the Model press - it might be a few months yet though, because the rollers need recovering and we have to find a home for it here (we need to do a bit of spring cleaning and chucking out first...)

Here is an advert for the Model in a copy of 'British Printer' from the summer of 1902...

The magazine came with the press, and has some beautiful adverts! The other page just visible in this shot is the 'situations vacant' page with various adverts. My favourite is this one -

'Engraver wanted for Artistic American and View work; must be competent man and able to make his own sketches; exceptional opportunity for first class man.'

What about a competent woman?! Although I'm not sure you could call my engraving competent - perhaps Jon could have applied instead of me...

When we were doing the history of our house (built in 1894), we looked up the 1901 census to discover that the occupants were involved in printing and bookbinding too! Here's an extract from the census - click on the image to see it properly.

Harry Webster (aged 19) was a bookbinder, Lionel (aged 18) was an assistant compositor and Grace (aged 16) was a book sewer. We haven't been able to find out anything more about them, but it's quite nice to think that we have our press and type all set out in what was probably their bedroom.

Quite how six people managed in our tiny house I'm not quite sure - sometimes there barely seems room for the two of us!

Anyway, here's some nice decorative type that came with the Model press in a sweet little wooden box. We haven't used it yet - but we're looking forward to testing it out with those new rollers!

Happy Christmas!

Our tree is up and decorated and Spooner-Gregory Acres is looking very festive indeed. We will be having a proper knees-up because Jon has finally finished his PhD. Hurrah! Here is the finished bound thesis - the hard back version will be bound later in the spring, after his viva.

In case anyone is wondering it's called ' Marginal Environments and the Idea of Improvement: Heathland and Moorland Landscapes c.1650-1850'.

Happy Christmas everyone!

We have a winner!

Congratulations to Jenna! And thank you to everyone else for leaving such lovely comments :)

A short post today - it's so cold that I can't type properly! We had a little expedition out into the cold to buy our Christmas tree, its sitting outside in a bucket at the moment but expect a blog post festooned with decorations soon!

A giveaway!

Today is the 2nd anniversary of 'For What is Chatteris?', which we started all the way back in December 2006.

You can read our very first post here.

To celebrate we are giving away a veritable smorgasbord of printed goodies!

To win, simply leave a comment on this post before midnight (GMT) on Tuesday 16th December - a week from now.

What you can win -

A Tulips linocut
Our little Edgefield wood engraving
A pretty paper flower brooch
A letterpress notebook
A handmade concertina notebook (like this one)
Letterpress Memorandum cards
Letterpress Note! cards
Some tiny letterpress TV cards
Hand printed holly decorations (I forgot to put those in the photo though - oops!)

More than £40 worth of hand printed stuff - all for free!

Here's to another year (or two) of blogging!

T&C
The winner will be chosen at random from the comments on Wednesday 17th December using an online random number generator.
All entries welcome - we will post to anywhere in the world (might not arrive before Christmas though...)

Makes!

The new Makes section of Folksy has launched, and we are very excited to be one of the first 'makes' on the site.

Find out how we engraved and printed our little Edgefield print here... And have a look at the other splendid 'makes' from other Folksy sellers too!

Today we have made a rather large batch of teacakes using one of Dan Lepard's recipes, and we'll be spending the rest of the day toasting them on the fire and reading the papers!

Teacakes:
600g strong white flour
125ml warm water
5 tsp or 2 x 7g sachets of quick yeast
150ml milk
75g caster sugar
50g white chocolate or dripping
300g mixed dried fruit
25g golden syrup
3 eggs
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger

1. Mix the yeast with the water and a tablespoon of the flour. Set aside.

2. Heat the milk until it is almost boiling, then take it off the heat and add the sugar, syrup, white chocolate/dripping and the fruit.

3. Beat the eggs and add to the yeast mixture.

4. Sift the flour and spices into a large bowl and then add the milk and yeast mixes. Beat together until it is all thoroughly mixed.

5. Cover the bowl and leave in a warm place for an hour or until the dough has doubled in size. You can knead it if you fancy but we've found it makes no difference to the final buns.

6. Divide the mixture into 14 teacakes. Shape them by stretching the dough and tucking it in underneath itself so you get a neat round ball of dough.

7. Place the teacakes on baking trays covered with baking parchment.

8. Leave in a warm place for 1hr 30 mins. Preheat the oven to 200C.

9. Bake for 10-15 minutes, until golden on top but still slightly soft.

10. Eat far too many of them, split, toasted and slathered in butter. Yum.